finished the child murder series!
Aug. 20th, 2017 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocoptera(Is that still a spoiler at this point?) Anyways, yeah, The Stone Sky, NK Jemisin, conclusion of the Broken Earth trilogy.
Before I summon the spoiler cut, I want to mention the somewhat-relevant information that I looked up recently that there are two previous back-to-back Hugo winners, Bujold for Vor Game and Barrayar and Card for Ender's and Speaker, and there has never yet been a consecutive threepeat.
And now spoilers.
So this was, to no one's surprise, excellent, and less relentlessly miserable than the first one (I thought it really only dipped once into "oh shit I can't handle this" territory). Some really vivid settings, effective use of backstory flashbacks, and Jemisin is smart about the fact that we're on this train to get to the finale at this point and doesn't try to squeeze fake tension out of stops along the way. I don't have a good picture yet on what else is going to be big in 2017 but honestly I think if Obelisk Gate can beat All the Birds in the Sky, Stone Sky is going to take the threepeat and make Hugos history, assuming that is we still have a Worldcon/a civilization/etc in 2018.
All that said, I have kind of mixed feelings about the end.
So... on the one hand, we totally got the epic mother-daughter climactic battle, caught the fucking moon, got some amazing character beats in Essun giving up, and Nassun seeing the tears on her just-turned-to-stone face, I mean, that moment was AMAZING, I do not want to undermine the extent to which this is a genuinely incredibly good book. On the other hand, I felt like Nassun pivoting from ending the world to making everyone stone eaters was sort of random and took away momentum from the primal "catch the moon/smash the moon" conflict, and felt a little bit like cheating, in that it pre-positioned her to make the second pivot to going along with catching the moon after all, and it also felt a little bit like cheating that the onyx obelisk was able to execute Essun's entire plan in her absence. Essun has this huge moment of making this defining choice which should mean she doesn't get to save the world and then hey the world has conveniently arranged itself so it can still be saved after all? Obviously this is not the most gratuitous deus ex machina the world has ever seen and there's probably a whole essay someone could write about Schaffa as a Gollum figure, a non-hero who inadvertently lets the heroes achieve their goals through their interaction with them. (Nassun, like Frodo, acts from compassion; the difference is that Frodo's compassion enables Gollum to act as the agent of world-saving and Nassun's compassion enables Nassun herself to act. Compassion in the Broken Earth is less important for what it results in in the world than for how it changes the person.) But, I don't know. Maybe it's just that the world was *so relentlessly awful* that any happy ending was always going to feel a little disconcerting and tonally awry from the rest of the story. I imagine that that's part of what Jemisin wanted to do, though, tell a story about how even when everything is fucking bleak and horrible there is still hope and the possibility of change.
Maybe I'm just still thrown by having been totally faked out by the opposite color swords. Can't believe we had a blue sword and a red sword and Essun & Nassun's final confrontation didn't turn into a swordfight. Don't get me wrong, I kind of admire Jemisin for not doing it, but that's a hell of tease. (Here's my review of the previous book, you can see where I thought this was going. Shoutout to Sildra by the way who was quite right about Essun being able to convert Nassun. And I thought the backstory did a good job of answering the "should they get rid of magic" question without actually posing it, like, making it very clear that magic itself was not the problem.)
Hey, question - why does Hoa refuse to take everyone back to Rennanis and is just like "you can take the shuttle back to the giant cricket zone and cross the death desert and probably die but I hope not but I won't take a day out of my busy eternal life to do anything about it"? I didn't get that.
Okay, final thought: maybe it's that very end of the coda that feels the most off. Hoa's conversation with stone-Essun. On the one hand, Jemisin has certainly earned the right after this whole trilogy to hammer us with "Friends. Family. Moving forward" and "I want the world to be better/don't be patient, don't ever be", like, yeah, if you're going write an epic story of this magnitude and achievement in originality, you totally get a blatant blunt-force didactic statement of the moral just to make sure everyone gets it, you certainly don't want someone *not* to get it. On the other hand, "whoop for joy" is a *really* upbeat ending after all the mass murder and child abuse and I wonder if I would have bought into it more if the ending was a little more somber or uncertain, like, stone-Essun hatches from the geode and... I don't know, is still carrying some of the weight of her past? I mean, yes, it is a literal rebirth narrative, I get that, she has been transubstantiated and redeemed (and we even had the harrowing of hell when they get all those ghosts out of the core, this is such a brilliant inversion of Christian communion, being eaten instead of eating, sorry, tangent) and I feel like this criticism could very easily be read as "so you don't think a black bereaved mother deserves a happily ever after, you think she should have to suffer her grief and guilt for eternity" and, no, I don't think that's what I'm saying? I'm just saying that as a reader, *I* wasn't in any geode, her past is still attached to the character in what I know and feel about the character, and it feels weird for there to not even be any acknowledgment of her core, defining story, like, Hoa feels like "it's you, it's truly you", but this is not the truly-you that we ever met, that person is erased by this new person. Which I suppose Jemisin is also doing deliberately - she's so good, I have to figure she's in complete control of what she's doing with her writing - but that's challenging, emotionally, as an ending.
Before I summon the spoiler cut, I want to mention the somewhat-relevant information that I looked up recently that there are two previous back-to-back Hugo winners, Bujold for Vor Game and Barrayar and Card for Ender's and Speaker, and there has never yet been a consecutive threepeat.
And now spoilers.
So this was, to no one's surprise, excellent, and less relentlessly miserable than the first one (I thought it really only dipped once into "oh shit I can't handle this" territory). Some really vivid settings, effective use of backstory flashbacks, and Jemisin is smart about the fact that we're on this train to get to the finale at this point and doesn't try to squeeze fake tension out of stops along the way. I don't have a good picture yet on what else is going to be big in 2017 but honestly I think if Obelisk Gate can beat All the Birds in the Sky, Stone Sky is going to take the threepeat and make Hugos history, assuming that is we still have a Worldcon/a civilization/etc in 2018.
All that said, I have kind of mixed feelings about the end.
So... on the one hand, we totally got the epic mother-daughter climactic battle, caught the fucking moon, got some amazing character beats in Essun giving up, and Nassun seeing the tears on her just-turned-to-stone face, I mean, that moment was AMAZING, I do not want to undermine the extent to which this is a genuinely incredibly good book. On the other hand, I felt like Nassun pivoting from ending the world to making everyone stone eaters was sort of random and took away momentum from the primal "catch the moon/smash the moon" conflict, and felt a little bit like cheating, in that it pre-positioned her to make the second pivot to going along with catching the moon after all, and it also felt a little bit like cheating that the onyx obelisk was able to execute Essun's entire plan in her absence. Essun has this huge moment of making this defining choice which should mean she doesn't get to save the world and then hey the world has conveniently arranged itself so it can still be saved after all? Obviously this is not the most gratuitous deus ex machina the world has ever seen and there's probably a whole essay someone could write about Schaffa as a Gollum figure, a non-hero who inadvertently lets the heroes achieve their goals through their interaction with them. (Nassun, like Frodo, acts from compassion; the difference is that Frodo's compassion enables Gollum to act as the agent of world-saving and Nassun's compassion enables Nassun herself to act. Compassion in the Broken Earth is less important for what it results in in the world than for how it changes the person.) But, I don't know. Maybe it's just that the world was *so relentlessly awful* that any happy ending was always going to feel a little disconcerting and tonally awry from the rest of the story. I imagine that that's part of what Jemisin wanted to do, though, tell a story about how even when everything is fucking bleak and horrible there is still hope and the possibility of change.
Maybe I'm just still thrown by having been totally faked out by the opposite color swords. Can't believe we had a blue sword and a red sword and Essun & Nassun's final confrontation didn't turn into a swordfight. Don't get me wrong, I kind of admire Jemisin for not doing it, but that's a hell of tease. (Here's my review of the previous book, you can see where I thought this was going. Shoutout to Sildra by the way who was quite right about Essun being able to convert Nassun. And I thought the backstory did a good job of answering the "should they get rid of magic" question without actually posing it, like, making it very clear that magic itself was not the problem.)
Hey, question - why does Hoa refuse to take everyone back to Rennanis and is just like "you can take the shuttle back to the giant cricket zone and cross the death desert and probably die but I hope not but I won't take a day out of my busy eternal life to do anything about it"? I didn't get that.
Okay, final thought: maybe it's that very end of the coda that feels the most off. Hoa's conversation with stone-Essun. On the one hand, Jemisin has certainly earned the right after this whole trilogy to hammer us with "Friends. Family. Moving forward" and "I want the world to be better/don't be patient, don't ever be", like, yeah, if you're going write an epic story of this magnitude and achievement in originality, you totally get a blatant blunt-force didactic statement of the moral just to make sure everyone gets it, you certainly don't want someone *not* to get it. On the other hand, "whoop for joy" is a *really* upbeat ending after all the mass murder and child abuse and I wonder if I would have bought into it more if the ending was a little more somber or uncertain, like, stone-Essun hatches from the geode and... I don't know, is still carrying some of the weight of her past? I mean, yes, it is a literal rebirth narrative, I get that, she has been transubstantiated and redeemed (and we even had the harrowing of hell when they get all those ghosts out of the core, this is such a brilliant inversion of Christian communion, being eaten instead of eating, sorry, tangent) and I feel like this criticism could very easily be read as "so you don't think a black bereaved mother deserves a happily ever after, you think she should have to suffer her grief and guilt for eternity" and, no, I don't think that's what I'm saying? I'm just saying that as a reader, *I* wasn't in any geode, her past is still attached to the character in what I know and feel about the character, and it feels weird for there to not even be any acknowledgment of her core, defining story, like, Hoa feels like "it's you, it's truly you", but this is not the truly-you that we ever met, that person is erased by this new person. Which I suppose Jemisin is also doing deliberately - she's so good, I have to figure she's in complete control of what she's doing with her writing - but that's challenging, emotionally, as an ending.
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Date: 2017-08-21 02:22 pm (UTC)