Yet science fiction allows her to display some of the fundamental characteristics of any system of slavery, however much her account derives from the particular experience of African Americans. Most of her characters are black, though this becomes only gradually apparent, and the system of slavery on her planet is not based on skin colour. Ms Jemisin is the first black winner of a Hugo award for novels (the redoubtable Samuel Delany won twice for his short stories).

The future is terrifying and the past incomprehensibly alien, yet hope, love and courage never quite die. Sometimes it is all abandoned and forgotten. Sometimes new forms of living are built on the ruins of the old. Nothing is permanent: families and cities alike are violently broken by external force. The central emotional relationships are those between a mother and her daughters, and the deep structure of the plot explores the experience of slavery and the cost and necessity of revolt. But it is not stocked with fantasy figures for the adolescent male. So there is plenty of excitement and explosions of the traditional sort. On the surface, it deals with life on a planet of ceaseless, life-threatening volcanic activity, where three different sentient life forms – one so profoundly alien that it can swim through the planet’s crust, and another consisting of multifaceted flying obelisks – must wrestle with human dilemmas. This defence has had to be used a couple of times in recent years to fight off attempts by rightwing trolls to impose their views on the majority.įor the last three years the winning novelist has been the American NK Jemisin, for the successive volumes of her trilogy The Broken Earth.

Such openness can be construed as an invitation to game the system, but the Hugos have a defence mechanism: if the shortlists have been swamped by an organised voting campaign, it is possible for ordinary voters to reject all the nominees in a particular category and vote for “no award”. The franchise is not restrictive, although there is a fee. The prestigious Hugo awards are conferred on the basis of what most readers have loved most. T he divide between high and low culture, or between what readers love and what the critics think they ought to love, is not at all clear in science fiction.

The broken earth