![]() Part of Jemisin’s genius is rooted in her ability to come up with fantastically inventive premises that, while unthinkable before her writing, feel intuitive once read, to the point that one is baffled that nobody came up with them before. Jemisin’s latest novel, The City We Became, explicitly recognizes this battle as the stuff of both social movements and epic fantasy. ![]() In light of the failure of this extended reactionary tantrum, Jemisin didn’t just win - her victories announced that science fiction and fantasy were, as she put it in her acceptance speech, “the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist” and that the genre was “finally, however grudgingly, acknowledg that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future.” The Hugos were, in short, a battle over who belongs in, and who ought to lead, the stories we tell about the worlds we inhabit now and the possible worlds we might build. ![]() Jemisin’s well-earned triumph was particularly notable given the fact that 2013 had seen the emergence of right-wing groups of predominantly white men, known as the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies,” who until 2017 attempted to flood the Hugo nomination system with blocs of authors and texts they deemed appropriate. Jemisin made genre history as the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel, with the entire Broken Earth trilogy (2015–’17) sweeping the awards: in 2016, The Fifth Season in 2017, The Obelisk Gate and in 2018, The Stone Sky. ![]()
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