On this selected short, a master of speculative fiction has curated a collection of imaginary worlds.

I'm Meg Walitzer, happy to share the stage with NK Jemison, as she considers sentient yogurt,

an app with attitude, and a perfect world.

Yeah, dream on. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

One of the strengths of fantasy is that it allows the writer to create imaginary worlds,

mirrors of our own, but shaped to raise interesting questions about society, technology,

and individual will. This can be done playfully but also powerfully. And few do

this better than celebrated writer N. K. Jemison. She uses alternate worlds and

realities to confront racism and abuses of power and to imagine a future without them. She's done this in works including The Great Cities, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and in in Short Story Collections, including How Long Till Black Future Month.

We at Shorts have been friends and fans of Jemison's brave and compelling work for quite a while,

and were eager to have her share her own tastes in a genre she has helped to

redefine. She helped us select all three of the stories on this program. They were

part of a live evening at Symphony Space that she hosted.

Here is NK Jemison speaking from the stage at our home at Symphony Space about the power of writing. lighting.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Selected Shorts.

I'm your host for tonight, NK Jemison, you can call me Nora.

We're having this evening at a moment when it feels like the world is ending. But as I tell my

writing students, the world has always been ending somewhere for someone. That's

what the writing is for to get us through.

Writing is an act of resistance against all of those who try to tell you that there is no way

forward, that every change is the last one.

It's no coincidence that the stories you'll hear tonight are

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