The Killing Moon (Dreamblood) (48 page)

Nodding in satisfaction, Sunandi left the Hetawa and went forth to do her part.

My thanks here are mostly for resources rather than people, but only because the list of people to thank would be another book in itself.

The list of helpful resources would be, too, but I’ll single out a few for particular note. First is
Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia
by Richard Cavendish, a coffee-table book that attempted the impossible—a survey of all the world’s myth systems. It had some notable problems of cultural bias and the usual problems of any broad survey, but it was helpful in one way: when I first read it, I began to see the common structure underlying most human cosmogonies. I used this common structure, as I did in the Inheritance Trilogy, to create the gods of Kisua and Gujaareh.

Also,
On Dreams
by Sigmund Freud, and
The Red Book
, by Carl Gustav Jung. The latter I was able to see “in person” at last thanks to a lovely exhibit at the Rubin Museum in New York. Early psychoanalysts got a lot of things wrong in their studies of human nature, but in their partly spiritual, partly intellectual quest to understand their fellow human beings, I got a sense of
how a faith can be born. To some degree, Gujaareh’s founder Inunru—er, sans mass murder and megalomania—is inspired by them.

Also, the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian and Nubian collection. The British Museum’s collection is much bigger and more impressive, but I don’t live in London, and that museum was too crowded and anxiously guarded to allow the hours of close study I needed. No quick visit can give you a real sense of the day-to-day life of ancient city-dwellers: how they combed their hair, how they cleaned their teeth, how they traveled from home to work, how they gossiped about that guy down the street who looked at them crosswise and didja hear he worships
that
god? In Brooklyn nobody cares if you sit in one place and stare at something for hours, as long as you don’t then get up and shoot somebody.

Oh, and I’ll allow myself one bit of people-thanks: to my first writing group, the BRAWLers, who were the Boston Area Writers’ Group until we decided we needed better branding. You guys tore this book apart and put it back together better, and you loved it and cheered for it before anyone else. (No, Jennifer, they did not have sex.) Thank you.

N. K. Jemisin

N. K. J
EMISIN
is a career counselor, political blogger, and would-be gourmand living in New York City. She’s been writing since the age of ten, although her early works will never see the light of day. Find out more about the author at
www.nkjemisin.com
.

So my editor has asked me to interview myself, for the benefit of my readers. Gotta admit, that’s a new one. I kind of like the idea, in principle: now I have the opportunity to ask myself questions I find interesting, while avoiding all those incredibly annoying questions interviewers always seem to ask, like “Where do you get your ideas?” And I can even be rude to myself! Hey, this is kinda cool. So here goes.

Where did you get your—

SLAP.
See, this is fun already!

Ow. So, the land of Gujaareh. Why’d you pattern it after ancient Egypt?

I’ve always been fascinated by ancient empires in general, but particularly those that have remained mysterious to—or been ignored by—“Western” historians and scientists. Egypt’s not really the worst of these, but that was part of the reason I chose it: because there is so much scholarship already, and there are so many archaeological and artistic finds to be explored. That made research easier.

But beyond that, I was fascinated by Egyptian magic,
which seems to have been a seamless blend of the religious and medical disciplines for them. I was surprised to learn a few years back that the “four humors” philosophy of medicine was employed there, because I’d always been taught that this was something that came from the Greeks. (But then, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome all did a lot of cross-pollination.) That made me wonder what other surprises there might be in the study of ancient Egyptian lore, so I started exploring further. And around that time, I discovered a new branch of modern science that seemed to dovetail nicely with the Egyptian stuff: psychodynamic theory.

Oh, so
that’s
what possessed you to create a magic system based on Freudian dream theory and Egyptian medicine. Because that stuff’s crazy.

Well, no. (And Freud would say there is no “crazy.”) Modern medicine recognizes the power of the subconscious mind. You’ve heard of the placebo effect—I know you have because you’re me—in which people who are given a sugar pill (or something else that has no medicinal content) often respond to treatment just as well as people receiving actual medicine. Sometimes their recovery is nothing short of miraculous, and they get better because they
believe
they should be better. The power of the mind to affect the body is something that’s been understood, and exploited, since ancient times. It’s not a far stretch from there to the idea that directed, lucid dreaming might somehow be used to harness the placebo effect. This is something Jung openly contemplated and explored through a religious context, in particular the Hindu mandala… but I digress.

So that’s the religious connection. Okay, admit it; you’re secretly trying to proselytize for Hinduism!

No, that’s stupid. I know diddlysquat about Hinduism, beyond what I’ve read in a few books. And anyway, I’m not Hindu.

No?

Nope.

But you mentioned a Hindu influence with the Inheritance Trilogy.

Yeah, and Zoroastrianism, and Greco-Roman and Norse mythology, and American Indian trickster tales, and the loa of vodoun, and the Christian Holy Trinity. I always find it interesting how people pick one thing out of a list of influences to fixate on. I gave a list because they
all
matter.

Dammit.

That’s not a question.

Okay, then are you proselytizing for
something
? Because you keep exploring religion in your writing, and that has to mean something.

Well, I consider myself an agnostic—not in the sense of doubting the existence of God, but in the sense of doubting the capability of any human religion to encompass the divine. More specifically I think religion alone is
not enough
to encompass the divine. Religion is a handy guide to living, assuming you’re still living in the society that existed at the time of the religion’s founding. It’s useful for unifying and motivating a population. But to understand ourselves and the universe, we need to explore other schools of thought—the
complexity of the human consciousness, the limits of science, and more. I believe we will eventually need to interact with other intelligent entities, and exchange ideas. And we need to be wary of the ways in which letting others do this thinking and learning
for
us can come back to bite us on the ass. So if there’s any one religious theme in my work, it’s that.

Lolwut?

Look, just write it down.

Okay, but… Ina-Karekh—the Gujaareen “land of dreams.” Is that meant to represent the Christian Heaven? With the shadowlands as Hell?

Nope. Ina-Karekh is based on Jung’s collective unconscious. And the method used to enter it is rooted in Egyptian belief—the separation of the ka, the life-energy of the soul, from the ba, the physical embodiment of the soul, wherein the ka is contained in various organs and on its own might have trouble traveling into other planes of existence—

Yeah, whatever, let’s move on to something juicier. The Gatherers are all gay, right? They’re totally gay.

There is no “gay” in Gujaareh. In Gujaareen society, people love whom they love. But if we used modern American labels on any of them, Nijiri would be gay.

And the rest?

They’re harder to categorize. Most Gujaareen are opportunistic: they’ll happily schtupp anyone they’re attracted to, so we’d call them all bi. But that label doesn’t really fit, because being bisexual is about more than whom you sleep with. Anyway, Ehiru was heterosexual before he became a
Gatherer—that changes them in more ways than just the spiritual. As it is, all Gatherers are closer to asexual.

Is everybody in these books African?

No. It’s not Earth. There’s no Africa.

You know what I mean. Are they all black?

Some are. Some are sort of reddish-or yellowy-brown, and some are tan with freckles, and some are white enough that they don’t go outside at noon. I know what you’re getting at, though. Gujaareh is modeled on ancient Egypt. (And Kisua is modeled on ancient Nubia.) Egypt, despite what my middle school geography textbook tried to tell me, is in Africa; ergo, its people are African. But “African” has no one set look, any more than “Asian” or “European” does. Also, Egypt was the crossroads of trade for that side of the planet in its day. Traders from what would become China, the Persian Empire, Greece, the Roman Empire, the Malian Empire, the Vikings, the Nubians—they all passed through Egypt’s ports. Everything we know of ancient Egypt, from modern genetic studies of mummies to their own art, suggests it was a multicultural, multilingual, multiracial society. So that’s what I’ve tried to depict here.

You could’ve done this story in a medieval European setting.

That’s not a question, and no, I couldn’t have. For one thing, the magic system is rooted in ancient Egyptian science and medicine, and medicine in medieval Europe was a completely different animal—

WHY DO YOU HATE MEDIEVAL EUROPE?!?!?!!?!

Uh, could you calm down? We need to keep our blood pressure in the healthy range.

Hater.

::sigh:: Look, I don’t have a problem with medieval Europe. I have a problem with modern fantasy’s
fetishization
of medieval Europe; that’s different. So many fantasy writers and fans simplify the social structure of the period, monotonize the cultural interactions, treat conflicts as binaries instead of the complicated dynamic tapestry they actually were. They’re not doing medieval Europe, they’re doing Simplistic British Isles Fantasy Full of Lots of Guys with Swords And Not Much Else. Not all medieval European fantasy does this, of course—but enough does that frankly, they’ve turned me off the setting. I might tackle unsimplified medieval Europe myself someday… but honestly, I doubt it. I loved the challenge of writing the Dreamblood books, but I’ve learned that I prefer creating my own worlds to emulating reality. World-building from scratch is easier.