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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday September 19 2017, @12:42AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @12:42AM (#569986) Journal

    The main thing about science fiction in my understanding of the genre is to ask 'what if?' and to speculate on what that might mean and what might happen if it were. The focus has to be on this one question: 'what if?' This is what makes Star Wars not SF in my book: it's fantasy every bit as much as Lord of the Rings even if it is set in space and alien planets and has blasters rather than magical swords (wait, there are magical swords too) and knights (wait, there are knights) in shining armour (well, not this then). Science fiction by definition has to speculate, and the speculation has to drive the story. Dune is like this, even if it does contain some fantastic elements. Star Trek definitely does. Do these books by Jemisin speculate, and is the speculation the focus of the story? If not, then they are not SF. That doesn't make them bad works, just makes them not-science fiction.

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