The Broken Earth Trilogy

Reading 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.

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Also published on Medium.