A God In All But Name

[mtvessel]

May/June 2024
The Obelisk Gate / The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemisin – Orbit, 2016, 2017
* * * / * * *
Well, her ending was a little different at least. As I said previously, these books have a geologically-themed magic system that is similar to one that I came up with for roleplaying purposes when a teenager. This gets developed over the following two books, but in a wild ad-hoc way that I would have been fine with when I was younger but do not find satisfactory now.

The Obelisk Gate pulls off the difficult trick of investigating the big existential question of what causes Fifth Seasons while retaining an emphasis on dysfunctional families and prejudice among small groups of people. It does this by following two members of a broken family - Essun from the first book, who has ended up in a village in a giant geode called Castrima, and her daughter Nassun whose father Jija has spirited her away after killing her brother for being an orogene, and who is taking her to a Guardian stronghold which claims to be able to remove Nassun's latent orogenic abilities. Unfortunately the big background story is largely data-dumped in slow conversations that Essun has with Hoa, a stone eater, and her ex-Guardian tutor Alabaster, the originator of the land-splitting earthquake that caused the current Fifth Season, making the book tediously static. It doesn't help that the ultimate cause of the Fifth Season phenomenon proves to be a disappointingly generic fantasy trope, complete with the sort of semi-scientific explanation that marred Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, and which my teenage self would have thought was so clever. We do learn why Alabaster did what he did in book 1, things are redeemed somewhat by an attack by a rival comm which introduces some much-needed action, and the Nassun/Jija plot is an effective if clunky allegory for the horrors of modern-day conversion therapy, but I didn't love the continued implication in both strands of the plot that men are by default callous and cruel, and women and children are forced into doing desperate things to defend against them.

And desperate measures is what The Stone Sky is all about, with Nassun heading to a distant city on the other side of the world called Counterpoint to perform a ritual that will fix everything and Essun trying to stop her, because it will kill her. This makes for a strong and suitably epic conclusion with huge magical energies unleashed and lots of female agency, but there is also a lengthy exposition of the Big Events that triggered the fifth seasons which involves an introduced and vaguely described god-in-all-but-name that annoyed me for the same reasons as "the Magic" in Robin Hobb's Soldier Son books, and which is recounted through a series of flashbacks that damage the pacing. And while there is a justification for it, the telling of Essun's story in second person is a stylistic quirk that I grew tired of very quickly.

For me these books had some serious issues and didn't deserve the sequential Hugos that they received, despite the brave attempt to do an epic fantasy that is female-focused and not obviously Tolkien-derived. While it was different, the ending is not a million miles away from the one that I envisaged for my roleplaying game, and I think that a trilogy that is worthy of multiple Hugos should have more considered worldbuilding than the wild effusions of an immature teenager.