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posted by Fnord666 on Monday September 18 2017, @03:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-will-tell dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday September 18 2017, @04:30PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday September 18 2017, @04:30PM (#569793)

    I haven't read any of these books, but you're making a terrible comparison. This blurb is about book 3 in a trilogy, with the previous 2 books having come out in the last 2 years. Those two books apparently won some prestigious awards, so the expectation is that this one will be just as great.

    This just isn't comparable to Episode 1. Ep1 came out over 15 years after the last installment of the first Star Wars series; it wasn't the 3rd episode of a trilogy. It also differed from the others in many ways: ESB and RotJ were both written and directed by people other than Lucas (Lucas had co-writing credits I think), it had entirely different actors, it used an entirely different method of filming (it used a ton of CGI, which didn't exist in the 80s), etc. Granted, many of us at the time were indeed fooled, as the stuff I just listed is really hindsight being 20/20, but still, we can look at that and compare with this, and it's pretty obvious that isn't not comparable. I don't have any idea how good this book will really be, but I also never read the two other books in that series which did win awards. I do think it's safe to say, however, that anyone who really liked the other two books will probably like this one too.

    A better comparison is with the Dune series: anyone who liked Dune and Dune: Messiah will probably also like Children of Dune (the 3rd book in the series). And even this one isn't perfectly comparable, as there was a *long* stretch of time between Dune and Children of Dune. Perhaps the LotR series (of books) is a better comparison.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday September 18 2017, @04:46PM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday September 18 2017, @04:46PM (#569798) Journal

    anyone who liked Dune and Dune: Messiah will probably also like Children of Dune

    This is probably true, but a lot of people who liked Dune and Children of Dune hated Dune Messiah (I found it improved a lot on the third reading). The styles of all three are quite different and it's very easy to like only one or two out of the three. God Emperor is a different style again, and though Heretics and Chapter house follow a single narrative they're also very different in the scope of the action and of the characters that they follow. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people who like different subsets of the two trilogies. That said, in comparison to the crap that his son and Kevin J Anderson wrote they're all perfect masterworks of fiction.

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    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @06:55PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @06:55PM (#569852)

      I read his son's work out of pure dedication to the universe. I just try and remember them like historical timelines and would have been perfectly happy with a single book that condensed them all into a history book format.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 19 2017, @08:53AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @08:53AM (#570120) Journal

        The prequel trilogy was just badly written. The Butlerian Jihad sequence annoyed me though, because it seemed to be based entirely on the intro to the TV version of the Dune film and not on the books. In the books, Frank Herbert explicitly stated that the problem was over-dependence on machines, which made humans stop thinking and gave control to people who had control over the machines. That has turned out to be quite prophetic in an age of Facebook and smartphones. The idiot duo turned this into a cheezy fight against robot monsters who had no sensible motivation - why were they enslaving humans, when machines are more efficient at manual labour? Why are they even bothering with the human empire when they could just expand geometrically as Von Neumann replicators? The books made a few superficial attempts to explain these, but the end result was that the humans were able to win because the machines were mind-numbingly stupid.

        The ending of the sequels was similarly horrible. They brought back the machines, which made no sense. In God Emperor, Leto II tells the two witches that thinking machines are no longer a threat and explains why. Frank Herbert telegraphs two explanations of the real threat over all six books and leaves you guessing which one he was going to go with: The first is that in the scattering, some descendants of humans have evolved to a point where they're unrecognisable as humans and have a huge survival advantage. The fleeing Honoured Matres are unable to compete in their ecosystem. Teg and Idaho hint at this a few times. The other ending that's hinted about is the existence of external threats: no other sentient creatures evolved (or, at least, weren't exterminated) in the Empire, but the Empire is a fairly small subset of the whole universe and outside there may be many other civilisations at different levels of advancement. Leto II hints at this somewhat in God Emperor, as motivation for the scattering - humanity in his empire is vulnerable to external attack, but afterwards it will be practically impossible for anything to exterminate them all. He also hints at the evolutionary explanation, by pointing out that he's retarded development and directed evolution in small groups specifically with the goal of making them amenable to future adaptation.

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        sudo mod me up
  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @06:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @06:43PM (#569845)

    I'm sorry, I'm just not going to read anything written by a woman, even if George Lucas likes it.