10 awesome science fiction and fantasy books by Black authors
By Daniel Roman
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 09: N. K. Jemisin attends her book signing at the WIRED25 Summit 2019 – Day 2 at Commonwealth Club on November 09, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED)
9. Everything by N.K. Jemisin
Ok, I’m going to break the rules here a little, because I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t. Since launching into the fantasy scene in 2010 with her Inheritance trilogy, N.K. Jemisin has been one of the most prolific authors of speculative fiction around. She has several series that you, dear reader, as a connoisseur of such things, most certainly need to be made aware of.
Let’s start with Inheritance. Comprised of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms and Kingdom of Gods, Inheritance was Jemisin’s attempt to take classic fantasy tropes and turn them around in refreshing ways. Gods live among mortals, ruling families play political games, and the rules’ palace literally floats above the city where their subjects live. Each book in the Inheritance Trilogy takes place years apart and feature brand new casts, so they almost stand alone.
Nemisin uses the same structure for one of her other great series, The Dreamblood Duology. Dreamblood is set in an Ancient Egypt-style fantasy world where priests harvest magical power from people’s dreams in order to protect the populace. Something begins preying on the dreams of sleepers, and a dark conspiracy comes to the fore.
But when it comes to N.K. Jemisin’s series, the big one is The Broken Earth Trilogy. Starting with her outstanding novel The Fifth Season, Broken Earth tells the story of a world with a supercontinent called The Stillness. This continent periodically undergoes a cataclysmic climate event known as the Fifth Season. People known as orogenes have the power to control and cause earthquakes, a useful thing in a world that undergoes regular natural disasters.
In a move reminiscent of the sort of struggles the X-Men always go through, the other people of The Stillness generally revile and fear orogenes, even going so far as to murder them on sight. And if not that, orogenes are sometimes whisked away to a place called the Fulcrum to be (brutally) trained by a caste of enforcers known as Guardians.
The Broken Earth Trilogy deftly weaves together powerful, moving themes and ideas with a personal quest of a mother trying to save her daughter. It is one of the modern masterpieces of contemporary fantasy, and the only series to win the Hugo award for best novel three consecutive years in a row.
All that is to say, it’s probably worth your time to read it.
If all that’s not enough, Jemisin also just released the first book of a new, urban fantasy trilogy. The City We Became hit shelves this past March, with the next two books of The Great Cities Trilogy still on the way.
I did say she was prolific, didn’t I?
