In The People Beneath the Clouds, N. K. Jemisin reflects on the science fiction that shaped her imagination—and the absence she began noticing within those imagined futures.
Remembering The Jetsons, one of her childhood favorites, Jemisin asks a deceptively simple question: where were the Black people? Her answer becomes a provocative jumping-off point for examining representation in science fiction and what supposedly utopian visions of the future can reveal about the culture that created them.
The People Beneath the Clouds is where HBG Films began.
The original assignment was to create promotional content around N. K. Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month? During our interview, I asked how she arrived at the book’s title. Her answer led somewhere unexpected—from her science-fiction influences to a childhood realization that there were no Black people in The Jetsons, and her theory about where they might actually be living in that world.
I knew immediately there was a larger story there.
I developed the interview into a standalone short film about race, representation and whose futures get imagined in science fiction. I created the visual language for the piece and, for its final sequence, drew and animated an original satirical world inspired by the visual vocabulary of mid-century futuristic cartoons—imagining the Black population Jemisin described living beneath the gleaming city in the clouds.
That experience became the model for HBG Films: listening beyond the promotional interview, recognizing the larger story when it appeared, and building an original film around it.
