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jcsbimp01On June 3, 2020, the day after my 63rd birthday, I began reading one of my gifts: a boxed set of three softcover volumes of The Broken Earth, a science-fantasy trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. The volumes are, in order, "The Fifth Season," "The Obelisk Gate," and "The Stone Sky." I just completed reading "The Stone Sky" within the last half-hour. Three books in less than three weeks is a reading rate record for me, but IT HAS BEEN SO RUSTING WORTH IT!
This is among the best set of books I have ever read, regardless of category: English-language work, fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, literary fiction. Often after I have really enjoyed a book, trilogy, movie, or other form of narrative entertainment, I will sling superlatives carelessly in my enthusiasm. This time, I feel the superlatives and my enthusiasm are appropriate.
Jemisin has put masterful writing together with an easy (but not too easy) storytelling style, and has woven a world of characters, situations, and powers from her own fertile imagination, but also from, and strongly guided by, her life experience as a Black woman in New York City. That she has done this in a setting that is a far-futuristic near-parallel-Earth that is tectonically and thus meteorologically unstable, pierced to its heart by its intelligent inhabitants, and driven to revenge against those inhabitants (the aforementioned instability is the product of Earth's anger directed at those creatures, but also of what they've done to earn that anger) simply makes this more magical, marvelous, and, most importantly, meaningful. She doesn't give away answers flatly, much of the time: She knows how to immerse you in the work so that you can conclude those answers from the words, sentences, descriptions she does use. I was so struck by her style that I felt I needed to do some side-reading - as well as making conversation with my Facebook friends during pandemic quarantine - about just what narrative style is and what it can do. I am so happy for this Master Class Refresher Course in it. Such good storytelling. I'd love to have heard this whole adventure told over a campfire. And in a strange way, it felt like it was.
The subject of enslavement is a big plot driver here, but so is the idea of community. What makes a person a person is just as central a question as the many mysteries with which Jemisin has sowed her fictional world. She deals with the familiar subjects head-on, peppers her characters' language with familiar idiom, and then turns around and displays such inventions as orogeny, Stone Eaters, and geomestry. All of this is done so flawlessly and believably that the reader can easily imagine 256 huge obelisks of different kinds of crystal floating in Evil Earth's atmosphere at once. The Stillness is a fictional land to which I know I'll long to return someday.
Long-form fiction, not limited to sci/fi fantasy, is a great love of mine from the days between high school and college years when I would sit in my family's non-air-conditioned house in Northwest Georgia (I'm 40 minutes away from that house now; it's being beautifully renovated by my sister and her husband, and my daughter from my first marriage lives down the block from them) and read "Dune," "Gone With The Wind," and James Joyce's "Ulysses". Jemisin makes me think of some of the greats I've read: Donaldson's "Covenant" series as well as Herbert's work. Zenna Henderson's tales of The People.
The Broken Earth stands among these great books. As I see it now, in so many ways, this trilogy towers over them.
This is among the best set of books I have ever read, regardless of category: English-language work, fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, literary fiction. Often after I have really enjoyed a book, trilogy, movie, or other form of narrative entertainment, I will sling superlatives carelessly in my enthusiasm. This time, I feel the superlatives and my enthusiasm are appropriate.
Jemisin has put masterful writing together with an easy (but not too easy) storytelling style, and has woven a world of characters, situations, and powers from her own fertile imagination, but also from, and strongly guided by, her life experience as a Black woman in New York City. That she has done this in a setting that is a far-futuristic near-parallel-Earth that is tectonically and thus meteorologically unstable, pierced to its heart by its intelligent inhabitants, and driven to revenge against those inhabitants (the aforementioned instability is the product of Earth's anger directed at those creatures, but also of what they've done to earn that anger) simply makes this more magical, marvelous, and, most importantly, meaningful. She doesn't give away answers flatly, much of the time: She knows how to immerse you in the work so that you can conclude those answers from the words, sentences, descriptions she does use. I was so struck by her style that I felt I needed to do some side-reading - as well as making conversation with my Facebook friends during pandemic quarantine - about just what narrative style is and what it can do. I am so happy for this Master Class Refresher Course in it. Such good storytelling. I'd love to have heard this whole adventure told over a campfire. And in a strange way, it felt like it was.
The subject of enslavement is a big plot driver here, but so is the idea of community. What makes a person a person is just as central a question as the many mysteries with which Jemisin has sowed her fictional world. She deals with the familiar subjects head-on, peppers her characters' language with familiar idiom, and then turns around and displays such inventions as orogeny, Stone Eaters, and geomestry. All of this is done so flawlessly and believably that the reader can easily imagine 256 huge obelisks of different kinds of crystal floating in Evil Earth's atmosphere at once. The Stillness is a fictional land to which I know I'll long to return someday.
Long-form fiction, not limited to sci/fi fantasy, is a great love of mine from the days between high school and college years when I would sit in my family's non-air-conditioned house in Northwest Georgia (I'm 40 minutes away from that house now; it's being beautifully renovated by my sister and her husband, and my daughter from my first marriage lives down the block from them) and read "Dune," "Gone With The Wind," and James Joyce's "Ulysses". Jemisin makes me think of some of the greats I've read: Donaldson's "Covenant" series as well as Herbert's work. Zenna Henderson's tales of The People.
The Broken Earth stands among these great books. As I see it now, in so many ways, this trilogy towers over them.
