2016 Hugo-nominated science-fantasy. As the world ends, two orogenes
try to protect their little patches of it. Definitely don't try to
start the series here.
I'm not going to say much about the plot because of spoilers, but
there are two primary narratives going on here: Essun, one of the
voices of the first book, living in and protecting an underground
community, and Nassun, her young daughter, also an orogene (people
with psychic powers to control earthquakes and such like), on the road
with her father.
In both cases it's second-person narration, always somewhat
offputting, with the same voice; but where this book really falls
short of the first, for me, is that it doesn't dig into the mindsets
of slavery and oppression in anything like the way The Fifth Season
did. There we had a really interesting examination of the way the
orogenes had become complicit in their own oppression as the only way
to survive; here we have one person who's pretty much broken free of
that and is discovering amazing new things while being permanently
gloomy, and another who's young enough to believe what people tell her
most of the time until she eventually grows up enough to break out for
herself.
This is the middle book of a trilogy. In the 1990s that was a damning
thing to say on its own, since too often it meant the long dull
journey between the interesting setup of book one and the interesting
conclusion of book three; a fair amount of recent writing has managed
to get away from that syndrome, but here it comes back in force. This
book contains some leftover bits of setup and some early hints of
resolution, and mostly not much change in the protagonists, except
that their powers wax and wane as the plot demands. In the first book,
the world was unambiguously ending, and the story was about how a
person should cope with that; now, there's some hope that it can be
saved, and that's a perverse disappointment. It's as if On the Beach
had ended with someone inventing a fallout-cleaning machine Just In
Time.
And all that's a damn shame, because once you get away from the
middle-book problems what's left is rather excellent. It's still a
fascinating world, albeit one that smells like the setup for a trolley
problem; the writing is fine except when oh no oh no it gets
self-indulgent; most importantly, the people are not simply
representative of single impulses and stereotypes the way many moral
tales would be, but always complex and interesting.
It's still distinctly better than many other books I've read recently,
but it's very much a step down from The Fifth Season.
To be followed by The Stone Sky. This work was nominated for the
2017 Hugo Awards.
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