skygiants | Entries tagged with n.k. jemisin

N.K. Jemisin's latest, The City We Became, is very much a paean to New York City -- a city I love and have lived in and have a lot of feelings about, and also a city I did not grow up in, and no longer live in, which is also relevant, I think, in how complicated I'm feeling about The City We Became.

The premise: sometimes, very old, very lived-in cities undergo a complicated evolution in which they become sentient entities, born and avatar-ized in the personage of someone who both lives in the city and is powerfully representative of the city's character in some key way. New York is the second city in the Americas to undergo this process, assisted by its predecessor São Paulo (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince having both almost made it but died in the 'birthing', possibly as a result of interference by a sinister cosmic entity, on which more anon) but something is weird and different about New York: a.) in addition to the one Avatar of New York, there are also five separate avatars representing each borough, and b.) the sinister cosmic entity attempting to kill the city at birth has also personified itself and brought its A game to bear against New York in a way that none of the other personified cities have ever seen before.

( Putting this under a cut because it's long and a bit navel-gazey and technically a little spoilery )

tl;dr;it's a well-written, well-characterized, and compelling book that I have some complicated feelings about on a broader conceptual and metaphorical level, and I think some of my complicated feelings are just 'I don't get on well with books that are more than 50% metaphor'. But also I have a book club discussion about it tomorrow so I'm sure some of my thoughts will change as they come into contact with other people's!

I made the rookie mistake of returning N.K. Jemisin's How Long Til Black Future Month to the library before up a post about it, and now I'm trying to match up the plots of all the stories I liked best to the titles on a list ...

Anyway, some favorites!

Red Dirt Witch: a story about outwitting the fae in rural Appalachia; the voice in this one really worked for me

L'Alchimista: this may have been my favorite in the book? It's not the deepest or most impactful but it's so much fun, about a chef who's asked to use her gastronomical talents to craft a magical potion. I made a post a little while ago about fantasy of craft, and this story is such a perfect little example of the stuff I love about that sub-genre when it's done well - professional pride and mundane arts

The Storyteller's Replacement: a very folktale-shaped story about smug dragon princesses. I support them.

The Narcomancer: 'man of faith wrestles with vow of chastity, questions of conscience' is certainly not a new storyline but this variant is well-done; I really enjoy stories about people figuring out how to walk the line between rules and ethics while staying true to their beliefs

The You Train: this story about decommissioned train lines in New York City doesn't have a ton of heft to it but I'm still too much of a New Yorker not to love it anyway

Sinners, Saints, Dragons and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters: my other favorite, about a man who connects with a lizard while riding out Hurricane Katrina; good behavior of a good human in a crisis

I did not love "The City Born Great," which is apparently forming the basis of Jemisin's next novel, but I'll probably like it better when it's novel length.

Thanks to the kindness of

aamcnamara in loaning a copy so I did not have to fight through the library line, I read The Stone Sky - third in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, following up on The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate - last weekend.

I don't think Essun destroyed any cities at all this book! I'm so proud!

( The rest is disconnected spoilery thoughts )

Sequel Season continues with The Obelisk Gate, the follow-up to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, in which the world ended and everything was terrible but in extremely interesting and engaging ways!

In The Obelisk Gate, the world continues to end, and things continue to be terrible, but there is a glimmer of hope! Essun, Our Heroine, has found a community where people don't want to (immediately) kill her, and within that community is an old friend (who is admittedly dying), and within that old friend is (possibly) the knowledge that might (maybe) save the world from several thousand years of geological winter and the inevitable destruction of humanity, if he can ever manage to impart it in a straight sentence before he turns completely into stone and is consumed by his new stone eater bestie.

In the meantime, Essun's lost eleven-year-old daughter Nassun is off on her own adventures! ... with a dad who killed her little brother and still might do the same to her if he's not convinced that she's 'curable'; a shiny new father figure who has done many terrible things and will most likely do more terrible things and loves Nassun very, very much; and a plot arc that seems likely to place her in direct and potentially world-destroying collision with her mother (who still wants more than anything to find her daughter, despite the fact that Nassun has no interest in having anything further to do with her) in Book Three.

The Fifth Season was a grim book. This book is as dark, or darker. It's engaging very hard with cycles of abuse and the way that oppression facilitates those cycles, both on the overarching and the extremely personal scales. Also, Essun and Nassun between them wipe out at least three ENTIRE CITIES in this book alone. Maybe four? I might be losing count. (And yet still neither of them is actually winning the body count Olympics! Thanks, Alabaster.)

But, you know, as of this book I do not, in fact, actually feel like the entire series is likely to end with rocks falling and everyone dying, which is something! (A rock certainly seems destined to fall and a lot of people will most likely die -- at this point, Essun is going at a steady rate of two cities destroyed per book and I expect that to be maintained at BARE MINIMUM -- but probably not everybody!)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/453010.html

The Fifth Season is by far the most depressing of N.K. Jemisin's books and I think I like it best of all the ones I've read? Perhaps in fact because it is the most depressing, like, everything is certainly terrible and I and N.K. Jemisin wholeheartedly agree on everything that is terrible, which is a change from past N.K. Jemisin books where some things are definitely terrible and some things are just the author's id angling a few degrees off from mine in small but significant ways.

...I really want to emphasize that everything in The Fifth Season CERTAINLY IS terrible though. Like, a small child dies on the third page, and things go downhill from there. The apocalypse is kind of the least of it.

The Fifth Season is actually set in a world (which I suspect is probably far-future our world, but that's not confirmed) where smallish geological apocalypses happen every few hundred years and people have sort of learned to cope with them. In one strand of the book, a woman named Essun lives through the start of what's looking like an extremely epic apocalypse, but is not so concerned about that as she is about the fact that her husband has just murdered her small son and run off with her small daughter into the apocalyptic night.

Essun is a secret orogene, a person with the power to manipulate geological forces. Orogenes are considered highly dangerous; they're hated and feared by the general population, and, if discovered, are liable to be murdered by mass mobs unless sent for training to an official centralized location called the Fulcrum where they learn to do important geological work on behalf of the proper human members of civilization. This system is definitely not coercive, abusive, or exploitative in any way!

In the two other threads of the book (not taking place during the apocalypse) a little girl named Damaya discovers she is an orogene and is brought to the Fulcrum on a road trip that is no fun at all, and a young orogene named Syenite is paired up with an extremely powerful but kind of batshit orogene named Alabaster for another road trip that is no fun at all. Essun's murderous-husband-hunting post-apocalyptic road trip is also kind of by its nature no fun at all for Essun, but she does get a creepy possibly-inhuman child and an eccentric scholarly genius hobo as travel buddies, who are both WAY more fun than Alabaster. (Tonkee the hobo genius is my favorite character in the book, possibly because she spends the least amount of time being miserable; this is especially nice because Tonkee is a transwoman and frequently trans characters are narratively assigned to be the most miserable. Though admittedly Alabaster, who is very beautiful and very tortured and very gay, is there on the other end taking up significantly more than his fair share of misery. Which, again, is kind of impressive in a book that starts with a woman mourning the death of a child.)

Anyway. It's a very good book, a very dark book, and a very unflinching book which is deeply concerned with the consequences of treating people as not-people. I super want to find out what happens next, though I don't expect it will be much happier than what came before.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/444133.html

Last week I went to a dance performance with my mother. One of the pieces was an abstract work called As Sleep Befell, and featured a set of leaping shirtless men dancing to the sound of an atonal orchestra and a singer in white robes.

"Hey, that piece reminded me of a book series I read recently!" I said, to which my mother responded with an expression of vaguely weirded-out puzzlement.

I did not explain because the intermission was short and The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun are somewhat complicated in their premises . . . but it reminded me that I never wrote them up, so I'LL EXPLAIN HERE INSTEAD.

The books are set in the vaguely Egyptian-inspired nation of Gujaareh, in which the religious practice focuses on the dream-goddess Hananja. Priests of Hananja have dream-based magic and can do a couple of different things. The first book focuses on the Gatherers, who basically kill people by taking their dream-humors -- but nicely! As a public service! So people can die in a pleasant and calm fashion! Unless the people are assholes have been judged to deserve it anyway -- and how they get caught up in a conspiracy to attack a neighboring nation that has a related-but-different culture, which then rebounds to reveal conspiracies within their own priestly organization. Most of the Gatherers are attractive dudes -- this gets a lot of attention because the Littlest Gatherer is madly in love with his attractive, tormented, and often-shirtless mentor -- which, combined with the theme of sleep and the general aesthetic, is probably a large part of how I got here from that dance performance.

The second book focuses on the first female Healer of Hananja, ten years down the line, who then gets caught up in conspiracies related to the fallout of the original conspiracy. It also features a NIGHTMARE PLAGUE. I have a huge weakness for plague stories, I don't know why -- they scare me in a way I find fascinating, I guess -- and brain-plague is twice as scary, you know, that worked really well for me in a terrifying way.

The worldbuilding for the books is fantastic, especially the rich, dense culture-building and the ways that the different cultures (of which there are several) are set up against each other in ways that don't allow for easy judgments from a contemporary reader. The side you're rooting for changes depending on the circumstances, and everyone has valid cultural reasons for believing and doing the things that they do! I ALWAYS LOVE THAT. It is also worth nothing that this is a fantasy world entirely based on an African setting, so there is like one white person in the whole thing and she dies in chapter one. (Though, on another note, there are a lot of assumptions within the cultures presented -- somewhat unexamined within the text, or at least not as much as I want them to be -- about disability and living with disability, mental and physical, and people mostly choosing death instead, so that's something to watch out for.)

Of the two books in the duology, I was a lot more emotionally engaged in The Shadowed Sun, because it hit a lot more of my particular interests -- female protagonist! examining the cultural and political repercussions of major events earlier in the series! NIGHTMARE PLAGUE! -- and, probably because I was more engaged in it, I also had more . . . strongly complicated feeling about the way some stuff played out?

( Spoiler-cut. )

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/352876.html

Just from the preview in the back of the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy, I had a strong suspicion that I was going to like The Broken Kingdoms much better than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Not that the The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms isn't a good book, but it's a book that relies very strongly on a central romance trope that doesn't do much for me. The Broken Kingdoms, on the other hand, is a.) much less about the romance and b.) about a world that is in the middle of coping with significant cultural change, which I love, and c.) has Oree, who is AWESOME.

But The Broken Kingdoms takes place ten years after The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and also stands on its own, so probably I should review it that way instead of entirely in terms of the first book.

Oree, the narrator of the book, is a thoroughly pragmatic blind artist who makes her living selling tchotchkes to tourists who visit the capital city of Sky. (Which, I have to say, I kind of love as a profession for a fantasy-novel heroine.) She has a complicated relationship with her godling ex-boyfriend, and occasionally she regrets taking in Shiny, the immortal-but-otherwise-powerless homeless guy that she found in her muckbin - he keeps making a mess of the place by trying to kill himself, and it's really annoying - but at least Shiny's useful for housework, and otherwise life is pretty good until she stumbles over a dead godling in the alley across the way.

And then Oree's life gets very rapidly much more complicated, as all of a sudden all the changes that are happening in the world - new godlings coming out of the woodwork all over the place! New gods in charge, some of whom might in fact be thoroughly scary old gods! The monotheistic sect that has ruled the world for millenia finding itself in great confusion! - become very personally relevant to her.

In general, though I'm fairly ambivalent about some of the plot twists towards the end, I found this book much easier to connect with than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I love Oree, and how her blindness is not a source of angst-fodder but just a fact of her life, and that she has friends and a job and a city that she loves before she gets pulled into the whole conspiracy of deities. I feel like I have a much stronger sense of her personality than I ever really did Yeine's. I also love that while Yeine spends the whole book very wary of the gods she's interacting with - and rightly so - Oree's attitude towards them is much more often "wow, you guys are just full of social fail," which I tend to find much more entertaining, and makes the power dynamics feel more balanced even if they aren't actually. It's a much more grounded book, I think (no pun intended, given the setting of the last one) and much less mythological in scope, which is not going to be preferable for everyone but is for me.

Also I think Lil the goddess of hunger is my favorite of the godlings of this universe so far, which may put me in the same category with

vivien529 and her Gentlemen. But she really is kind of adorable! And she never eats people without asking first.

ETA: Warning now for spoilers in comments.

N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not a book that I fell madly in love with, but it is a book that I liked a great deal and thought was very well-done, and that I think a lot of you guys would like too. Here are some reasons why:

1. Mythology! The center of the book is a creation myth that feels real and complicated, and the gods involved in that creation myth are real and complicated and pretty clearly nonhuman figures. Some bonus pluses: the creation myth uses a lot of nonstandard imagery and involves an Epic World-Balancing OT3 (that is now unbalanced, because gods are crazy.) Also there is a lot of really interesting exploration of power dynamics within the context of enslaved/bound superpowerful beings.

2. Culture-building! The world of the book sets up one culture that has managed to exert dominance over a whole lot of others, and the other cultures are legitimately different and complicated and not written just to engage our sympathies by being The Underdogs - I mean, they do engage our sympathies, but all of the cultures involved contain customs that seem reasonable and customs that seem crazy, as different cultures do, and there are conflicts that grow organically out of those differences. I love it when authors pull that off. Our Protagonist has a foot in two different cultures; she's grown up in one, and gets summoned to the other, and while the one she grew up in has a much clearer hold on her affections (and she thinks everyone in the other one is a vicious lunatic), there is also a lot of complexity in her relationship to both, and that is very cool too.

3. Complicated politics! I mentioned that Our Protagonist gets ordered to leave her small "barbarian" country and is summoned to the center of the empire; I should also say that she is summarily thrown into the middle of an amoral political mess that is probably going to end in her almost-inevitable death. If you like stories about straightforward heroines thrown into dangerous political atmospheres where they have to make choices of dubious morality, this one is really well done, and there were several twists I didn't see coming.

Uh, basically, if you could not pick up the plot from the things I just listed, here is a summary: Our Protagonist Yeine, the daughter of the head of a minor northern kingdom and the disinherited heir to the enormous empire, gets summoned to aforementioned enormous empire and told that she is now one of the options to be Queen Of Everything. Awesome! Except not, because - aside from the fact tht Yeine has no interest in fighting the other heirs for the title of Queen of Everything - everyone (including her grandfather, who's the one who named her an heir) totally expects her to die, and while the bound gods running around hate everyone else involved and may sort of be on her side, they have complicated plans for her too that are probably not going to turn out too well for her in the long run.

( Spoilers! In short: I like human relationships and the book was not nearly as invested in those as it was in human-god dynamics, which is totally fair. )