The Obelisk Gate

 N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, a 2017 Hugo nominee, continues where The Fifth Season left off --- instants later. This means that it continues the momentum of the first novel, and since I am inhaling these books between fever-naps, I can continue to read, with no break between installments. This momentum is no slow-building thing; like the continental plates in the book itself, it starts with a lot of powerful momentum already. The Fifth Season is dedicated "For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question", a theme which is reinforced by later explicit guidelines for slavery, which state "Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default." (The Fifth Season, p. 61) These are generic enough to hook my attention: whether commenting on the explicit formation of an underclass, or the implicit ways in which gender often sidelines women, these quotes shape how I approached the book and the themes that stood out while reading.

If that was not enough, the series begins with a murder and progresses by showing that the main characters are not invincible or immortal. Jemisin does not shy away from killing characters who, in a typical fantasy context, I would have earmarked as protected-by-narrative-importance. Quite early, we have this narration:

When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.
But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.For the last time." (p. 15)

If the force of subjugated peoples were not enough, the blazing reference to T. S. Eliot is certainly a strong hook, a demand for attention and an indication of the scope and importance of the narrator's tale.

All these layers continue in The Obelisk Gate, where we finally see the culmination of the intertwined threads of The Fifth Season, and some new narrative threads begin to spread out. One would think that in a three-book series which begins with "this is the way the planet ends", there might not be very much more to say or do, but Jemisin's main characters reach to grasp their fate in full knowledge of the limits of their power and the lifetimes available to them. The novel progresses in the usual fantasy way --- people study hard, focus their attention, and are able to harness increasingly absurd amounts of mystical power --- but the a-few-months-ago apocalypse, and the characters' individual motivations, make this book enjoyable. There is, of course, some fantastic writing to carry the entire thing, a nice dollop of words atop a teetering pile of ideas.

I liked it.


This post's theme word is cabochon, "a gem polished but not faceted." The ability to control magic is a cabochon in children; a sparkling, cut jewel in trained adults.

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, a 2016 Hugo nominee, is excellent. It alternates between several stories of women in the land of “the Stillness”, so-called ironically because its continental plates are so mobile that the inhabitants’ architecture and social structures are centered around the common occurrence of earthquakes and other geologic activity. In the face of such disruption, society demonizes the few people who have the power to control seismic activity, since they have enormous destructive potential. The magic training school --- which inevitably exists, this is fantasy --- emphasizes both that it is difficult to learn to control this ability, and that certain magical potency is innate. Geomancers (not their actual nomenclature in the novel) are denied personhood, ostracized, killed, or collected as slaves and subjected to the cruel and often lethal regimen of the magical training school, then permanently enslaved by the government in service of providing geologic stability to politically-important regions.

This book was excellent. It reminded me of many other things, which I want to emphasize does not mean that it actually shared any deep similarities with them.

In giving women agency and the freedom to exhibit a variety of motivations and character traits, it reminded me of Le Guin's Earthsea series; also, of course, it featured a variety of not-particularly-Western people, often described by the color of their skin (almost none of which were "white"), coping with an uncooperative earthquake situation. Yes, there was magic. Yes, there was racism. Yes, family and social structures were highlighted and important. But whereas Le Guin's stories usually turn inwards, focusing on small-scale solutions and interpersonal conflict, Jemisin's story grew bigger and bigger, accreting import and severity as the characters (inevitably) levelled-up in magic and in their understanding of what is really going on with the social structure. The scope ballooned in typical fantasy style, and it did it magnificently.

There's always an interesting feature of reading a novel (especially digitally): the images conjured in my mind are completely my own, not even influenced by cover art. I appreciate that Jemisin consistently reminded her readers that her characters, and everyone in her world, was a shade of brown, lest our whitewashing imaginations run away with us. The geography --- unsurprisingly an often-described feature in a book about lethal geological activity --- was often described in magical-intuitive terms, as if one could sense the pockets of magma circulating below. Vegetation gets short shrift. This was okay with me, as it meant that my brain often substituted settings from From Dust, a video game where gameplay consists of reshaping geography by dropping lava and trying to avoid too much destruction of villages.

Describing a book by its magical system, and then by similar-but-distinct things that it reminded me of, is surely a disappointing and unsatisfying type of recommendation. The book was great. You should read it for yourself. I'm not alone in liking it; it won the Hugo award!

This post's theme word is sorb, "to take up and hold by ad/absorption." The soil can only sorb so much groundwater before a disastrous flood ensues.