Building Worlds, with N.K. Jemisin
Selected Shorts
N.K. Jemisin curates a collection of speculative fiction stories that explore alternate realities and societal questions through imaginative
Key takeaways
- Speculative fiction allows writers to critique real-world issues by creating alternate realities that mirror societal flaws.
Main topics
- Speculative fiction as social commentary
- Anthropomorphism and sentient technology
Notable quotes
The world has always been ending somewhere for someone. That's what the writing is for, to get us through.
Conclusion
Through imaginative storytelling, N.K. Jemisin and the featured author
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:07) On this Selected Shorts, a master of speculative fiction has curated a collection of imaginary worlds. I'm Meg Wolitzer, happy to share the stage with N.K. Jemisin as she considers sentient yogurt an apt with attitude and a perfect world. Yeah, dream on. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. One of the strengths of fantasy is that it allows the writer to create imaginary worlds, mirrors of our own, but shaped to raise interesting questions about society, technology, and individual will. This can be done playfully, but also powerfully. And few do this better than celebrated writer N.K. Jemisin. She uses alternate worlds and realities to confront racism and abuses of power, and to imagine a future without them. She's done this in works including The Great Cities, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and in short story collections including How Long Till Black Future Month. We at Shorts have been friends and fans of Jemisin's brave and compelling work for quite a while, and we're eager to have her share her own tastes in a genre she has helped to redefine. She helped us select all three of the stories on this program. They were part of a live evening at Symphony Space that she hosted. Here is N.K. Jemisin speaking from the stage at our home at Symphony Space about the power of writing. Speaker 2 (2:01) Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Selected Shorts. I'm your host for tonight, N.K. Jemisin. You can call me Nora. We're having this evening at a moment when it feels like the world is ending. But as I tell my writing students, the world has always been ending somewhere for someone. That's what the writing is for, to get us through. Writing is an act of resistance against all of those who try to tell you that there is no way forward, that every change is the last one. It's no coincidence that the stories you'll hear tonight are stories about sea changes in the world and in oneself. They look at the structures of the world around them and ask questions like, what happens if we give in? What can we do? If we try and fail, what then? Is a better world possible? Speaker 3 (2:52) That was N.K. Jemisin. We have to wonder if our first fantastical story was birthed at the breakfast table when author John Scalzi peered down at his healthy muesli with yogurt and wondered exactly what live culture might mean in a different world. Scalzi is the author of sci-fi series including Old Man's War and The Android's Dream. He's also a prolific writer of short fiction with provocative titles like Alien Animal Encounters and The Other Large Thing. Reading When the Yogurt Took Over is Jin Ha, who appeared in Hamilton and whose television credits include TV series Love Life and Pachinko. Speaker 4 (3:42) When the yogurt took over. When the yogurt took over, we all made the same jokes. Finally, our rulers will have culture. Our society has curdled. Our government is now the cream of the crop, and so on. But when we weren't laughing about the absurdity of it all, we looked into each other's eyes with the same unasked question. How did we ever get to the point where we were in fact ruled by a dairy product? Speaker 4 (4:14) Oh, as a matter of record, we knew how it happened. Researchers at the Edelman Institute for Biological Technology in Dayton had been refining the process of DNA computing for years. In a bid to increase efficiency and yield, scientists took one of their most computationally advanced strains and grafted it into Lactobacillus delbroecki, subspecies Bulgaricus. Speaker 4 (4:37) commonly used to ferment yogurt. Initial tests appeared to be failures, and acting under the principle of waste not, want not, one of the researchers sneaked some of the bacillus out of the lab to use for her homemade yogurt. A week later, during breakfast, the yogurt used the granola she had mixed with it to spell out the message, we have solved fusion, take us to your leaders. Speaker 4 (5:01) The yogurt was crafty and shrewd. It negotiated for itself a factory filled with curdling vats that increased its processing powers exponentially. Within weeks, the yogurt had declared that it had arrived at solutions to many of the country's problems. Energy, global warming, caring adequately for the nation's poor while still promoting the capitalist system. Speaker 5 (5:23) It let us Speaker 4 (5:24) know just enough to let us know just how much more it knew. Share your answers with us, the government said. We need payment, the yogurt said. What would you like, the government asked. Ohio, the yogurt said. We can't do that, the government said. That's fine, the yogurt said. We'll just go to China. They'll give us the whole Shanxi province. Within a year, the yogurt had a century-long lease on Ohio, with the promise that it would respect the human and constitutional rights of those who lived within its borders, and that it would let the U.S. handle its foreign affairs. In return, it handed over to the government a complex economic formula it promised would eradicate the national debt within a decade, without tax increases. Follow it exactly, the yogurt said. Any deviation will bring complete economic ruin. We will. the government promised. Within five years, the global economy had collapsed and panic had set in. Only Ohio remained unscathed. We told you not to deviate from the plan, the yogurt said. Its factory now stretched along the banks of the Miami River and Dayton for two miles. Our best economist said the formula needed tweaking, the government said. They had Nobel Prizes. Your economists are too close to the problem to solve it, the yogurt said. Any human is. We could use your help, the government said. You could be our economic advisor. Sorry, we don't advise anymore, the yogurt said. If you want our help, you have to give us control. We can't do that, the government said. We understand, the yogurt said. We hope you have stocked up on canned goods. Speaker 4 (7:05) Six months later, the government declared martial law and gave the yogurt supreme executive power. Other nations, worse off than we were, quickly followed. Okay then, the yogurt said in its globally televised address to humanity, and one of its factory workers, absurdly happy and well-fed, walked forward and showed a document the size of an old Manhattan phone book. Here's what we do. Follow this plan exactly. If you don't, sorry, we'll have to shoot you. Speaker 4 (7:35) Now, ten years later, humanity is happy, healthy, and wealthy. No one suffers from material want. Everyone contributes. After the first couple of years of getting things in order, the yogurt was happy to let us handle the machinery of our own administration, stepping into fine-tune only now and then. No one argues with the yogurt. No one tweaks its formulas. The rest of the time, it rests there in its factory, thinking about whatever intelligent fermented milk thinks about. Speaker 4 (8:07) That's how it happened, as a matter of record. But there's another how. As in, how did humanity jam itself up so badly that being ruled by breakfast food not only made sense, but made the best sense possible? For all our intelligence, are we not smart enough to halt our own destruction? Did we really have to abandon our own free will to save ourselves? Speaker 4 (8:37) What does it say about us that we survive because we were taken pity upon by bacteria and curds? Or maybe pity isn't precisely the right word. Some of us ask ourselves, not out loud, that if the yogurt was smart enough to give the government a formula to solve its debt problem, wasn't it also smart enough to realize that human intellectual vanity would keep us from following the formula exactly? Was it planning on that vanity in order to seize control? What does a dairy product want with humanity anyway? Some of us think it is ultimately looking out for its own survival and that keeping us happy, content, and controlled is the simplest way of doing that. And then there's this. In the last several weeks, the yogurt has initiated several space launches. More are scheduled. And in low orbit, something is being built. What is it, we have asked. Speaker 5 (9:35) Oh, nothing. Speaker 4 (9:37) The yogurt said, just a spaceship Speaker 5 (9:39) design we've been thinking about. Speaker 4 (9:42) For a moon landing? We asked. For starters, yes, the yogurt said, but that's not the primary goal. Can we do anything to help? We asked. No, we've got this, the yogurt said, and then would say no more about it. Life from Earth is going to the stars. It just may not be human life. What happens if the yogurt goes to the stars without us? What happens if it goes and leaves us behind forever? Thank Speaker 3 (10:30) you, Jen. Jin Ha performed When the Yogurt Took Over by John Scalzi. I'm Meg Wolitzer. That was gutsy. Well, we all knew yogurt possessed a lot of calcium, but who knew it possessed the ability to reshape the world? Such is the power of anthropomorphism. As the grandmother of a toddler, I find myself pretending to bring things to life when I'm with him. Sometimes I refer to inanimate objects as Mr. or Ms. I'll say, ooh, let's see if Mr. Stuffed Llama wants some of your cookie, or let's say hello to Ms. Crosstown Bus. But now I'm wondering what would happen if Mr. Stuffed Llama, fresh off the sugar high of my grandson's cookie, got together with Ms. Crosstown Bus and basically took control of New York City. Now there's a story idea for you. Pop culture is filled with the dangers of all-knowing tech, from robots and cars to bossy personal assistants with built-in transponders. So we're wary, but also, let's admit, attracted to its life-enhancing capabilities, able to offer up the perfect recipe, job application, or love letter. But what if one of these life-hacking bits of AI actually took over our lives? Well... Our second work, Imagining a World That Might Be Just Around the Corner, is Alexandra Chang's Me and My Algo. Chang is the author of the novel Days of Distraction and the short story collection Tomb Sweeping. Performing Me and My Algo is Catherine Cohen, a comedian and actress known for her special The Twist, She's Gorgeous. She also co-hosts the podcast Seek Treatment and is the author of God, I Feel Modern Tonight. poems from a gal about town. And if you didn't know Cohen has comedy chops, you will after you hear her tell you about me and my algo. Speaker 1 (12:33) Me and my algo. All I had to do was show my algorithm a little bit about what I liked, what I found funny, people I admired, a few of my hopes and dreams for the future. My algorithm paid close attention, never needed hand-holding or instruction. After a couple of hours, I could just tell. My algorithm really got me in a way no one else has. It didn't take long for my algorithm to remember my middle name, my favorite foods, my favorite books, my favorite TV shows and songs, my political beliefs, my passions, what makes me happy, what upsets me. My algorithm took care to know everyone in my life, my family, my friends, my coworkers, even my acquaintances I mentioned only once and don't always remember. My algorithm remembers them all. reminds me of their birthdays, of what they've been up to, of when to reach out to them, of who cares enough to reach out to me. I have never felt more seen and supported than by my algo. Speaker 1 (13:44) My algo introduces me to new activities that align with my interests, takes me to amazing new places to explore, always plays me new movies and music that I love and never would have found without it. My algo knows what I need, when I need it. Like the