A Legendary World-Builder on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Souls’ of Cities

N. K. Jemisin is a fantasy and science-fiction writer who won three consecutive Hugo Awards — considered the highest honor in science-fiction writing — for her “Broken Earth” trilogy; she has since won two more Hugos, as well as other awards. But in imagining wild fictional narratives, the beloved sci-fi and fantasy writer has also cultivated a remarkable view of our all-too-real world. In her fiction, Jemisin crafts worlds that resemble ours but get disrupted by major shocks: ecological disasters, invasions by strange, tentacled creatures and more — all of which operate as thought experiments that can help us think through how human beings could and should respond to similar calamities. Jemisin’s latest series, which includes “The City We Became” and “The World We Make,” takes place in a recognizable version of New York City — the texture of its streets, the distinct character of its five boroughs — that’s also gripped by strange, magical forces. The series, in addition to being a rollicking read, is essentially a meditation on cities: how they come into being, how their very souls get threatened by forces like systemic racism and astronomical inequality and how their energies and cultures have the power to rescue and save those souls. I invited Jemisin on the show to help me take stock of the political and cultural ferment behind these distressing conditions — and also to remember the magical qualities of cities, systems and human nature. We discuss why multiverse fictions like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” are so popular now, how the culture and politics of New York and San Francisco have homogenized drastically in recent decades, Jemisin’s views on why a coalition of Black and Latinx voters elected a former cop as New York’s mayor, how gentrification causes change that we may not at first recognize, where to draw the line between imposing order and celebrating the disorder of cities, how Donald Trump kept stealing Jemisin’s ideas but is at the root a “badly written character,” whether we should hold people accountable for their choices or acknowledge the way the status quo shapes our decision-making, what excites Jemisin about recent discoveries about outer space, why she thinks we are all “made of exploding stars” and more. Mentioned: N. K. Jemisin interview on Vox’s "The Gray Area with Sean Illing" Book recommendations: Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine Witch King by Martha Wells The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Our researcher is Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrero. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Jesse Bordwin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  Nora K. Jemisin is one of the most highly decorated writers in fantasy and science fiction today. Her Broken Earth trilogy won three consecutive Hugo Awards, pretty much the highest honor in science fiction writing, first time anybody had ever done that. She has since won two more Hugo Awards, including for a recent Green Lantern series, Far Sector. It's got to be a heavy shelf in her, in her house. I'm a huge fan of these books. I love the Broken Earth trilogy. I love the Inheritance trilogy, which is earlier, and I recommend if people have not read it. What sets Jemisin's work apart is her ability to use these fantastical worlds to explore really deep, urgent themes. How the systems in our world operate, how people work with and against each

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  other when their world is under threat, how oppression replicates itself throughout history. And behind that is Jemisin's skill at world building. In a past conversation I did with her, we talked about that really explicitly. You can search for that if you're interested. But there is a way in which she creates for herself these very, very clean models of how a world works. And then she hits them with a shock, and then she sees what happens. Her newest series is a little bit different. It's set in a much more familiar world, a recognizable, though alien-infested and magical version of New York City. And this series includes books, The City We Became, and most recently, The World We Make. And these books are in dialogue, in a much more direct way, with the world

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  we're in now, and the politics of the world we're in now. So I invited Jemisin on the show to take stock of the past few turbulent years, not just in her worlds, but in ours. What the pandemic showed us about the systems we build to organize our society. What is happening to cities, these books are very much about cities, in an age of exorbitant wealth and sky-high housing prices. How change and oppression happen over time and replicate over time and interact over time, a central theme in her work. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:27Ezra Klein?

  Noor K. Jameson, welcome to the show.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Thank you for the welcome. Hi again.

• 2:31Ezra Klein?

  So the new books are set in a multiverse and I feel like multiverses are big right now. The whole new Marvel sequence is multiverse. I just read Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandell. That's multiverse. We had Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was like, I feel like one of the great movies of the year. Why do you think multiverses are so in?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, my layperson's idea is just that people are trying to imagine different ways of doing life, different ways that the world could be personally and, and, you know, sort of more globally. And with a multiverse, it's a kind of handy way of exploring, you know, what if the world had been X instead of the way it is? And, you know, there's a lot of fun in that. It can be silly. You know, I also loved Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's a great movie. Everybody should go see it. But it can also be terrifying because then you, it's a way to see also, you know, what could be worse. It's the same

• 3:32Speaker 01

  appeal that exists for the science fiction field, I would say, just the idea of exploring what if?

• 3:39Ezra Klein?

  There's this kind of fascinating idea that, that I've heard from the philosopher Ti Nuen and then the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, that this is actually a pretty big shift in storytelling. Chiang wrote that, quote, "For much of human history, stories reinforced the idea of fate. They told us that events unfolded the way they did because of destiny or the will of God." And that now we have these stories that are much more about the reality of contingency, that there is no one way it could turn out. But that's actually a bigger shift, maybe, in our collective unconscious, or maybe even conscious, than we give it credit for.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  I think it's very conscious. Yeah. I mean, the- The exploration of what if and what also might be is is not new by any stretch. But, you know, I would agree with Ted, you know, and the idea that people aren't happy right now. People do not sort of commonly perceive the world to be in good shape. I think, you know, we're all sort of painfully aware of, you know, climate change and the encroachment of fascism and, you know, the imminence of possible war and all kinds of things like that everywhere. And, you know, we're looking for alternative viewpoints, alternative ways of being, I think, and ways of thinking. And that can be good. In a way,

• 4:58Speaker 01

  it is revolutionary thought. If those thoughts don't take any, you know, sort of turn into action, then, you know, even even without the action, revolutionary thought is is a good thing. It is a way of kind of imagining that the world can be different. If you are willing to at least acknowledge that change can happen, then, you know, you might be more willing to actually take action to make those changes happen in the real world. The catch is that revolutions, you know, hurt people. Revolutions, you know, the the most vulnerable people who are already struggling now will fall off a cliff when such a time actually happens. So, you know, revolution is always a good thing. But it means something.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I do think it means something that people are kind of in much larger numbers imagining better worlds or or just different worlds.

• 5:51Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on that. All through your work, I think, there's a very deep attentiveness to the idea that revolutions, even that things you might really want, things you might really love, have dark sides. It's literally true for the way cities are born, or at least one of the ways cities can be born. And in in the series, it's very present, I think, in the Broken Earth trilogy. You've talked about how cities themselves, in our actual reality, they change weather patterns, their their spaces in some ways of of violence to the world around them. Tell me a bit about how you balance this idea of wanting to believe in and be oriented towards change, and also seeming to me to have a pretty acute consciousness

• 6:35Ezra Klein?

  that all magic, all creation comes at a price.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  That's just, that's how change works. If you're going to be writing about, you know, whether it's magical change or real world change, it's inaccurate to describe change as a universal good. And I just believe that if you're going to explore the ways in which a change can upend a society in good ways and bad, then you owe it to all the people that have been through revolutions and wars and upheavals in the past to acknowledge the reality of what that entails. It means that some people are going to die. It means that some people are going to suffer horribly. It can also mean that the world becomes overall a better place.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  But to me, there's no, I'm not interested in, you know, sort of a facile reimagining of the world in which everything is suddenly better. You know, that's, that's a fairy tale. I'm not exploring realistic material because I'm exploring, you know, rock people and magic and things like that. But I am interested in keeping the people realistic, keeping the, the human part of the story plausible. And to do that, that means that I've got to explore multiple facets of what change happens, what change turns into.

• 7:57Ezra Klein?

  This felt to me, though, like your most realistic book by a lot, which is not to say there are not fantastical elements to it, but that the New York that is inhabited in the book doesn't feel like it's on the far off branch of the multiverse. I mean, it feels very much like the New York of 2020 or 2021, like it's the, the politics are very recognizable, the questions are very recognizable. You seem to be much more in our world this time, and I'm curious about that choice.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  That was just, I felt like writing about our world. And if I'm going to do that, then I, I would do the world a disservice by treating it as... Some fantasy land where, you know, I don't even want to depict New York as much as I love it. I don't want to depict New York as, as all joy and all light and all happiness. I don't want to depict cities, though I am a city girl at heart, as all joy, light and happiness. And, you know, rural life is evil. You know, that's, that's what they do. That's what people on that other side of the political divide like to do. The us-ing and them-ing of reality. I just want to explore what that turns into. If the us-ing and them-ing

• 9:11Speaker 01

  is treated as, you know, is sort of taken to an extreme, where does that go? But, I mean, more than that, it's just, as far as I'm concerned, fantasy can sort of explore other political realities as well as other laws of physics, whatever you want to call it. And, and that for me has always been the appeal of fantasy, that you can use it to explore people and, and their differences if you change elements of society. In this particular case, it's just, you know, a change of perspective more than anything else. The avatars of New York City start to see the world in a more global way. And also that

• 9:56Speaker 01

  includes the multiversal way of viewing the world. And that changes how they react to the city. So, you know, that's, that's the thing that always interests me is how do people react to these changes, whatever those changes might be?

• 10:09Ezra Klein?

  You grew up partly in Alabama. You spent your summers in, with your father in New York City. What is your contingency? What did the, the two sides form in you? And what do you imagine you'd be without either one of them?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, I'd be a much worse cook if I hadn't grown up in Alabama.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's just the complexity of who I am. And, and anybody that's lived any kind of bi-coastal or multicultural existence has developed a degree of flexibility, a degree of hopefully a keen-eyed view of both. Like, I don't choose to live in places like Alabama. I don't choose to live sort of the rural life, but I don't have any, you know, hatred or disrespect for it. You know, it's just not a thing that is, you know, adherent to my personality. And I guess sort of a bigger perspective shift that it's caused for me is like, I realize I have a better understanding of how people, I guess,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  stereotype the other way of living and doing and thinking. Every time I go home to Alabama, I run into somebody who's like, isn't it dangerous there in New York? Aren't you living a really dangerous? Isn't it scary with, you know, whatever movie, Charles Bronson film conceptualization of New York that they have in mind? You know, and I have to point out to them that the violent crime rate is actually much higher in Mobile than it is in New York, that there is a massive methamphetamine problem, um, you know, in these rural places that you're imagining as being so idyllic. You know, perception is not reality. And I just like playing with both perception with reality, um, you know, with people's beliefs about the world.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  But I still try to depict what I honestly see to add that plausibility realism element.

• 11:59Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I really loved in the books is the depictions of what creates a city's soul. And you have this way of, um, literalizing that into, into imagery and, and power and a kind of magic and, and, but behind that is a lot of work, I think you had to do in trying to decide, well, what is a city's soul? What part of this is a city's vibrancy and what part of it is just life? I'm curious what that process was, was like? How do you make those decisions as you try to define what gives New York its New York-ness?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I chose things that were relevant to me because that's pretty much the only thing you can do. New York is such a huge city. Every individual citizen's experience of it is so wildly different that there was no way I was going to capture, you know, New York in any kind of objective way that everyone would agree with. I expected that. I went into it sort of planning to piss off a few of my friends from New York. But, you know, I just understood that New York is, you know, a personal experience. It is a relativistic thing. My experience of New York is what I decided to draw upon.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I'm a black New Yorker. I am a woman. I've lived here partially, but also, like you said, in a more rural, small town in Alabama. So I have comparison and contrast experiences that I think a born and bred New Yorker who's never left here would not have. I also have experiences that, you know, the friends and the Seinfeld set did not have. To some degree, I wanted to specifically address that because a lot of people's conception of New York is based on TV shows that depict a very narrow slice of New York reality. And, you know, in some cases, that is the wealthy, white, upper-class New Yorkers that have

• 13:56Speaker 01

  never left the Upper East Side or Upper West Side or whatever. That is the perception of New York that they've been getting, or the girls' depiction of New York. And that's just never been my experience of New York. I grew up among artists. I grew up among black people and queer people and Latino people. I grew up walking down street festivals, you know, gnashing on some chicharrón and listening to people argue in Polish. You know, I mean, that is, that to me is as much New York as whatever Hollywood has been putting across. But I haven't been seeing that New York. So that was just my attempt to readdress that.

• 14:39Ezra Klein?

  Some of the book seems animated by a fear that that New York is, on some level, dying or being at least threatened. Is that how you feel about it? Do you feel something about the soul of New York is being lost?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes. People have mixed feelings about gentrification. I hear people point out all the time that, you know, New York, back in the day, you know, the crack epidemic of the 80s, things like that, where the city was nearly bankrupt and bad things were happening, mistakes were made. A lot of people think of that New York as worse. And yeah, in some ways, it definitely was. I'm not even going to pretend that that's, that's wrong. But it was also a New York where you could be yourself, where various subcultures could grow and thrive because it was a place for you to find your people. That is the part of New York that has been affected most by gentrification. Gentrification homogenizes.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  It is changing New York in the sense of bringing it up to a single standard. And that standard is that of, you know, the, the middle class or the upper middle class and their conceptions of what New York is and should be. There's not as much room for subgroups to thrive in that New York. In fact, there's no room, in some cases, for that, those subgroups to thrive. And so it is being lost. When the artists that I grew up around, because my father is an artist, but when the artists that I grew up around end up leaving the city because they can no longer afford to be here and be artists, this is the city that is, you know, the capital of the art world, or at least it used to be. And we've, we're losing that.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  It used to be the capital of, you know, the drag world, ballroom scene, that kind of thing. We've lost that already. Well, not completely. But so when those subcultures are fading, and I don't see very many new subcultures rising to take their place, that uniqueness of New York in that it was the place where you could find your people, that's going away. And, you know, it's a very gentle erasure of, of that complexity that used to be New York. And it arrives on the, the feet of a coffee shop.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  All cities change with time. I understand that. But at certain points, you have to ask yourself whether those changes are better for the city or not. That is a kind of erasure.

• 17:05Ezra Klein?

  So I live in San Francisco these days. I'm very attentive to the book because I might move to New York over the next year. So I'm trying to think about New York.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Well, you're experiencing your own version of that in San Francisco already.

• 17:16Ezra Klein?

  Well, that's what I was going to say, and I recognize that me moving to New York is also maybe the problem you're pointing out. But San Francisco, I come from Southern California. I went to school up in Santa Cruz. San Francisco always meant something very specific to me. And it's a subculture and it's queer subcultures. And then I was out on these coasts for 15 years and I moved back here. And it's been really striking. It's been really striking. And one of the things you see with enormous clarity here, and I suspect there's a lot of it there, too, is just you really can't have the kind of ferment that makes cities great with really, really high housing costs.

• 17:57Ezra Klein?

  Like, low housing costs are like the platform upon which experimentation and new people and new ideas can be built. And high housing costs are a fortress around a city.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:10Ezra Klein?

  And it's been very strange. It's a much stranger feel being here than I had anticipated.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I only visit San Francisco, but my first impression of it, and my impressions of cities were the inspiration for the city we became. The fact that I would travel and I would go to a city and I'd step off the plane and immediately have a sense of whether this city was a place where I could be comfortable or whether it was a place where I needed to keep my trip as short as possible and get out of town before the city expressed its distaste for me in some way. But when I first visited San Francisco, probably 20 years ago, my immediate sense was, oh, I could live here. This is the kind of city where I'd be comfortable.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  It is an artsy city, a bookish city, a city that likes new things and new cultures, new tastes, new flavors. And I visited again just a few years ago, and yeah, I saw the same thing you saw. Huge cities, tent cities of homeless people, just kind of struggling to get by. The same people who, a few years before, would have been part of those subcultures and living in the apartments that were part of those subcultures, now can no longer afford to live in the city. And it is changing in a negative way. When you're losing the things that make that city a desirable place to live,

• 19:39Speaker 01

  then it is in some ways killing the spirit or the culture of a city. So.

• 19:44Ezra Klein?

  There's something very specific about the way your book thinks about gentrification. And I think that word can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But you just got at it where you're saying that it tries to raise it to a very certain standard. And it seems to me that the idea of the book is that there's this tension in cities at a certain point, probably at a certain point of wealth, between the desire for order and the appreciation of a certain kind of chaos, a certain ferment, when a lot of different kinds of people are living in very close proximity and having to accustom themselves to each other's lives. Can you talk a bit about that tension for you between the appeals of order and predictability

• 20:23Ezra Klein?

  and quiet and safety and those of chaos and creativity and ferment and all that comes with it?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Well, personally, I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there's nothing chaotic in diversity. There's nothing chaotic in a city with many different subcultures, all interacting and going about their business. That is an order of its own. It's just, you know, it looks different from the suburbs. And yeah, the tension that you feel of those with wealth and power trying to turn the city into a place that is more homogeneous, more stable from their perspective, but also more predictable and boring. We use gentrification because it's a word that flows better off the tongue.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  But I always think of it as like the suburbification of a city. Because that's really what they want. They want all of the comforts and conveniences and the quiet of the suburbs. But they've chosen to come to a place where people's conception of convenience and comfort is all very different. And a city inherently needs to be a place that can welcome all of those different perceptions of comfort. Sometimes they clash, you know, sometimes the person that needs the.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Self-care of a house party that bumps till 3 a.m. is going to bump up against the person with a one-year-old that needs the self-care of being able to put them to bed.

• 21:56Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes we were that person two years ago and now we're the other person.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Well, I mean, and that is part of city life, you know, that that ability to adapt, that ability to find ways to to make those things that appear to be in conflict work together. And sometimes it doesn't always work out. It's not always possible to, you know, we're not all like getting along here, but we're able to live together and that is part of city life. The attempt to reshape that city life and that complex chaos into a simpler chaos is deadly to cities, in my opinion. You know, and I don't blame the people who come from more, more, uh, flatly complex places.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  I don't blame them for trying to create what they are familiar and comfortable with. But on the other hand, I don't blame the people who live in the cities who say, I've been here, this is how it is here, from fighting back. And as long as they are still able to effectively fight back, then the city can thrive. When their voices get silenced, when they get pushed out of housing, when they get arrested and charged with felonies, when they attempt to make change from the grassroots level and the city does not respond, but someone else speaks to the manager and they're able to get change. When just the regular people stop having any power in a city, that city is, in my opinion, doomed.

• 23:28Ezra Klein?

  There's a connection in our politics that I think is pretty poisonous between this idea of, I keep coming to the word ferment, a kind of density in crime, which is, you know, built on ideas of New York in the 80s or frankly, DC where I lived for a long time in the 80s and 90s. And I mean, and it was even dangerous when I was living there. I mean, a lot of, you know, one of my roommates was shot. I mean, a number of other people I knew were beaten up on the streets. Like, the danger was not, and is not, for that matter, fake. And on the other hand, there are a lot of cities in the world that are not suburbanized, to use your language, which I think is useful, but also have quite low crime rates. And I think it's been the tying of these two things together that has turned the the

• 24:10Ezra Klein?

  politics around cities very complicated and and and very sad in a bunch of ways.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first and foremost, New York's crime rate is actually quite low. You know, I also spent a lot of time here in the eighties during the crack epidemic. And, you know, I hear people say all the time, well, it's so, crime is so bad now. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, like, when you actually look at the crime statistics, we're at like the bottom of a 20 year low, and we've had some blips. But, you know, that's the, the resumption of normal city crime does not make a crime wave. But there are people who have invested in, in financial interest in manipulating this perception. And you've, you've kind of touched on that, that it is tied to politics and the ability to gain power.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  It is tied to wealth and the ability to redistribute that wealth. There was a big push a few years ago to defund the NYPD. And then almost immediate backlash, we ended up with a, and a cop for mayor who immediately diverted funding from, you know, education into the NYPD. So, you know, I mean, there, there are those who stand to benefit financially from manipulating people's perceptions away from what is actually happening into what they want everybody to think is happening. And, you know, some of that is tied to the tension of the, the, the gentry class, the gentrifier class of them wanting everything more homogenized and, and less complexly chaotic.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  And one of the ways that they get that sense of control is to increase the number of police. They feel safer with police in, in their purview. So, you know, I mean, that's, it's tied to money and it's tied to power. It's not actually tied to the crime rate.

• 26:01Ezra Klein?

  Well, this was actually something that I found some tension in with the book. When, when you say there that it's not the case for the rest of us, and I was thinking about the Eric Adams election. And in the book, I think these ideas and, and these desires are very much, I mean, in a very literal way, tied to whiteness, to, to the woman in white, to a Trump like white candidate for mayor. But then in, in New York in 2021, I mean, as you say, a former NYPD policeman, Eric Adams, wins the, the mayoralty, but he does so, he's, he's a black man and he does so on a black and Hispanic coalition. White voters went for, for Catherine Garcia. And I'm curious how you experienced the, the election of Adams, because I think it, it sort of scrambles the politics of this in interesting ways.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  You can support whiteness and be not white. That's, it's a system. You know, there, there are a lot of people who kind of subscribe to the idea that, that talking about whiteness means that you were talking about white people. And that is not the case. Whiteness in and of itself as a concept is a homogenization of Europeans. European immigrants came to this country with their own languages, their own culture, their own foods. And in order for the powers that be in this country to forge a coalition that could push back against the very multicultural masses, the working classes. One of the things that happened was the creation of this identity that could suck in the Irish

• 27:31Speaker 01

  immigrants and the Italian immigrants and the wealthy uptown British descended people and things like that, and form them into a single coalition that could work back against all of those competing forces. And that homogenization is harmful to white folks. It is, you know, wouldn't you want to retain some aspect of your own home culture that your, your grandparents fought and struggled to kind of, you know, come to a place where they felt that they would be free to practice? So I treat whiteness in the book as a symbol of homogenization because that effectively is what the concept of whiteness is. You know, and I've encountered people who've read the books and are like, you know, NK

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Jameson doesn't like white people. No, I don't like whiteness. White people are people. I have great feelings about some of them. I have not great feelings about others because that's what happens when you're interacting with people. But when you are dealing with a, a socio-political construct that was designed to funnel wealth and power into one group and to disenfranchise other groups, that needs to be addressed. And, and, you know, I, I stuck tentacles on it and made it funny, but that's one of the things that I wanted to explore.

• 28:46Ezra Klein?

  Well, I definitely want to get to the tentacles. But I guess I want to push on this a little bit around the, the idea of whiteness as the, as a sort of useful badge for this because one thing in my head here is I grew up in a, in a community, so my father's a Brazilian immigrant. The community I grew up in is very, very heavily Asian immigrants and Hispanic immigrants. And I think at this point is, I think about equally Asian and, and white. And if you put Asian and Hispanic together, that's a majority. And something I really saw growing up there, I mean, and it's a suburban community, to your point about suburbanization, it's like the suburban community Irvine. But is that that desire for a very, very stark kind of safety, a very stark kind of predictability, it was very

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  strong among the immigrant families. Like, they weren't coming there. I don't know that I would call their politics whiteness, or to the extent that one would. I think then we're stretching the term in a weird way, that when we're starting to describe a politics that is immigrants from China and South Korea, and Black and Hispanic voters in Queens and Brooklyn, it just seems to me that calling it whiteness is slightly confusing whose politics we're actually ultimately talking about.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Hmm. It can be confusing if you continue to look at it in a granular, individualistic way. It makes perfect sense to me that immigrant communities, particularly people who are coming from conflict, people who are possibly descended from refugees, or are themselves refugees, would want safety. I mean, this is, everybody wants safety. I live in Bed-Stuy, which is a historically Black community that is rapidly being gentrified. But I talked to a lot of the old folks there who've been there for 20, 30, 40 years. And they tell me, you know, we used to just beg the police to show up in our neighborhood, because they wouldn't even bother. And, you know, it's suddenly strange to hear these young people saying

• 30:42Speaker 01

  that we don't want the police in our neighborhood. But when you look at the police as a system, when you look at the police on a more global level, and you see the ways in which historically, they've been deployed as strikebreakers, and as, you know, ways to sort of keep certain communities in line or destabilized. And they can keep those communities destabilized by not showing up, or by showing up and overpolicing.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It is the same thing. At the end of the day, it is a way to keep a block of citizens whose interests are probably different from those of the people in power. It is a way to keep that block of citizens destabilized and less powerful, that is serving whiteness. Now, you can call that also a class structure, too, because it's not serving all white people. Individually, it's serving specifically Those who are wealthy and have power, but it is designed to protect and enshrine that particular kind of power. And that doesn't mean that it isn't useful to other groups of people. It is 100% useful to a group of immigrants who have come from a chaotic

• 31:56Speaker 01

  background to find a place that is safer, that is quieter, that is healthier, whatever. There's nothing wrong with seeking that. You just need to understand that it's not going to be provided in a way that is meant to primarily help you. It is meant to primarily help other people. If you find it useful in the meantime, great, that could change. And that's the sort of more global understanding that people sometimes develop and sometimes not.

• 32:53Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that struck me about Panfilo, who's the Trump-like candidate in the book, is that he was in some ways significantly less ridiculous and explicit than Donald Trump is himself. And I've seen this actually a couple of times in post-Trump fiction, that there's something so...

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Post-Trump fiction, my god.

• 33:12Ezra Klein?

  Fictional about Trump as a character, like himself, not as a character in a book, but as a human being, that going beyond him becomes unbelievable because he's sort of unbelievable. And then, but before him, it's like you're not even able to fully get at the outrageousness of what we really saw. And I'm curious what it was like for you writing a character like that, like as Donald Trump is still a live force on the scene.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, Donald Trump is a badly written character, completely implausible, and you cannot include him in fiction in any way that makes sense and keep the story, you know, logical or working. The hilarity is that this book, The World We Make, probably would have been written a couple of years earlier if not for Trump, because my original plan for it was to write about New York being attacked by the president, who was a demagogue and who would, you know, frame New York as this den of iniquity that needed to be brought under heel and control.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And, as you know, that actually happened, and at that point, I basically had to redo the entire plot of the book because I got, my idea got stolen by Trump. So I didn't sue him. Anyway, but what it kind of boiled down to was that I didn't want to base this on Trump. I decided that after he stole my idea, I decided that I was just going to kind of keep things local, and I borrowed from several local New York politicians who are pretty well-known in this area, and Penfilo is an amalgamation of those New York-specific politicians, and they are less over-the-top than Trump.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  He's not really a New York politician, so that was where that came from.

• 35:05Ezra Klein?

  And talk to me a bit about the woman in white, because she, I think, reflects something else that's also present in a bunch of your books, which is, she emerges first in the first book. You experience her as a kind of personal villain, like a big boss. And there's something to that, but over time, and I don't think I'm spoiling too much, you understand that she is a system and also, in a way, a slave to a system. And that kind of idea of even the villains are systems seems to me to be true in a bunch of your different books. I'm curious how you think about that, that relationship between systems and the individuals who carry out their bidding.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  It's just a thing that I'm constantly sort of noodling on some level. As I was saying, with individual immigrants who who might basically espouse an agenda that in my mind I think of as serving whiteness, but it is an agenda that suits their needs, it is constantly a necessity in American politics to look not just at individuals. You cannot look even at single communities. You have to understand it as a politics of systems. Because in a lot of cases, you see people trying to work against all of that. You see individual politicians come in who are reformers and they they genuinely believe

• 36:29Speaker 01

  that they can do something against predatory policing or the school to prison pipeline. They genuinely believe that they can help and they try and they do make a dent. But then there's an immediate backlash or there's, you know, some sort of energy that they didn't anticipate. And in order to prepare for that backlash and those energies to to make real change, you need to understand that these systems defend themselves. And it's not even necessarily individual people or individual choices that are contributing to that. It's just the way things are designed to work. It's the way any society is designed to work. That's what creates stability.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  It's not a bad thing for the status quo to defend itself and to maintain itself. In some ways, that's one of the reasons why we were able to survive a Trump presidency because so many of these systems existed and they were so difficult to change that even he couldn't break them all. However, you do still need to understand that those systems are now vulnerable and shaky because the people who are trying to destabilize those systems get it. You know, whenever you see the ways in which the Republicans have like Strategically seeded activist judges throughout the entire US judiciary. And you start to see the reasons why they've done this.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  You know, that's a plan that they've been working on for years, and that's a thing that they've been putting in place for years. You're going to need to do that same granular level of change in order to fix it. And I think a lot of people think of these systems and these flaws and these problems as the result of individual people. Trump was a symptom of a greater problem. He was not the cause of it. And I think that if we are to fix and address all of these issues, we have to start thinking systemically about how to do so. And that means sometimes you may have to have some compassion for your enemies. That means sometimes you have to recognize that if the city has elected a black man, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's not serving a white supremacist goal.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  You know, these things are complicated.

• 38:43Ezra Klein?

  I think a pretty profound question that that raises is how do you decide when you want to say people are acting of their own volition, right? A voter is right about what they want. A person is carrying out their role in society because it is a role they believe in. And when we ascribe them their actions to a system? Because it also occurs to me that in the same way that ascribing people's actions to a system can in some cases be compassionate, you're saying that this is not only on you. It can also be a way, pretty if we do it more to some than others, a way of accusing others of not truly knowing their motivations and so not truly being actors whose integrity of their actions does not carry the weight it otherwise would.

• 39:28Ezra Klein?

  Their voice doesn't get as much validity to speak for itself.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  I mean, if that is how it's coming across in my fiction, then I've done something wrong. What I've always tried to do, and compassion is not the word I like to use. I prefer empathy. Empathy is not necessarily sympathy. Empathy is understanding why a thing happens, or understanding why kind of all the factors that go into a person making a choice, in the way that that person, you know, you understand it as that person would understand it, doesn't mean that they are absolved of the consequences of that choice. I do not believe in treating people as irresponsible for their actions. I want to hold them accountable for the choices that they make. And I try to insert into my fiction,

• 40:16Speaker 01

  I try to make it visible that they've made a choice, that this choice was influenced by X, Y, and Z factors, and that they probably felt like they didn't have a choice, but they still made a choice.

• 40:28Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that I think is true. And I actually meant this from the other direction. I don't think you absolve people of what they do on behalf of systems at all. I think you're actually very attentive to that. I actually was noticing, as we were talking about this, though, that, for instance, you were saying a minute ago, that many of the voters who voted for Eric Adams are voting on behalf of an agenda that was not their own. But the sort of folks on the other side, I don't think get characterized as servants of a kind of counter system, that I think there's more individuality given to, say, the other avatars of New York, as opposed to the panfilo voter. And so there's actually a way in which, I don't think it absolves them, but I think that there's a sense that the systems are

• 41:07Ezra Klein?

  working in the malign direction. But sometimes the people working on the side of light are more individuals whose volition is more their own.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Uh, not necessarily. I am definitely biased, you know, every person is. And there's definitely one way of dealing with the world that is my way of dealing with the world. And the fact that I'm willing to, you know, acknowledge that other ways of viewing the world are, to those people, equally valid, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that I don't agree with, you know, my own perception. It's just that, you know, I can understand them and still disagree with them. But what it really boils down to with Adams is those same black neighborhoods crave stability, same as those immigrant communities do. Many of the people who voted for Adams

• 41:58Speaker 01

  remember the old days, which weren't that old. When you're talking about a 60-year-old black woman who managed to buy a brownstone after working for the MTA for 30 years and retiring with decent money. To her, she wants the stability of the borough president that she knows, the face that she finds familiar, the person who helped her auntie three blocks over when her aunt had a problem with the water department. Those individual choices and that individual centering of the world, those people are voting in their own interests. I am not trying to say that they are serving the interests of white supremacy by doing

• 42:41Speaker 01

  so. They are choosing to serve their own interests, obviously. But when you are voting for a candidate who was a cop and who is very committed to the idea of making sure that the cops have much more money, much more power, you've chosen a double-edged sword. You've chosen stability, but it's going to take a different form from what you think it will. You've chosen something that feels familiar and comfortable, but it may not necessarily come back to help you. It may come back to bite you on the ass. So I just want to explore that, that tension that exists on an individual level as well as a systemic level.

• 43:21Ezra Klein?

  So one layer of the book is systems, and another layer of the book, in a way that I think is really striking for the errors in which these books came out, is this idea of organisms, and particularly cities as organisms. And I remember reading the first book, The City We Became, right as the pandemic hit. And so, of course, it was written before the pandemic hit. But that idea that, under threat, cities, which are composed of all these individual peoples, all of a sudden begin operating at moments of crisis as something closer to a unit, something closer to an organism, something closer to one thing. It felt really on.

• 44:02Ezra Klein?

  Because particularly cities at that moment, anywhere that was really dense, we all had to act as one. We all, you know, had to either not go out, you know, or go out a lot less. Obviously, there are essential workers and people breaking the rules, or everybody would get really, really sick. And I'm curious about how that must have felt, having spent a long time thinking about, at a metaphorical level, how a city would turn into a more singular organism during a crisis, and then watching cities around the world have to all of a sudden develop closer to singular organisms, although different ones, during a crisis.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I guess my own perception of living systems is that they are collections of systems. The human body is a collection of systems. I have a doctor friend that sort of talks about the body as pumps and pipes. So if you think of the body as, you know, an individual organism as a collection of, you know, your circulatory system and your nervous system and da, da, da, da, da. And yeah, they all have to interact in more or less healthy and regular ways for your body to continue operating. A city is no different. We have political systems. We've got infrastructure. We've got various individual groups of people

• 45:22Speaker 01

  that have competing needs, and they do have to work together for that city to function. So that's just how I tend to depict large, complex systems of every kind as possibly living. It's probably reflecting my own philosophy about the universe as a whole. I suspect the universe might be alive, too, but that's a longer conversation.

• 45:44Ezra Klein?

  A panpsychic?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I don't know what to call it. I just believe very much in Carl Sagan's understanding of the world, which is just that people tend to think of themselves as small and unimportant, maybe super important, but just within the small sphere of their own existence. But we are ultimately born of the hearts of exploding stars. We are all made of star stuff. And holding both understandings in my head at the same time tends to affect how I view just reality as a whole. I think of it as a complex and breathing, pumping...

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Changing thing. And I think that that just kind of comes through in my writing sometimes.

• 47:04Ezra Klein?

  When we last spoke, we talked about how you build worlds and then introduce a shock, something that that changes them and watch how the system responds. I mean, our world just went through that, is going through that, actually, still to a large degree, but in an unusually clarified way. I mean, there are always a lot of shocks happening, but COVID was this global shock. You could really watch. How did the system respond differently or interestingly to what you thought? How did, how did watching the world get hit by that shock change your model of our societies?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  It didn't. What it did show me was that certain forces with a great deal of power have also noticed the systemic nature of reality and are weaponizing that in ways that maybe, maybe aren't new, but which we haven't been quite as used to, I guess. I'm being very global. Case in point, in New York, for quite some time after the start of the COVID pandemic, there was the 7 p.m. clap, where people go up on the rooftops or out on their fire escapes and bang pots or whatever to signal their support for healthcare professionals.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  A year and a half later, healthcare professionals are getting attacked in hospitals by people who've been deluged with counter energy, counter media, basically telling them that the healthcare professionals are their enemies, effectively, for trying to immunize them, for trying to teach them best practices to protect themselves. And that did not happen organically. You know, we've already seen some evidence of quote unquote grassroots movements that have been backed and financed by large groups. And of course, a number of the politicians spouting some of that rhetoric are also backed by some of those same groups. So what I think is, is standing out to me is that we're not really seeing

• 49:07Speaker 01

  organic change happen in our society right now. One of the ways that the status quo is defending itself is by trying to make itself seem bigger, trying to make itself seem more reasonable, louder, whatever, and to drown out the voices that are rightly suggesting change.

• 49:27Ezra Klein?

  I think this is interesting, and I want to think about it for a minute because I don't want to say there's no such thing as organic change. But I think that when I look at change on both sides, including the 7pm clap, which I don't know its exact origins, but at a certain point was promoted officially by a lot of different players. We had something like that here, too, which I loved. It was beautiful. But I wonder when we say change is organic versus not, because, you know, at the same time, the people who wanted to see a lot of change in the pandemic, and I was frankly, one of them, and who hoped that there was suddenly a wide opening. But that had institutions and political figures and money and so on behind it, too. I mean, the people arguing for a moment of radical

• 50:11Ezra Klein?

  reorientation, the number of like, big think tanks and top politicians and just like, it felt to me like for 18 months to two years, everybody was like, and now more than ever, my agenda. And it's not that that wasn't organic. I mean, they were real about it, right? When AOC wanted to say that, you know, this was an opportunity for something different. I mean, she believes what she believes organically. It's not, this is no ascription of sinister intent. But I do wonder about sort of seeing one side as organic and the other side as anything less. I mean, I sort of think of reactionary dimensions of our society as as organic as the revolutionary dimensions of our society. And I'm curious if you see that differently.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I do not see the reactionary elements of our society as organic. What I see these days is voices being amplified, particularly on like, say, social media. It's turned out over the last few years, a lot of the sort of public freakouts that have happened over various popular media, you know, black people in Star Wars, for example.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  It's turned out that a lot of the sort of voices speaking out against that were bots programmed and purchased by, you know, various forces that wanted to elevate their own voices. Those reactionary voices have always existed in our society. Those individual voices are not, I'm not saying that there's anything inorganic about those. What is inorganic is the amplification of those voices. They are amplifying, in this particular case, minority voice. And so, you know, it's important to point that out. One of the things that the right wing in this country in general has always done is sort of inflate its own numbers. That's not really a new thing, but the methods and mechanisms by which they are doing it

• 52:02Speaker 01

  are a little different right now. And again, in order to get control of or resist the system or this series of systems, we need to understand it and we also need to think systemically.

• 52:13Ezra Klein?

  Tell me more about that idea of understanding it. When you say that there's a process of change, that those who want to see change, you need to better understand, what's your model of change?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I was raised, not raised, but I was trained as a psychologist. And there are several models of change that kind of inform my thinking. The model of change that Lewin, I believe, used. Basically, kind of talks about the fact that there's a series of stages that you go through. You have a complacent stage, then that complacency gets shaken up by either some incident or some people. And then, you know, and this is a huge paraphrase. And then the destabilized system does what it can to restabilize itself. And that's been the model that I've used to kind of try and view political changes and so forth that have happened over the last few years.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  But that's also just my own observations. When the current model of workers going off to work, commuting on their own dime for sometimes very long distances to go into an office and sit there and not necessarily be more productive than they would have been at home. And when that current model got challenged by the pandemic, we immediately began seeing pushback against the natural complaints of workers who've been exposed to a new way of doing things and may want to continue doing that new way of doing things. We're seeing the system try and restabilize itself by pulling people back into what used to be. I don't blame those people for trying to push back.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, a large corporation that has spent a great deal of money on New York City real estate is not going to want to just leave that real estate, leave, you know, sitting empty. They want that real estate to be used. I get that. But when it short circuits a natural conversation that was already having because they've amplified their voice by buying articles in various newspapers or by buying politicians who can push back against the natural sort of grassroots push to make change. I just think that needs to be noted.

• 54:25Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about this book's relationship with H.P. Lovecraft.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think of it as a single story. Just to note, the duology is the first and second part of a single whole. There's less direct address of Lovecraft in the world we make, but the reaction is still there. I will say that I consider the book to be inspired by Lovecraft. In the sense of his way of viewing New York City, as evidenced in some of his letters and some of his fiction, like the horror at Red Hook. His view of New York City as an organism populated by infectious disease agents, which are people of color.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  He had an issue with the Portuguese, you know, like just people he didn't like. You know, in his mind, New York was this terrible place teeming with this infestation that was gradually going to destroy it. I see New York in a very similar way, I believe. You know, we can't read his mind. But I also look around New York and I also see New York as being populated and teeming with large numbers of people who are contributing to making it the organism that it is. The only difference is I see that as a good thing. You know, I don't walk through Chinatown and think the degenerate people around me

• 55:51Speaker 01

  who are subhuman and don't have souls, as he did. I walk around and I see people. I see some of them are nice to me and some of them are not nice to me and some of them are indifferent to me and I'm indifferent to most of them and that's how it is. And I just see that as, as life and he saw it as a threat. So, you know, it's inspired by him, but it's also speaking back to him and just saying that, you know, his perspective, his way of, of viewing the world as populated by threats. I decided to counter that by viewing the world as populated by energy, by people who are making the world interesting and stronger, making the city a place of multiple languages,

• 56:36Speaker 01

  where, where new slangs get invented and new dances get invented, new cuisines get invented. Because when you have large groups of people interacting like that, that's what happens. I see it as an engine of creativity and he saw it as death.

• 56:53Ezra Klein?

  You won a Hugo Award this year for your Green Lantern series. There's a reference to the Avengers in the world we make. And I was thinking about that because the books together, the story together, it really feels, in a cool way, I thought, as craft, like a comic book. And in particular, it's unbelievably visual in a way that almost no other book I can remember reading is. I mean, you can really see it.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 57:17Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious how much writing in comics or reading comics, because I know you're a comics fan, has influenced that.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, I, when I was in college, I was a huge X-Men fan. I had to stop in college because I was a poor college student. And that was around the time when storylines started ranging across six different books. And I just couldn't afford to keep up. I hear a sigh of familiarity there. But so, you know, obviously, I grew up on X-Men and all of that stuff. And, you know, there's some obvious kind of me pushing back against a lot of the ways in which those books contended with issues of race on an allegorical level. You know, the treatment of the mutants as an allegory for black people or an allegory for oppressed groups in general was not handled in the best way.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  And I had some feelings about that. And that has shown up in my writing in a lot of different ways. But, you know, I would actually say that the biggest influence on this particular series, The Great Cities, would probably be more Japanese manga than American. Because I just kind of mentally envisioned the Five Boroughs of New York City as a giant robot, more like Voltron than anything else. And I wanted to see the Five Boroughs form like Voltron, you know, with New York as the head and fight a giant monster. That's really what it kind of came down to. I'm as influenced by silliness as I am by more serious topics.

• 58:49Ezra Klein?

  If you're somebody who's not read much manga, which I am, I've been a comic books fan for a long time, but I've not read much manga, what should people read?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, I haven't read anything recent, but some of my all time overall favorites would be Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa, if I'm not mangling her name. Fullmetal Alchemist is great at sort of exploring and skewering systems and it's actually kind of inspired by European history and the whole Nazis versus the Western Europe conflict and religious conflict and ethnic conflict, a whole bunch of other things. But it is deep, it is fun, and I highly, highly recommend that one.

• 59:38Ezra Klein?

  I know you've done a lot of work thinking about space. I know you've attended workshops with NASA and it's something that you've had an interest in. I think it's been a really big couple of years with space. There's been a lot of talk of UFOs, with the amazing asteroid collision that NASA just managed to pull off. There are pictures from the new telescopes that are just remarkable. I'm curious how that is playing into what you're thinking about the world. I assume you're following it. What's shaking loose for you there?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  It is, I will just say that my next idea, I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but the new thing that I am working on is more space oriented, I'll just say.

• 1:00:22Ezra Klein?

  I know you do a lot of travel for research for your books and I know you've done a fair amount of disaster travel. Are there places you're going to go for this one? Are there things you want to look at?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't narrowed down. I'm at the super earliest beginning stages of an idea for this one. I have jotted down exactly five sentences for it at this point. But I can kind of tell already that I'm going to need to do a lot more historical research into a particular figure and more theoretical physics, probably. It's going to be a far future. I don't even want to call it a space opera. Yeah.

• 1:01:07Ezra Klein?

  Well, then let me ask always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Well, let's go with Fullmetal Alchemist for my first one. I have not been reading a lot of new fiction. The pandemic's effect on me was that for a while I just stopped reading. I just, I don't know what it was, you know, and I hear a lot of people say that they've responded with either their own struggles to read, or they suddenly became like voracious readers during the pandemic. So it is starting to fade, though, and what I've been doing is reading a lot of older material that I knew I loved and just kind of rereading it, refreshing myself on it, learning new things from it. So off the top of my head, I've been doing a lot of nonfiction as usual.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  I've been rereading a friend of mine's novel, but also just a very good novel called Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine. It is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world and focusing on a circus of mechanical and partially mechanical people and just kind of exploring their lives and their interactions with this world. Beautifully written, just haunting prose.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Also recently read, I've been making room for books by authors that I genuinely love on a regular basis, and Martha Wells is consistently one of my favorite authors. She's got a new book coming called The Witch King that I absolutely loved, should be out in a few months or so. And I've been rereading, possibly because the book is coming out and I knew I was going to need to do some promotional stuff for it, but I've been rereading Jane Jacobs', The Death and Life of American Cities, which is nonfiction. It's a systemic look at how cities function and why city design and its actual application

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  is often detrimental to the goals that city planners have in mind. So it's just a really interesting way of reconsidering how cities operate and ways in which we might improve them with not a lot of money spent, but with a lot of changes to assumptions and misconceptions and so on.

• 1:03:27Ezra Klein?

  Nora Jemison, thank you very much.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:03:39Ezra Klein?

  The Azure Clutch was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Rojai Karma. Our researcher is Emefa Agawu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Mary March Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrera. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, and Jesse Bordwin.