Department of English

N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy—a sprawling, multigenerational epic—holds the distinct and unprecedented honor of having received the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel for each of its three installments: The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017). Spanning hundreds of years through the lives of mortal and immortal characters, Jemisin’s work asks crucial questions regarding the transformation of living beings and the environment over long history. In so doing, it taps into the power of science-fiction to refract our own realities, fears, hopes, and dreams while nevertheless offering us a wholly original world of fantasy. This One Series seminar will take students on a worldbuilding quest through Jemisin’s radical new humanism and consider how the genre of science-fiction represents, and perhaps transforms, the social, economic, and natural world. Our reading of the complete Broken Earth Trilogy will be supplemented by theories of literary genre, race, capital, and environmentalism as we re-think our current cultural moment. Assignments will include brief research exercises and short writing in various forms. For the final projects, students will have the choice of a critical essay or creative project.