If it is indeed true, I’m shocked, not in a good way. People of color have always been here. Women have always been here. And for a genre that supposedly prides itself on, to quote Gene Roddenberry, infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and being more progressive than the rest of the world, though there are some that don’t think we should be, for a genre that prides itself on that to have never given the best-novel award to another black person, that’s just bizarre. It’s also indicative of a general tendency in literature. We tell ourselves we’re more progressive, we’re more futurist, we’re more forward thinking, and that’s just not true. If we don’t make the same effort at antiracist and anti-oppressive thought, we’re not going to be any better about it than anybody else, and I’m glad that this is changing.

Your award seems like a repudiation of the Sad Puppies, a contingent of Hugo voters that has argued that the awards were getting too politically correct and multicultural, at the expense of more traditional sci-fi, like military sci-fi and space operas. Do you think that fight is over now?

There are people who want to frame this as an epic, atavistic struggle between good and evil, but this is America, this is the way America has always worked. It is nice to have my work recognized, and heartening to find that this book that I frankly didn’t think was good — I came very close to wanting to quit this book and I was convinced that nobody would buy it and it would destroy my career. And it’s nice to find out that this thing that I thought was too daring, too strange, too esoteric to my own interests, actually does suit the interests of quite a few people.

Where did the idea for “The Fifth Season” come from?

The idea for the core of the story, a society of disaster preppers who have the ability to stop and start earthquakes, that came to me from a dream. I dreamed of a woman walking toward me with this furious look on her face and a mountain floating along behind her, and I remember being convinced in the dream that this woman was [mad] at me and she was going to throw the mountain at me if I didn’t figure out why she was angry. From there I came up with a world where people might need the ability to control seismic energy in ways that transcend the laws of physics.

“The Fifth Season” takes place on a planet unlike ours and features a mutant race with the ability to control nature, and it addresses very real issues like oppression and climate change. Why does fantasy allow you to do as a writer that realism can’t?

I tend to write society as I see and understand it. My first series, the “Inheritance” trilogy, in the first book you were dealing with a woman of color from an impoverished culture, being brought up among wealthy, privileged white people and having to cope and perform in ways that she has not been raised to do, and that was obviously drawn from some personal experiences. I do that in everything — explorations of power, identity and belonging. In the case of “The Fifth Season,” that’s the first time I went macro scale with it. Rather than talking about individual interactions within discriminatory settings, I decided to focus on an oppressive society at the macro scale and what that society does to individuals.