Thus, while Jemisin has become a leading figure, her influence and prestige have come through two decades of unrelenting commitment to sophisticated world-building, culturally rich, character-driven literary prose, and a remarkable capacity for experimental writing. This concentration of character-voice combined with a disciplined approach to speculative world-building appears in some of Jemisin’s best writing in How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? By consistently producing engaging, character-driven short stories, complexly beautiful science fiction novels, and thoughtfully prophetic nonfiction essays, Jemisin is one of a number of Black North American women speculative fiction writers who are helping to reframe readers’ expectations with genre-redefining literary fiction and speculative world-building, including folks like the legendary Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Nnedi Okorafor, and 2020 Hugo competitor with Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse. Plus, if common excellence awards are not enough, she was also the 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant fellow. Her 2018 short story collection that I am reviewing here, How Long ’til Black Future Month?, won the Locus Award and the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Jemisin has been nominated in other categories, including short fiction. Finally, last year, The City We Became was Jemisin’s fifth nomination in the novel category, and it also took that year’s Locus and BSFA awards.Īnd these are just the novel awards. Jemisin’s conclusion to the Broken Earth Trilogy scored the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards in a stunning trifecta. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy won the Hugo awards (in the novel category) in three successive years (2015, 2016, 2017)-making her, I believe, the only author to have an entire trilogy win, the only author to win three years in a row, and one of only five writers who have three or more wins. In terms of influence, Jemisin is perhaps the science fiction writer with the most major awards and nominations in the last decade.

Jemisin is one of the most powerful writers in contemporary speculative fiction, I am making a claim of both influence and content.

How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K.

How long til black future