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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Sometimes a book series is so important that you want people to put everything aside and just read it. I'm not the only one who feels this way about N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The first and second novels in Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate won the prestigious Hugo Award for the past two years in a row—the first time this has happened since Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead won sequential Hugos in 1986 and 87. Now the final Broken Earth book, The Stone Sky, is out. You can gobble up the whole series without interruption.
There are a lot of reasons why this series has been hailed as a masterpiece. There are unexpected twists which, in retrospect, you realize have been carefully plotted, skillfully hinted at, and well-earned. There are characters who feel like human beings, with problems that range from the mundane (raising kids in a risky world) to the extraordinary (learning to control earthquakes with your mind). The main characters are called orogenes, and they have the ability to control geophysics with their minds, quelling and starting earthquakes. Somehow the orogenes are connected with the lost technologies of a dead civilization, whose machines still orbit the planet in the form of mysterious giant crystals called obelisks. To most people on the planet, the orogenes are known by the derogatory term "rogga," and they're the victims of vicious prejudice.
But Jemisin is hardly retelling The X-men, only with orogenes instead of mutants. She's created a sociologically complex world, and the more we read, the more we understand how the orogenes fit into it. As we travel with our protagonists across the planet's single megacontinent, we discover the place is full of many cultures, often at odds with one another. The brown urbanites from the tropics think the pale, rural people of the poles are ugly idiots; the coastal people aren't too sure about the inland people; and of course everybody hates the orogenes. These tensions are part of a long and complex history that we learn more about as the series develops. There are a number of mysteries to unravel in this series, but one of them is understanding the devastating origin of prejudice against orogenes.
[...] The Broken Earth is exciting, full of incredible technology, and powered by a dark historical mystery. It's something you can read to escape, or to ponder philosophical questions in our own world. In short, it's that rare series that appeals to a love of adventure, and to the urge to reflect on the unseen forces that drive our civilizations.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday September 18 2017, @07:52PM
Yeah, after I wrote this, I started comparing ASoIaF to LotR and Dune and it does seem there's similarities. But there's some differences too (note that I haven't read the books that are the subject of today's article; I also haven't read ASoIaF, I've only seen the TV show):
In Dune and LotR, the plot is written entirely from the PoV of the protagonists, whoever they may be. In LotR, it's all about the Fellowship and their adventures. In the first book, they're mostly a single group and travel together, then in the later books they get separated so the story switches between the few groups (Sam/Frodo, Pippin/Merry, the rest). You never hear the story as told by any other groups not in the company of the Fellowship members, and certainly not by the orcs. In Dune, I seem to remember that it's from the PoV of Paul and his buddies, and later his descendants, then in the later books from the Bene Gesserit and their ally Miles Teg IIRC (it's been a long time). I don't recall any scenes where, for instance, it gets deep into what the Harkonnen are thinking as they plot against the Atreides; it does have scenes where, for instance, the Harkonnen are interacting with Leto Atreides or Doctor Suk. In GoT, on the other hand, there's plenty of scenes where you get to see the "villians" (Lannisters) at length, even though there's none of the protagonists (Starks) around, and you learn a lot about their psychology and motivations. Also, the line between who's a "villain" and who isn't is pretty blurry at times: are Jaime and Bron protagonists or not? Jaime starts out as a definite villain, but then becomes much more sympathetic, but now in season 7 is directly fighting against our protagonists again.
Also, GoT is a bit unique with the sheer number of important characters that you have to keep track of. It's a bit like the Silmarillion that way, except with an actual detailed plot rather than basically being a banal history book. And in GoT, major characters get killed off fairly regularly.
But overall, I guess most fantasy fiction is going to have a lot of similarities to either.