SFWA To Celebrate Race-Baiting Activist N.K. Jemisin As Science Fiction Grand Master At Nebula Awards
SFWA has done the unthinkable and named N.K. Jemisin, Grandmaster of Science Fiction, which they plan to celebrate at their upcoming Nebula Awards Conference, as the club continues to push into political propaganda, abandoning any semblance of being a professional science fiction writers’ organization.
N.K. Jemisin is best known as a diversity-hire in publishing with a penchant for black activism, hailed as one of the greatest writers out there despite her works being narrowly focused on race-baiting agitation.
Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which won three consecutive Hugo Awards from 2016 to 2018, functions less as science fiction and more as an extended racial allegory dressed in fantasy clothing. The series centers on “orogenes,” a persecuted class of people with earth-moving abilities who are kept as slaves, forcibly sterilized, and referred to by the slur “roggas,” a term Jemisin constructed as a direct parallel to the n-word. The Fulcrum, where orogenes are trained and controlled, operates explicitly as a plantation metaphor. The protagonist Essun’s young son is beaten to death by his own father for displaying orogene abilities, a scene drawing direct parallels to how Jemisin frames the treatment of Black children in America. The second-person narration Jemisin employs throughout the trilogy, unusual in fantasy fiction, was described by the author herself as representing trauma dissociation, but it also functions as a device forcing readers to inhabit a racially oppressed identity regardless of their own background.
Her DC Comics run Green Lantern: Far Sector applies the same framework to superhero fiction with considerably less subtlety. Jo Mullein, a Black woman Green Lantern, is assigned to the City Enduring, a society of three alien species that achieved peace by chemically eliminating their own emotions through something called the “Emotion Exploit” patch. The allegory is immediate: a society demanding its citizens suppress emotion to maintain social order maps directly onto respectability politics arguments about Black emotional expression. The central murder mystery unfolds against a backdrop of a protest movement called the Sooth, coded unmistakably as a Black Lives Matter parallel, fighting against a system that literally mandates emotional suppression. Mullein’s outsider status as someone from a world that still experiences racism gives Jemisin regular opportunities to deliver contemporary racial commentary through the character’s observations about the City Enduring’s supposedly “post-racial” society. The comic received critical acclaim from mainstream outlets for exactly these qualities, which tells you everything about who the intended audience is.
Jemisin is also very vocal with her black supremacist views, stating before, “As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful, the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change. With epic fantasy there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative, in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack…”
Now, SFWA has declared her to be a grandmaster in an hour-long rambling video to promote the Nebula Awards conference. "We are honoring our newest Grandmaster, N.K. Jemisin, who shows us that storytelling can be a powerful tool for engaging with our reality. Through her work, she reminds us that speculative fiction can be both a space for resistance and a landscape for transformation,” said SFWA President Kate Ristau.
Before getting into the rest of her topics, Ristau made another strange comment that shows this is all about politicism rather than sci-fi, "It is our duty to acknowledge the generational impacts of settler colonialism, forced displacement, and assimilation on Native American families. We recognize these first peoples who coexisted in interdependent and sustainable relationships with the land."
The video also goes into a full list of identity politics-ridden works that are nominated for their various categories, almost all featuring some kind of race, gender, or sexual orientation heavy-handed messaging.
The program continues with strange and quirky attempts at humor which Ristau doesn’t seem much like a professional at all, let alone a head of an organization. "Thank you to our communities that help us brew coffee and fan the fires of our rage. I mean, uh, joy. Uh, definitely joy. Just just joy,” she says in a bizarre admission of her mental illness.
It’s also worth noting that they propped up an audiobook narrator for an award who uses “she/her” pronouns, despite the person clearly being a man with a deep voice.
Most of the nominated works in various categories aren’t worth naming as they aren’t fiction that anyone outside of the club is likely to have read or care about. A sample of one of the works should be enough to show how it’s all about identity and not about the actual quality of stories: “The super-abled 501 local union building wasn't ADA compliant. I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn't exactly fix my mobility problems.”
Ristau ended her stream with an urge for her club to vote, again not really seeming to realize that her job is to advocate for authors and science fiction works, as she said: “The power of story to make change from the ground up.” She then concluded, “Your work can change the world. So can your vote.”
How this helps professional science fiction writers in the least is beyond anything Fandom Pulse could come up with. We reached out to Vox Day, the editor in chief of Castalia House Publishing, and a recent science fiction #1 bestseller with his co-written Space Fleet Academy: Year One. He commented on Jemisin’s nomination, “I congratulate SFWA on completing its self-destructing speed run and rendering itself entirely irrelevant to the actual genre of science fiction literature.”
This year’s Nebula Awards conference promises to be even cringier than last year with hyper-politicized works and a Grand Master who is clearly chosen for racial reasons. The conference programming also has some strange panels that one must wonder what it has to do with science fiction:
What do you think of this? Leave a comment and let us know.
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The Cruel Equations shows the other side of the universe that cadets like Constantine Ramsey are being trained to defend. The Academy teaches its students to make the hard choices. The Cruel Equations shows what those choices look like when they land on a world of 340 million people who never asked to be a test case for humanity’s survival.
The hardest science fiction you will ever read.
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