N. K. Jemisin
Author of The Fifth Season
About the Author
N. K. Jemisin is an American author and blogger, born in 1972, and based in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a B.S. in Psychology from Tulane University and her Masters of Education from the University of Maryland College Park. Her work includes numerous short stories, a novella, a triptych, The show more Inheritance trilogy, Dreamblood series, and The Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season is a book in The Inheritance trilogy for which she won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Her other awards include Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice, Fantasy (for The Shadowed Sun); Sense of Gender Award, 2011 (for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Japanese version); Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice, Fantasy (for The Broken Kingdoms); and the Locus Award, 2010 (First Novel, for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms). She won the 2017 Nebula Award and the 2018 Hugo Award, Best Novel category for The Stone Sky. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: N.K. Jemisin on 2013
Series
Works by N. K. Jemisin
The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky (2018) 571 copies, 5 reviews
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (2018) — Editor; Introduction, some editions — 220 copies, 6 reviews
Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters {short story} (2010) 4 copies, 2 reviews
Bittersweet 3 copies
The Evaluators {short story} 3 copies
On the Banks of the River Lex 2 copies
Henosis 2 copies
Red Dirt Witch 2 copies
Sunshine Ninety-Nine 1 copy
The You Train {short story} 1 copy
Valedictorian {short story} 1 copy
L'Alchimista {short story} 1 copy
The Dancers' War 1 copy
Untitled 1 copy
The Killing Moon Excerpt 1 copy
Black Space 1 copy
Associated Works
A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers (2019) — Contributor — 542 copies, 20 reviews
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists (2011) — Contributor — 491 copies, 17 reviews
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves (2018) — Contributor — 471 copies, 33 reviews
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 49 • June 2014 (Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue) (2014) — Contributor — 174 copies, 11 reviews
Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018) — Contributor — 161 copies, 1 review
The Year's Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020 (2020) — Contributor — 110 copies, 7 reviews
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 13 (2019) — Contributor — 68 copies, 3 reviews
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope (2025) — Contributor — 63 copies, 1 review
New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps (2017) — Contributor — 45 copies, 1 review
Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (2011) — Contributor — 41 copies
Sunspot Jungle: The Ever Expanding Universe of Fantasy and Science Fiction (2018) — Contributor — 39 copies, 1 review
Fantasy Magazine, Issue 60 (December 2016) - People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue (2016) — Contributor — 32 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Jemison, Nora K.
Jemisin, Nora Keita - Birthdate
- 1972-09-19
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Tulane University (BS ∙ Psychology|1994)
University of Maryland, College Park (MEd) - Occupations
- blogger
speculative fiction author
psychologist - Organizations
- Altered Fluid
- Awards and honors
- Gulliver Travel Grant (2004)
MacArthur Fellowship (2020)
Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award (2025) - Agent
- Lucienne Diver (Knight Agency)
- Relationships
- Bell, W. Kamau (cousin)
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Iowa City, Iowa, USA
- Places of residence
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
Mobile, Alabama, USA
Massachusetts, USA
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
College Park, Maryland, USA
New York, New York, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin - CURIOUS KING LE 2024 in Fine Press Forum (June 2024)
The Dreamblood Group Read - July - The Killing Moon in The Green Dragon (August 2023)
N K Jemisin in Science Fiction Fans (December 2022)
July 2021: N. K. Jemisin in Monthly Author Reads (November 2021)
Found: Fiction/Fantasy w/pic of a Red Moon on the Cover in Name that Book (March 2021)
The Dreamblood Group Read - August - The Shadowed Sun in The Green Dragon (September 2014)
Reviews
The harbingers of the Enemy will hide among the city's parasites. Beware of them. [9]
Jemisin by turns delights and disappoints in this fabulist imagining of living cities as avatars, beings awakening to a reality hidden from us even while living alongside us, and battling a threat uncertain in origin and intent. Readers are thrown into this parallel world with scant introduction, observing as a boy learns there is much more going on than living on the streets has prepared him to understand. show more When that boy's world turns inside out, events come thick and fast, and the boy responds far more competently than he should be capable of doing ... only for the story to shift abruptly to another set of characters not yet aware of what just happened.
My chief pleasure in reading The City We Became was in figuring out what was going on, separate from the immediate events and interactions between characters, that hidden reality behind the scenes. These hints and glimpses are the delights Jemisin provides, and they are myriad and plentiful, and spool out in a believable way. The disappointment is, from a certain vantage, hardly worth mentioning: the depiction of the city's avatars as almost DC Comics or Marvel-style superheroes, who battle their unseen foe in manner reminiscent of Superman or Godzilla, yet almost shadowboxing given their foes never fully manifest. Keeping the enemy inchoate, rather than having a Super Villain or Villains step from the shadows, is key to keeping the disappointment factor from overtaking the story. This comic pastiche is amusing and done well, but that is not what holds my attention.
The threat these avatars face contributes to a recent sub-genre which subverts tropes of Weird Fiction, effectively using the racism of HPL against itself, and the myopia of early English-language fantasy as a plot device. Jemisin's satire is part homage and part critique, which I find more interesting than simple mimickry.
I've already read the short story from which the duology evolved, and another short published earlier and -- while not explicitly linked by publisher or author to the Great Cities series, so far as I can tell -- even more compelling in its milieu and mythology. The setting is rich enough in suggested themes and potential meaning to ensure I will read the concluding novel, eventually.
//
A collage preceding the Preface depicts in a two-page image the layers evident in Jemisin's story. At first look, it seems a simplified map of NYC's five boroughs, with cute souvenirs (fridge magnet, business card) laid upon that map, and writing upon it as if by a tourist in a scrapbook. Only after finishing the novel can a reader grasp the full significance of what has been labeled, and what not; why the odd designs or hand-made placenames have been added. A visual representation of the hidden world irrupting into our own. show less
Jemisin by turns delights and disappoints in this fabulist imagining of living cities as avatars, beings awakening to a reality hidden from us even while living alongside us, and battling a threat uncertain in origin and intent. Readers are thrown into this parallel world with scant introduction, observing as a boy learns there is much more going on than living on the streets has prepared him to understand. show more When that boy's world turns inside out, events come thick and fast, and the boy responds far more competently than he should be capable of doing ... only for the story to shift abruptly to another set of characters not yet aware of what just happened.
My chief pleasure in reading The City We Became was in figuring out what was going on, separate from the immediate events and interactions between characters, that hidden reality behind the scenes. These hints and glimpses are the delights Jemisin provides, and they are myriad and plentiful, and spool out in a believable way. The disappointment is, from a certain vantage, hardly worth mentioning: the depiction of the city's avatars as almost DC Comics or Marvel-style superheroes, who battle their unseen foe in manner reminiscent of Superman or Godzilla, yet almost shadowboxing given their foes never fully manifest. Keeping the enemy inchoate, rather than having a Super Villain or Villains step from the shadows, is key to keeping the disappointment factor from overtaking the story. This comic pastiche is amusing and done well, but that is not what holds my attention.
The threat these avatars face contributes to a recent sub-genre which subverts tropes of Weird Fiction, effectively using the racism of HPL against itself, and the myopia of early English-language fantasy as a plot device. Jemisin's satire is part homage and part critique, which I find more interesting than simple mimickry.
I've already read the short story from which the duology evolved, and another short published earlier and -- while not explicitly linked by publisher or author to the Great Cities series, so far as I can tell -- even more compelling in its milieu and mythology. The setting is rich enough in suggested themes and potential meaning to ensure I will read the concluding novel, eventually.
//
A collage preceding the Preface depicts in a two-page image the layers evident in Jemisin's story. At first look, it seems a simplified map of NYC's five boroughs, with cute souvenirs (fridge magnet, business card) laid upon that map, and writing upon it as if by a tourist in a scrapbook. Only after finishing the novel can a reader grasp the full significance of what has been labeled, and what not; why the odd designs or hand-made placenames have been added. A visual representation of the hidden world irrupting into our own. show less
When I started reading this book I had a few moments of sideways déja vu. Jemison’s story begins as the unexpecting Manny becomes an embodied avatar of New York (followed shortly thereafter by manifestations of the other boroughs), and I was getting serious flashbacks to the beginning of Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift series, wherein Matthew becomes a host to the Electric Blue Angels and then takes on the title of Midnight Mayor of London (with all its power and responsibilities). There show more are definitely themes that run throughout both books (treading similar conversations about a city’s power, its magical citizens, and having unexpected power and responsibility thrust upon the protagonists in defense of said City), but like the differences between the cities of New York and London, Jemisin’s book stands apart as its own citified entity. I absolutely loved Griffin’s take on manifesting magical London (as much as I love the city itself), so Jemison’s version of magical urbanity was like visiting and falling in love with the magic of a new and equally interesting city. This is only the first book in a planned trilogy, and it’s clear that the Cthulu-inspired antagonist isn’t nearly done yet, so I am very much looking forward to seeing where this story goes! show less
Jemisin caps off the best fantasy trilogy with a conclusion that is deeply & profoundly personal to the protagonist, and also about changing the world. Jemisin is endlessly imaginative, but her books capture a grittiness about our world, about self-sacrifice and cultural conflicts and about what people in power inflict on others. This is one of the darkest books I've read in ages and I was sitting on a friend's floor trying to convince her to read it anyway: "When Jemisin's characters die, show more it's about something. She cares about her characters. They aren't forgotten. The other characters don't just magically heal their trauma. They find ways to construct meaning to move forward." This is a story about being in community and how we do that, despite hurting each other, despite being unable to save each other. This is a story about unconventional loves (and more about Alabaster and Essun) including platonic and familial. I loved every page. show less
There comes a time in the lives of most women I know, when you realize that your body and your life are worth less to the legal system of the country in which you reside than your property.
That moment came for me personally a few years ago when I tried to report to police an admission made by an ex-boyfriend that he'd had his ex's apartment bugged so he could monitor who she was sleeping with. They refused to take the report "because no crime had taken place." Apparently she would have had show more to find out on her own that it was being bugged, and then prove that he was the one who had done it, and then call the police herself, before they could do anything to investigate, which seems contrary to how other criminal investigations are conducted. I mean, if someone is shot, you don't hear police going "when you know who did it, let us know and we'll be happy to get involved!" Or "yes, but the corpse has to call us, not a bystander." But a man telling someone--bragging to them--that he had hired someone to place cameras and recorders in the house of an ex to monitor her sex life is not enough to look into. That he was also stalking me, and that I worried that he might have bugged my home, changed nothing. I was told that I would first need to demonstrate that my home had been bugged and then hire a PI to prove it was him before I could even file a report. I was on my own.
On the other hand, when I wanted to report that my bicycle had been stolen--without knowing who had stolen it--the same police force was quite happy to help, not that they could do anything to get it back.
So my bike counts. But I don't.
I've always been a feminist, so it's not like I was unaware of this in theory, but it's different when it happens to you. And then the problem becomes that all future similar cases remind you, and you never forget: you are worth less than your property.
Sure, yes: when a white woman, preferably a virtuous white woman with money and an upstanding husband, or a young and virginal white woman with her whole life ahead of her, turns up dead, her body and life suddenly matter. But it's truly striking how often it turns out in retrospect that she had tried for years to get help and been denied at every turn. Her life only mattered when it was lost. And for too many women, particularly our indigenous sisters here in Canada, her life doesn't even matter then. What murder? She probably tripped on a broken beer bottle and accidentally gouged out her vagina. It happens.
There was that story recently of the university hockey player who wasn't just let off the hook on a sexual assault charge, but even the regular assault conviction that did stick was delayed so that the sentence wouldn't interfere with his prestigious Deloitte internship. I mean. Just because he violated a 16 year old girl doesn't mean that his career prospects should suffer. Right?
A 16 year old who was raped by her stepfather with her mother watching, pimped out by the stepfather to his friends--he plead guilty and got four years. The judge described this crime as heinous and a violation of trust and responsibility with lifelong consequences for the victim. Four years is what that's worth.
And another story, which didn't lead to Change.org petitions and general social media outrage, about a Dalhousie student who broke into an ex-girlfriend's apartment--by battering down the door, no less--assaulted the man she was there with until he fled to get help, sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend, broke a window, who ended up with no jail time at all. He was a wealthy white boy, you know. They can't really be dangerous. When they do things like this it's an aberration, not an indication of future risk. And you don't want to interfere with his promising future with anything so arbitrary and high-handed as justice. He plead guilty to break and enter and assault of the boyfriend, for which he received a two-year conditional sentence. The sex assault charge was dropped. It was considered that she couldn't prove it, and you don't want to take the word of a girl over a wealthy white boy with good prospects who just happened to have broken a door down in an uncharacteristic fit of rage!
She dropped out of school. He went to law school.
It's not just that her body and life matter less than his career prospects.
Her body and life clearly mattered less than her fucking door. If he hadn't broken the door down and hit an actual person (i.e. a man) he would likely have gotten away without any penalties at all.
(Oh, but don't mention rape culture. That hurts some men's feelings. Women's lives and bodies matter less than that, too.)
It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder what the hell you're doing it for, when you've been employed as a professional do-gooder for a few decades. As it is, it's a stressful career that leads to burnout for many. The hours can be long, you're often harassed (or assaulted or stalked) by members of the public who see you as an enemy of freedom and progress, and as one writer memorably put it, the victories are temporary while the defeats are permanent--a situation that leads to higher rates of alcoholism, mental illness and divorce. And I'm doing this, I've sometimes asked myself, for those assholes? For a society that considers on the whole that I am worth less than my bicycle? For a large number of people who don't think of me as fully human?
In my house, the Battlestar Galactica remake is an appropriate reference point for almost everything. So:
I've read the series as a climate change metaphor: people create a technology that is supposed to make their lives easier (a fossil-fueled industrial revolution, the Cylons) that then turns around and destroys their entire world. I don't think the creators meant it that way, but that's the lens I watch it through, and it works. President Roslin's rejoinder to the military brass: "The war is over. We lost," often plays in my head when I'm reading or watching desperate 11-th hour pleas on transitioning to a low-carbon economy to save ourselves. I mean I'm sorry but the 11-th hour was in the late nineties; we're well past midnight now.
The other side of the series, of course, is what makes a person, and it is highly highly relevant both to modern-day politics and society.
What makes a person? Genetics? Does that mean a person with wonky genes isn't a person? Intelligence? So what about a person of low IQ? Art, music, literature? What does that make people who don't produce any? Sex? Orientation? Race? Well of course, you're saying--but remember that I'm worth less than my bicycle, and during the Harper government it was made abundantly clear in their policy decisions that my career to help save and repair the environment made me potentially an enemy of the state. Most women I know, and most people of colour I know, have a choice between permanent rage and pretending not to see what they see or know what they know. So what makes a person?
Around the same time I read a news story about a young woman in South Africa who was raped, then ripped open with a knife from her throat to her vulva and left to bleed out in the rubble of an abandoned building.
Why the hell are we worth saving?
It's a question that comes up relentlessly in The Stone Sky. Do you try to achieve the impossible and save a world that's enslaved you while in the process reforming it, or do you burn it down?
It's impossible to summarize all of the things the book is about, but let me try:
Motherhood, trauma, survival, the long shadows that trauma casts on families, genocide, racism, slavery, oppression, projection, fear, the cost of survival, the price of supporting luxury and privilege on the destruction of the earth and the dehumanization of other people, loss, how loved ones factor into living life in such circumstances, and ultimately:
How, as someone who has been so dehumanized, to respond.
(All packaged in a fantasy trilogy in which magic is the ability to manipulate earth, from small stones to tectonic plates.)
This from one of the novel's protagonists, a ten-year-old girl who has seem more of man's inhumanity to man than anyone should ever have to. One of the trilogy's achievements is presenting all of the perspectives in credible and sympathetic characters, and she is a strong voice for the case of letting the world end.
What would you do? Would you save a world that tortured you, if you were the only one who could?
~~~~~
Essun, the novel's main protagonist, is amazing. As a literary achievement and as a person. She is strong, clever, a survivor; she has lived through horrors, and inflicted some of her own; she is difficult and has learned to fear and mistrust strangers for good reason; she has lived as a slave and as a "free" person who can only be free so long as no one knows what she is; she has buried more than one much-loved child; and she has been told that she is the only person who can save the world. So should she? Will she?
In the first novel, you learn to love her for her strength, determination, and love of her children.
In the second novel, you learn about her crimes and her victims. And why.
In the third novel, you wonder: do you want her to save this world? Does it deserve to survive?
I don't want to give too much away, because I think everyone should be reading these books. Jemisin manages the fantastically difficult feat of writing a book of immense, scathing and current social commentary packaged in an entertaining plot with vivid characters, deep relationships, and gorgeous writing. Forget whether or not you think you like fantasy novels. These books are worth reading. They will break your heart and knit it back together a hundred times over.
And if you are involved in any kind of world-saving, Essun's story is one you really want to read.
The world is burning now, actually; and while The Broken Earth is about a lot more things than environmental destruction, it's about that too. Harvey and Irma should be very potent and very timely reminders that we have really fucked things up, and the payment's not due in 2200 or 2100, but is coming due now. I look at those storms and I don't just see the destruction and loss of life (and it's not just people and their pets) now, but from all the similar storms that climate change has made inevitable and which will happen with greater and greater frequency as this century progresses. This is and will increasingly become normal. All of the wonderful and inspiring actions the global community is undertaking (Trumpians exepted) are at least 20 years too late to prevent catastrophe, though we can lessen it, and that's not nothing. But it's also not, you know, wait around 20 years and Tesla will solve everything. We're in for a rough time, if we survive it.
That moment came for me personally a few years ago when I tried to report to police an admission made by an ex-boyfriend that he'd had his ex's apartment bugged so he could monitor who she was sleeping with. They refused to take the report "because no crime had taken place." Apparently she would have had show more to find out on her own that it was being bugged, and then prove that he was the one who had done it, and then call the police herself, before they could do anything to investigate, which seems contrary to how other criminal investigations are conducted. I mean, if someone is shot, you don't hear police going "when you know who did it, let us know and we'll be happy to get involved!" Or "yes, but the corpse has to call us, not a bystander." But a man telling someone--bragging to them--that he had hired someone to place cameras and recorders in the house of an ex to monitor her sex life is not enough to look into. That he was also stalking me, and that I worried that he might have bugged my home, changed nothing. I was told that I would first need to demonstrate that my home had been bugged and then hire a PI to prove it was him before I could even file a report. I was on my own.
On the other hand, when I wanted to report that my bicycle had been stolen--without knowing who had stolen it--the same police force was quite happy to help, not that they could do anything to get it back.
So my bike counts. But I don't.
I've always been a feminist, so it's not like I was unaware of this in theory, but it's different when it happens to you. And then the problem becomes that all future similar cases remind you, and you never forget: you are worth less than your property.
Sure, yes: when a white woman, preferably a virtuous white woman with money and an upstanding husband, or a young and virginal white woman with her whole life ahead of her, turns up dead, her body and life suddenly matter. But it's truly striking how often it turns out in retrospect that she had tried for years to get help and been denied at every turn. Her life only mattered when it was lost. And for too many women, particularly our indigenous sisters here in Canada, her life doesn't even matter then. What murder? She probably tripped on a broken beer bottle and accidentally gouged out her vagina. It happens.
There was that story recently of the university hockey player who wasn't just let off the hook on a sexual assault charge, but even the regular assault conviction that did stick was delayed so that the sentence wouldn't interfere with his prestigious Deloitte internship. I mean. Just because he violated a 16 year old girl doesn't mean that his career prospects should suffer. Right?
A 16 year old who was raped by her stepfather with her mother watching, pimped out by the stepfather to his friends--he plead guilty and got four years. The judge described this crime as heinous and a violation of trust and responsibility with lifelong consequences for the victim. Four years is what that's worth.
And another story, which didn't lead to Change.org petitions and general social media outrage, about a Dalhousie student who broke into an ex-girlfriend's apartment--by battering down the door, no less--assaulted the man she was there with until he fled to get help, sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend, broke a window, who ended up with no jail time at all. He was a wealthy white boy, you know. They can't really be dangerous. When they do things like this it's an aberration, not an indication of future risk. And you don't want to interfere with his promising future with anything so arbitrary and high-handed as justice. He plead guilty to break and enter and assault of the boyfriend, for which he received a two-year conditional sentence. The sex assault charge was dropped. It was considered that she couldn't prove it, and you don't want to take the word of a girl over a wealthy white boy with good prospects who just happened to have broken a door down in an uncharacteristic fit of rage!
She dropped out of school. He went to law school.
It's not just that her body and life matter less than his career prospects.
Her body and life clearly mattered less than her fucking door. If he hadn't broken the door down and hit an actual person (i.e. a man) he would likely have gotten away without any penalties at all.
(Oh, but don't mention rape culture. That hurts some men's feelings. Women's lives and bodies matter less than that, too.)
It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder what the hell you're doing it for, when you've been employed as a professional do-gooder for a few decades. As it is, it's a stressful career that leads to burnout for many. The hours can be long, you're often harassed (or assaulted or stalked) by members of the public who see you as an enemy of freedom and progress, and as one writer memorably put it, the victories are temporary while the defeats are permanent--a situation that leads to higher rates of alcoholism, mental illness and divorce. And I'm doing this, I've sometimes asked myself, for those assholes? For a society that considers on the whole that I am worth less than my bicycle? For a large number of people who don't think of me as fully human?
In my house, the Battlestar Galactica remake is an appropriate reference point for almost everything. So:
[from Adama's speech at the decommissioning ceremony] You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question "Why?" Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.
I've read the series as a climate change metaphor: people create a technology that is supposed to make their lives easier (a fossil-fueled industrial revolution, the Cylons) that then turns around and destroys their entire world. I don't think the creators meant it that way, but that's the lens I watch it through, and it works. President Roslin's rejoinder to the military brass: "The war is over. We lost," often plays in my head when I'm reading or watching desperate 11-th hour pleas on transitioning to a low-carbon economy to save ourselves. I mean I'm sorry but the 11-th hour was in the late nineties; we're well past midnight now.
The other side of the series, of course, is what makes a person, and it is highly highly relevant both to modern-day politics and society.
What makes a person? Genetics? Does that mean a person with wonky genes isn't a person? Intelligence? So what about a person of low IQ? Art, music, literature? What does that make people who don't produce any? Sex? Orientation? Race? Well of course, you're saying--but remember that I'm worth less than my bicycle, and during the Harper government it was made abundantly clear in their policy decisions that my career to help save and repair the environment made me potentially an enemy of the state. Most women I know, and most people of colour I know, have a choice between permanent rage and pretending not to see what they see or know what they know. So what makes a person?
Number Six: I'm so proud of you, Gaius.
Doctor Gaius Baltar: Why? Because I've taken a life?
Number Six: It makes you human.
Doctor Gaius Baltar: Is it? Not conscious thought? Not poetry, or art, or music, literature? Murder. Murder is my heritage. Is that the lesson I'm supposed to pass on to our child?
"Battlestar Galactica: Resurrection Ship: Part 2 (#2.12)" (2006)
Lt. Sharon 'Boomer' Valerii: [Adama asks Sharon why the Cylons hate humanity so much] It's what you said at the ceremony before the attack when Galactica was being decommissioned. You gave a speech that sounded like it wasn't the one you prepared. You said that humanity was a flawed creation. And that people still kill one another for petty jealousy and greed. You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive. Maybe you don't."
Around the same time I read a news story about a young woman in South Africa who was raped, then ripped open with a knife from her throat to her vulva and left to bleed out in the rubble of an abandoned building.
Why the hell are we worth saving?
It's a question that comes up relentlessly in The Stone Sky. Do you try to achieve the impossible and save a world that's enslaved you while in the process reforming it, or do you burn it down?
It's impossible to summarize all of the things the book is about, but let me try:
Motherhood, trauma, survival, the long shadows that trauma casts on families, genocide, racism, slavery, oppression, projection, fear, the cost of survival, the price of supporting luxury and privilege on the destruction of the earth and the dehumanization of other people, loss, how loved ones factor into living life in such circumstances, and ultimately:
How, as someone who has been so dehumanized, to respond.
(All packaged in a fantasy trilogy in which magic is the ability to manipulate earth, from small stones to tectonic plates.)
These things have distorted her voice, made it a shaky growl that randomly spikes into a higher pitch and louder volume, because it's everything she can do not to just start screaming. "I wouldn't fix it, Schaffa, I wouldn't, I'm sorry, I don't want to fix it I want to kill everybody who hates me--"
Her middle is so heavy that she can't stand. [She] drops into a crouch, then to her knees. She wants to vomit but instead she spits words onto the ground between her splayed hands. "G-g-gone! I want it all GONE, Schaffa! I want it to BURN, I want it burned up and dead and gone, gone, NOTHING l-l-left, no more hate and no more killing just nothing, r-rusting nothing, nothing FOREVER--"
This from one of the novel's protagonists, a ten-year-old girl who has seem more of man's inhumanity to man than anyone should ever have to. One of the trilogy's achievements is presenting all of the perspectives in credible and sympathetic characters, and she is a strong voice for the case of letting the world end.
What would you do? Would you save a world that tortured you, if you were the only one who could?
~~~~~
Essun, the novel's main protagonist, is amazing. As a literary achievement and as a person. She is strong, clever, a survivor; she has lived through horrors, and inflicted some of her own; she is difficult and has learned to fear and mistrust strangers for good reason; she has lived as a slave and as a "free" person who can only be free so long as no one knows what she is; she has buried more than one much-loved child; and she has been told that she is the only person who can save the world. So should she? Will she?
In the first novel, you learn to love her for her strength, determination, and love of her children.
In the second novel, you learn about her crimes and her victims. And why.
In the third novel, you wonder: do you want her to save this world? Does it deserve to survive?
There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment....
Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they're worth--because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don't, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort....
The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn't right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.
I don't want to give too much away, because I think everyone should be reading these books. Jemisin manages the fantastically difficult feat of writing a book of immense, scathing and current social commentary packaged in an entertaining plot with vivid characters, deep relationships, and gorgeous writing. Forget whether or not you think you like fantasy novels. These books are worth reading. They will break your heart and knit it back together a hundred times over.
And if you are involved in any kind of world-saving, Essun's story is one you really want to read.
When a man dies, it should be devastating to a girl who once called him Father, but this becomes as nothing when she has been called monster so many times that she finally embraces the label. When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. ("So you were slaves, so what?" they whisper. Like it's nothing.) But to the people who live through a slave rebellion, both those who take their dominance for granted until it comes for them in the dark, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment longer in "their place"--
That is not a metaphor, Essun. Not hyperbole. I did watch the world burn. Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don't lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.
The world is burning now, actually; and while The Broken Earth is about a lot more things than environmental destruction, it's about that too. Harvey and Irma should be very potent and very timely reminders that we have really fucked things up, and the payment's not due in 2200 or 2100, but is coming due now. I look at those storms and I don't just see the destruction and loss of life (and it's not just people and their pets) now, but from all the similar storms that climate change has made inevitable and which will happen with greater and greater frequency as this century progresses. This is and will increasingly become normal. All of the wonderful and inspiring actions the global community is undertaking (Trumpians exepted) are at least 20 years too late to prevent catastrophe, though we can lessen it, and that's not nothing. But it's also not, you know, wait around 20 years and Tesla will solve everything. We're in for a rough time, if we survive it.
You consider. I listen to the slow ongoing roar of the volcano, down here in the deep. Then you say, "I want the world to be better."show less
I have never regretted more my inability to leap into the air and whoop for joy.
Instead, I transit to you, with one hand proferred. "Then let's go make it better."
You look amused. It's truly you. "Just like that?"
"It might take some time."
"I don't think I'm very patient." But you take my hand.
Don't be patient. Don't ever be. This is the way a new world begins.
"Neither am I," I say. "So let's get to it."
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