Tag Archives: Ursula K. Le Guin

The Broken Earth Trilogy

The Broken Earth: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky coversReading each volume of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin left me electrified. The first two books, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, won the past two annual Hugo awards for best novel—a rare occurrence. Her final book in the series, The Stone Sky, is up for the 2018 Hugo. Here’s why I think this science-fiction/epic fantasy trilogy is so important, and why I’m rooting for it to win. (It’s largely spoiler-free.)

The Broken Earth gives us a vastly-scaled vision of global environmental catastrophe.

With Essun, the main character, we enter a world that long ago suffered a planet-wide injury, which has locked the earth into unending cycles of convulsion. Periods of relative stillness are punctuated by Fifth Seasons, with earthquakes, eruptions, and toxic fallout that threaten humankind’s survival. The people of Essun’s time call their planet “Father Earth.” This name jolted me whenever I read it, challenging my ingrained understanding of our planet as Mother Earth, Gaia, the Greek Demeter, etc. But rather than seen as nurturing, this Father Earth is viewed as angry, unpredictable, and punishing, like an Old Testament Yahweh.

A genetically gifted group is the oppressed minority.

Essun is an orogene, possessing a genetic mutation that allows her to both amplify and calm a geological disturbance. Because untrained orogenes may trigger seismic events when they’re under stress, they are feared, shunned, despised and sometimes killed. Even when adopted and trained in the harsh sanctuary of the Fulcrum, their lives are hedged in by duty, even to the point of forced reproduction. Essun is also a woman of color, but in this world race and gender aren’t markers for oppression, functioning more like ethnicity in ours. Being an orogene is what defines her identity and her fate.

We feel the destructive effects of oppression burrowing deep into individuals.

In order to keep her safe, Essun traumatizes her daughter, Nassun, pushing her at an early age to learn to control her gift. Essun herself has been abused and ostracized as a child—and that’s only the beginning of her many psychic injuries. Even Schaffa, Essun’s morally ambiguous, Fulcrum-appointed guardian, is emotionally deformed and controlled by institutionalized pain.

Essun’s own suffering provides the raw, long-running engine that powers the book and animates the larger story. She’s a mother who has lost her children, to fear of orogenes and to the system that controls them. Over the course of the books, she creates and loses multiple family groups in the same way. Among her other hurts are the harms she is forced to inflict on others, given the narrow range of choices she has in an unjust world. The parallels to the experiences of the enslaved are immediate; the anguish of parents and children separated from each other, more relevant than ever.

Jemisin’s narrative structure is brilliant, gradually evolving to carry the expanding spheres of the story.

Essun’s story unfolds in second-person, at first by an anonymous narrator who addresses her as “you.” Later, we learn the identity of the narrator, a character in the story; and in the final book, we learn how that character’s history is central to understanding the sweeping, millennias-old forces that shaped Essun’s broken world. I was left in a state of stunned and grateful admiration at the scale of Jemisin’s writerly authority. By the end we’ve learned how the orogenes began, the meaning of the massive floating obelisks left over from a dead civilization, and the origin of the apocalyptically destructive Fifth Seasons.

With all its vast worldbuilding, the story grounds itself not only in individual lives, but in what have been traditionally women’s concerns…

…how we raise children, make and keep (or lose) homes, how we make communities with whatever is at hand—the humble, necessary building-blocks of culture. Among the six nominees for the Hugo awards this year, only The Stone Sky and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 take place on a home planet; the others are all set in space, either on ships, space stations, or faraway colonized planets.

The romance of space is fantastic and still worth writing about. But Jemisin takes the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler and makes it her own. Like Le Guin, she assumes the continuing importance of women’s everyday lives and concerns in larger narratives. Like Butler, another African-American author, she insists on the need of children and other vulnerable people for community even in the most desperate circumstances. Jemisin adds a commanding voice to this growing continent in the science fiction/fantasy world. All this is why I want to see Jemisin win an unprecedented third consecutive Hugo for The Stone Sky, the shattering finale to a powerful and precedent-breaking series.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling makes the world

Maria Popova has written onstorytelling around the fire her wonderful website Brain Pickings about Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on the nature of speech, “Telling is Listening.” This brought back to me the sense of how much Le Guin—a master storyteller herself—has made the importance of storytelling a central theme in many of her novels and stories.

In the essay, from her collection The Wave in the Mind, Le Guin argues that human communication is not some mechanistic process, involving the transmission of data bits from one brain to another, but is a complex and mutually created event. The message, she says, can’t be separated from “the relationship between speaker and hearer.” Language itself is social. In an image recalling the primal experience of listening to the storyteller around a fire, she says, “The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers.”

That very human experience appears again and again in Le Guin’s work, where she has meditated on its significance in different ways. In The Telling, one of her Hainish cycle novels, an ancient culture has been kept alive by the spoken sharing of its history, myths and poetry, while its sacred texts are hidden away from the authoritarian regime that now rules the planet. Then, even this connection is threatened when the authorities outlaw any gatherings to hear The Telling, as it’s called. Le Guin’s young-adult fantasy trilogy Annals of the Western Shore begins with Erroc, a boy who rejects his inherited gift for “undoing,” only to eventually find his calling as a powerful storyteller. In Voices, the second book in the series, Erroc helps the members of a people whose tradition of learning and literature is under attack by a fundamentalist group.

These books tell us that stories, spoken or written, are not just information, but the medium that weaves a culture into existence—in the same way that speech, for Le Guin, is the medium of a shared understanding. But in one short story of Le Guin’s that has stayed with me, and that Popova reminded me of, the power of storytelling goes even beyond this.

The Shobies’ Story” is another Hainish cycle story, from Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. The crew of the Shoby, an intergalactic spaceship, embark on the first voyage with a new faster-than-light propulsion system that will involve a human crew. No one knows what to expect, and one crew member’s attempts to explain the new system make it sound more metaphysical than mechanical: “‘It is not physical, and it is not not physical,’” he tries. “‘So the ship will be moved,’” another asks, “‘by ideas?’”

The trip is instantaneous. But where exactly they’ve arrived is not clear; and, more frightening than that, everyone, from the old navigator to the children, seems to be having a different experience—they can’t even agree on what is happening. Something in the trip has fractured their shared reality, and different probable events jostle with each other, all equal in weight. In a later story, a character calls it “‘the chaos experience.’” It’s only when they all sit down at the hearth in their living quarters (yes, this ship has a fireplace) and start to tell a communal story of their journey, that space and time begin to knit back together into a narrative they can agree on.

Wow. “The Shobies’ Story” seems to suggest that we need the mutual creation of stories not just to share cultural knowledge, but even to create the perceived universe that we all agree on. Without the human sharing of speech and story, that understanding breaks down, and we’re lost in our individual dream worlds. This story may offer a mirror of Le Guin’s classic novel The Lathe of Heaven, a nightmare scenario in which one man’s dreams actually change the world he wakes back up to. But in the Shoby crew’s desperate and humble reenactment of an ancient tradition, Le Guin seems to suggest that the shared experience of telling, in some fundamental way, has the power to make, and remake, our world.