The Aspirational Drive Of The Zeitgeist

“I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist” says Jemisin in her charming, eloquent, feisty speech accepting her Hugo award for The Stone Sky, which is the third novel in the Broken Earth trilogy. I’m currently reading her novel The Fifth Season and am back home in our shared neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn for the holidays. I haven’t finished reading the novel, much less the trilogy, so I don’t want to write about it (spoilers: it’s very good), so this speech seemed a good substitute.

In recent years, the more I think about politics, the more my belief has crystallized around the idea that I am against the powerful, and for the powerless. That the powerful always need to be resisted and pushed back against, and that one of the best ways to understand a society is to look at its treatment of the powerless. In every society, there is a group of people who are protected, included and comfortable, be it large or small. Most of written history and literature is the history and narrative of protected groups of privileged people. One of the aspects of power is to have a voice and to determine what is said about you, to control your own narrative.

Slowly through human history, the marginalized and disenfranchised are finding opportunities to raise their voices and tell their stories to wider and wider audiences. Marginalized groups are becoming visible and heard, and entering their version of events into the historic and cultural record. Jemisin as a black woman sits at a unique intersection to observe our culture and chooses to do it through richly written, complex and strange fantasy novels. I have always believed that the wide-open nature of sci-fi and fantasy has made it one of our most potent vehicles of political imagination and allegory. Jemisin raises the question in her speech of who will be allowed to use these powerful tools to imagine the future and to comment on the present?

When we extrapolate forward and imagine what may happen, we start from where we stand. When we comment on society, we do so from our position within it. If the only voices which we lift up and amplify, or validate as part of the cultural record, are those of the children of the powerful, we blind ourselves to richer possibilities and imaginings. As someone joked on Twitter the other day “2018 was a long decade”, and boy were they right. But 2018 also included some victories, and moments to celebrate. Jemisin’s victory, and speech, are one such moment well worth savoring.