One had dark-as-night hair that contained a starry cosmos of infinite depth the other, in a child’s body, manipulated planets like toys. The inspiration for her début novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” (2010), was a dream vision of two gods. Her tendency is to interrogate what she sees with if/then questions, until her field of vision widens enough for her to glimpse a landscape that can hold a narrative. She does not so much mine them for insight as treat them as portals to hidden worlds. Jemisin’s writing process often begins with dreams: imagery vivid enough to hang on into wakefulness. I needed to build a world that would explain her.” That’s a person who has been through so much shit that she has been pushed into becoming a leader. “She was angry in a slow burn, with the kind of anger that is righteous, enough to change a planet. “I need to know how that person became who she is-a woman so angry that she was willing to move mountains,” she told me. Jemisin awoke in a sweat and jotted down what she had seen. Jemisin did not know how she had triggered the woman’s fury, but she believed that, if she did not ameliorate it quickly, the woman would hurl the smoldering massif at her. She was glaring down at Jemisin and radiating anger.

Standing before the formation was a black woman in her mid-forties, with dreadlocks, who appeared to be holding the volcano aloft with her mind.

“It was a chunk of rock shaped like a volcanic cone-a cone-shaped smoking mountain,” she recalled. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her.

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin