Before February ends I wanted to review a collection I’ve been meaning to read for years: N. K. Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month?
I love a good short story collection, and I’ve loved every Jemisin work I’ve read (her Far Sector Green Lantern series from DC was amazing) so I had high hopes going into this one, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Each one of the fantasy or sci-fi stories in this book is told through the lens of a black person’s experience: it’s never preachy because it’s often subtle, but as a white woman it’s a perspective I should look at more often. The chapters touch on poverty and racism, but also community, tradition, self-confidence, and ancestral pride. Whether they take place in the past or future, the stories are often a cautionary tale, or a celebration of the things we love, flaws and all.
The meanings I got from the stories may not be what Jemisin intended, they were just my attempt to distill each story down to a few sentences.
“The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is a story about a truly lovely Utopia (seriously, the description of the Festival of the Day of Good Birds makes me wish I could see something even half that beautiful and fun in real life) but it also asks what is a Utopia, really, and what would it take to have one? What would we have to change? It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing worth having ever is.
“The City Born Great” is what inspired and eventually became the book The City We Became. It’s about how cities that last long enough eventually become sentient, how everything good and bad in a city makes it real, gives it a personality and a life of its own. It’s a love letter to New York, and the climactic battle makes you want to do a victory yell and run around the room. I’m excited to visit New York again soon, because I’m sure most of the sly in-jokes are meant for New Yorkers alone and went right over my head.
“Red Dirt Witch” takes place in early-1900s Alabama, and starts out as a fantasy story of southern poverty and magic. But it quickly turns into something else, a parable about acceptance, resistance, sacrifice, and the right time for each.
“The Effluent Engine” is a spy thriller set in an Alternate Universe, Slightly Steampunk Victorian New Orleans. It’s fun, exciting, and thought provoking, with some breathless romance thrown in for good luck. Think James Bond, if Bond was a Haitian woman and not a complete cad.
The tribal remains of an old society meet the high tech representatives of a new one in “Cloud Dragon Skies.” I think it’s pointing out that the space between “helping” and “meddling” is a very thin line, and no matter your intentions sometimes it’s best to leave things the hell alone.
“The Trojan Girl” is pure sci-fi, and follows a pack of “Wolves,” AI-created creatures who have broken free from their creators and now scavenge on the edges of a VR world. I love all the details about surviving in virtual reality, improving themselves with patched-in code and ducking into the “real” world only in an emergency. I can see it as a parable about systemic racism, where people are technically free but actively discouraged from flourishing. And the prize the Wolves find isn’t something to make them better fighters, it’s the ability to imagine something better.
“Valedictorian” is another sci-fi story, but set in a very chilling dystopia, where everyone lives in fear of both failure and success; the only way to survive is to be absolutely mediocre. And for the main character, even death would be better than not being her absolute best self, even if everyone hates her for it.
Out of all the stories in the book, “The Storyteller’s Replacement” was the one with an ending I didn’t quite understand. It’s a wonderfully grim fairy tale, with some dark humor sprinkled in, and I understood the meaning (“weak leaders take power from others rather than build strength in themselves”) but I never quite figured out who the Storyteller was, or who they were talking to.
In “The Brides of Heaven” a tragedy leads to despair, which leads to madness, and someone at their lowest point finds hope. You’d think that’d be an uplifting story, but it really, really isn’t. It’s satisfyingly creepy, and a reminder that not every coping method is a good one.
“Walking Awake” is a flat-out horror story. It has body snatchers and body horror and slaves and lies and a deathless master race that we created ourselves. But it also compares survival with sacrifice, and debates which is better. (Depends on what you’re willing to do to survive.)
“The Elevator Dancer” is almost a poem. It reminds me of 1984 and Equilibrium, and maybe a little of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron. Emotion and expression are outlawed and to be a good human is to supress anything that brings joy without being “useful.” It’s also a slap in the face of any religion that says doing something that feels nice is obviously sinful.
“Cuisine des Mémories” is about memory, about how smells and tastes bring them back more than anything else we experience. It’s about being lost in memories, about wanting to recapture the past without trying to fix the present. It’s also a food story and Jemisin is particularly good at those. (Man I’d love to visit that restaurant. There’s a noodle breakfast I had in China that I’d pay a lot of money to have again. Not just the food, everything that went with it.)
“Stone Hunger” feels like the intro to a bigger story. A lot of world-building went into it, and we’re dropped into the middle. I understood the story completely, except I didn’t know if there was supposed to be a deeper meaning to it. You could see it as the cycle of atrocity and revenge, and forgiveness being the only way to end it, but it could also just be a cool story about a girl who can cause earthquakes.
In “On the Banks of the River Lex,” we get to wonder: what happens to religion and mythology and superstition after all the people are gone? It doesn’t seem like a happy existence, but it’s not completely hopeless.
I wasn’t sure what to make of “The Narcomancer.” I loved the idea of mage-priests who specialized in different kinds of magic. (Dreams, death, sex, it’s all good.) And I loved the discussion about how you can’t judge someone by what trauma they’ve lived through and how they choose to heal. But there also seems to be a teeny tiny idea that suicide is preferable to mental illness, and I really don’t think that’s the intent of the story but it sure jumped out at me.
I’m sure we’ve all heard stories about famous authors who fell from grace, and now we can’t read their work without remembering the full, unpleasant history behind it. “Henosis” is an unsettling story, told out of order to keep the reader off balance. It’s about what happens when the literary community decides an author has done the best thing they could ever do, and they want to preserve that moment forever.
“Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows ” is one of my favorite kinds of short stories: it’s mostly told through messages sent on a futuristic blog site. Something’s happened in the real world that’s never completely explained, mostly because the participants aren’t sure themselves. But there’s a lot of the claustrophobic feeling of being “terminally online,” where you’re trying to reach out of your isolation to make a connection with anyone, which isn’t as good as the real world but it’s better than nothing. Or is it?
“The Evaluators” is another sci-fi story told through online messages, but in this one an exploration team finds a planet with a healthy, thriving population. Maybe too healthy? I love that there’s an off-handed quip made near the beginning of the story that makes a lot more sense when you get to the end. All in all it’s a slightly pessimistic view of society, that maybe the only way humanity can succeed is if we make some awful choices. Or have them made for us.
“The You Train” is about being stuck in a rut, and how to get out of it, even if it’s scary. It’s also about standing up for yourself, and asking for help, and being forgiving of yourself and your friends, who are going through their own crap too. And it’s another love letter to New Yorkers, particularly people who know the subways and trains really, really well.
I wasn’t quite sure what was going on in “Non-Zero Probabilities,” except that suddenly superstitions and good luck charms have started working (sort of), which is good because suddenly the most unlikely events have become way more likely. Maybe this means people with cancer go into spontaneous remission, or it could mean the condom breaks, or it could mean a one-in-a-million mechanical failure causes a train derailment that kills a couple dozen people pretty horrifically. Everybody’s a liiiiiittle nervous. But the story is saying something about giving up control, and accepting that even unlikely things have to happen to somebody and that’s just life.
“Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters” is an unflinching look at what Katrina was like for people who couldn’t get out of the city. It’s ugly, but matter-of-fact too: you do what you have to do to survive. This one is a love letter to New Orleans in a way, but not the New Orleans of the French Quarter or the Stadium or the Anne Rice Vampire Tours. It’s the areas where people have lived for generations, scraping by but doing okay: it’s not a great life but it’s a life and New Orleans is their home. Also the story has a dragon that I adored.
L’Alchimista was my favorite story in the book, because of all the wonderful details. It’s pure fantasy but it takes place in modern day Italy, and instead of a magician it’s a middle-aged woman who could’ve been the best chef of our age if the world hadn’t been very unfair. She’s presented with an impossible challenge by a mysterious stranger, and she knows it doesn’t make sense but I love how she just accepts it. She’s beaten down and tired and absolutely doesn’t believe in magic but by god she’s going to take these weird-ass ingredients and make something great.