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N. K. JEMISIN: The truth of the matter

though is that what the audience believes is what matters.

It's not our world.

It's not our reality.

It's not our time.

And there's a lot of different ways that you can convey that.

There's a common perception out there

that science fiction is purely science

and that fantasy is purely magic and historical.

The truth of the matter, though, is

that what the audience believes is what matters.

And the audience's range of what they're

willing to accept in each area is not as discrete as that.

You know, at the end of the day, it's all just

sort of speculative stuff.

It's not our world.

It's not our reality.

It's not our time.

And there's a lot of different ways that you can convey that.

You aren't stuck in the past when you're writing fantasy.

You can write fantasy set in the future.

You aren't stuck in space when you're

writing about science fiction.

You can write it in the modern day.

You can write it in the past.

And a lot of the things that we traditionally

think of as science fiction are actually

fantasy when you kind of dig a little bit past the surface.

So for example, "Star Wars."

You know, what's the Force?

Well.

I mean, there's lots of incredibly detailed

explanations and midi-chlorians, yada, yada, yada.

But, you know, at the end of the day,

it's a person reaching out their hand

and making things happen with their mind.

You can call that psionic or psychic power.

That's something that happened a lot in science fiction.

Or you can call it magic.

It's space magic.

And people are willing to accept that this

is space magic as long as you don't call it space magic.

You can call it the Force.

You call it midi-chlorians.

You call it psychic power or something like that.

But it's a cosmetic nod to the fact

that this is science fiction so we can't call it magic.

But I don't feel like that constraint is something

that the writer should feel held to.

The writer is the one who sells the plausibility

of whatever imaginary thing that they're trying to convey.

The writer is the one who conveys

the feeling, or the meaning, or the depth of that.

So if you're trying to sell your readers on magic that

is indistinguishable from science,

then you need to treat your magic like science.

You have to talk about it having replicable effects,

being measurable, things like that.

Personally, I have a kind of general distaste for that.

A lot of fantasy readers and a lot of fantasy fans

have kind of been trained over the years

by like D&D and other tabletop role playing

games that magic and all of these other things

can be systematized, can be treated like just

a standard thing that happens.

You lose your hit points.

You move on.

Magic I feel should be a little more imaginary and a little

more numinous than that.

And you can take it in a lot of different directions

if you don't feel constrained by the rules of some game system.

So this is why with "The Fifth Season"

and the whole "Broken Earth" trilogy,

I actually spent a while playing with the idea of magic

versus science and how much magic

can be treated like science before it is a science.

There are two pretty well known advances in science fiction.

There's Clarke's law, Arthur C. Clarke,

which is that any science which is sufficiently advanced

is indistinguishable from magic.

Well, a corollary to that law is that any magic which

is sufficiently systematized is indistinguishable from science.

And I just decided to play with that throughout the series.

We've got the orogenes whose power is clearly not

scientific.

Can't measure it.

They don't understand fully how it works.

They're able to sort of raise a hand

and concentrate really hard.

And they cause things to happen miles away.

But at the-- this is a spoiler.

But partway through the second book,

I decided to just arbitrarily call that magic.

And then we go on to see that there's a society that

happens in the third book.

There's a society that actually built itself

on the science of this magic.

So you know, I just don't see a lot

of distinction between the two.

There are conventions which you probably

want to adhere to if you want to keep your audience entertained

and satisfied.

But you can play with those conventions

if you've got the skill to do so.

And how well your audience accepts that is up to you.

There are ways that you can help the reader

through their learning curve.

And one of those methods is just simply repeating

again and again the unusual elements of your world

and explaining more than once the unusual elements

of your world.

You have to be a little careful with that

because some people learn more quickly than others.

And the first or second time that you explain, for example,

that you've got a magic ring that

contains the soul of the dark lord or whatever,

the first time that you explain it,

that sinks in for some people.

But then for other people, you've

got to hit it two or three more times.

At the end of the day, your job is

to write fiction, not another textbook.

So you don't need to go and give yourself a PhD

to plausibly depict this stuff.

But plausibility has a kind of wide range.

Of course, if you do have actual scientists read your work,

they're going to react badly to anything

that you get really wrong.

And I do think it's important to try and make sure

that you get the basics right.

A lot of people learn about the world

and learn about science from fiction.

And you know, in fact, at one point

I ended up attending a workshop sponsored by NASA called Launch

Pad that exists because science fiction writers historically

had been getting some basic facts of science wrong.

And because of that, the American public

was getting basic facts of science wrong.

And so the idea is that if your influencers and so forth

actually kind of know what they're talking about,

then other people will too.

But the goal is plausibility.

You want to make sure that you've

gotten enough of the basics right

that you're not kind of doing anything really

horribly, egregiously wrong.

But you don't need to get bogged down in the details

and the minutia.

And you also need to stay true to your world.

So for example, with the "Broken Earth" books, I like volcanoes.

I like rocks.

But I am not a geophysicist.

So what I did in order to research and to prepare

for writing that book was I ended up sort of following

some geophysicist on the internet,

joined a couple of message boards,

followed some interesting accounts on Twitter.

I, at one point, sat down and had

coffee with a friend of mine's partner who was a geophysicist.

And then I ran the story past a number of other writers

that I know who have varying degrees of scientific knowledge

and asked them if it sort of passed the smell test there.

And that was a few months of research

that was me reading books and spitting back

what I could from that.

But that's not what fiction is about.

At the end of the day, fiction is about making it feel right.

So in addition to all this other research that I did,

I also traveled to Hawaii, because I

needed to know what a volcano smelled like.

I needed to know what lava looked like, and felt like,

and smelled like.

And there's a limit to that too, because there's

different kinds of lavas and so forth.

But I did hike across the Kilauea Iki,

which is a 50-year-old crater from one of the last times

that that particular part of Kilauea erupted.

It's still hot.

It's not still boiling, but it's still warm.

So I looked at a barren landscape.

I touched ash and felt it and felt the grit of it

between my fingers.

I smelled sulfur.

You can't do too much of that because it's toxic.

But I smelled what a sulfurous draft of gas kind of smells

like.

And then I was able to describe these things,

because this is what fiction is really about

is helping your reader live and immerse in that experience.

So I was able to reproduce the sensation of grit or feeling

grit touch your face and things like that.

So it was less important, in some ways,

for me to get the science right than it was for me to get

those small details right.

But I tried to get the science right too, just

because I'm a perfectionist.

I'm going to read a section from "The Fifth Season," chapter

20, Syenite Stretched and Snapped Back,

from page 363 of this version, but there's

lots of versions out there.

"It's an unspoken thing between them.

But Syenite's not stupid.

There are a lot of things a skilled raga can

do to help on the kinds of sorties Innon's crew makes.

Not starting shakes or blows.

She won't and he'd never ask it.

But it is a simple thing to draw enough strength

from the ambient to lower the temperature at the water's

surface and thus cloak the ship in fog

to hide its approach or retreat."

You know, I grew up in the South where

we had fog all the time on cool days

because there was moisture on the ground

and the air was cooler.

And whenever the water vapor evaporated,

it just kind of hung in the air, visible

like a cloud on the ground.

Anybody that lives in a place that gets lots of fog

understands what creates fog.

So you just need to kind of draw on that

or make it clear that that's the principle that's at work here.

She's not pulling fog out of nowhere.

She's using a very familiar kind of environmental change

to create it.

People are aware of animals reacting

to earthquakes or to any kind of seismic vibrations

before human beings do.

I grew up in a place without earthquakes.

I've only felt an earthquake once in my life.

I don't know a whole lot about them.

But I knew that from reading lots of books,

or watching TV shows or movies in which the dog suddenly

starts barking and then there's an earthquake.

Now when you're using knowledge that's

gained from movies or TV, you have

to make sure that that's right.

So it was important to research that and make sure

that animals did react more quickly to seismic vibrations,

but they do.

So now I'm going to read from chapter 5, which is actually

the first point in "The Fifth Season"

where I actually explain how orogeny works.

Now at this point in the novel, you've actually

seen how orogeny works.

Essun has reacted very badly to people in her home

village trying to kill her.

And she tried to kill them back, except that they used a bow

and arrow and she used orogeny.

So you've already seen the terrible effects of orogeny.

You've seen that she's killed several people fairly quickly.

And in that narrative passage, she

describes having destroyed the aquifer of the town

so that they're going to run out of water

and eventually that town will probably die as a result.

But here is the first place where she actually

explains some of that.

"You're so tired.

It takes a lot out of you killing so many people.

Worse, because you didn't do nearly

as much as you could have done once you got all worked up.

Orogeny is a strange equation.

Take movement, and warmth, and life from your surroundings,

amplify it by some indefinable process

of concentration or catalysis or semi-predictable chants.

Push movement, and warmth, and death from the earth.

Power in, power out.

To keep the power in though, to not turn the valley's aquifer

into a geyser or shatter the ground into rubble,

takes an effort that makes your teeth

and the backs of your eyes ache.

You walked a long time to try to burn off

some of what you took in but it still brims under your skin

even as your body grows weary and your feet hurt.

You are a weapon meant to move mountains.

A mere walk can't take that out of you."

So orogeny was intended to be my way

of playing with the expectation in fantasy that magic has

to have rules.

You know, it's obviously a pretty straightforward power.

You can move mountains.

You can do things with seismic energy.

Those things range pretty widely and are actually

pretty versatile.

And there's something thermodynamic

going on which you can see from the effect.

In order to draw in energy, Essun

sucks the heat, and movement, and life out of everything

nearby and kills it.

So I wanted it to be clear that there was some kind of process

going on, obviously some movement

of thermodynamic energy, but what is it?

And how the heck does that turn into moving a mountain?

We don't know.

She doesn't know.

There's never going to be an explanation.

It's a fantasy novel.

Readers will see on the spine that it's a fantasy novel.

So they go into it expecting magic.

And they go into it expecting a magic system.

So in fantasy and science fiction,

there are many ways to depict how magic systems work.

But people want to know what the rules are.

How does it work?

What are the limitations?

What's the damage and so on?

And I wanted to establish in this passage pretty clearly

that it's not 100% known in this case,

that a lot of what Essun does is pure instinct.

She has had really extensive training.

And it kind of is implicit in the way

that she describes all of this.

She understands the basics of it.

But there's some pieces of this magic system that

don't have any logic to them, don't have anything

that is explanatory to them.

And I wanted to introduce the idea right here that this

is a magic system that we're never

going to really be able to fully explain, because it's magic.

And that's the whole point.

If it were easy to explain, predictable, measurable, it

would be science.

And that's really it.