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The Stone Sky (Jemisin)
4/5. Okay, I went and read The Stone Sky and it was really extremely good and I was not sure it was possible to follow up Fifth Season with something even more intense (Obelisk Gate was very good, but not, I think, more intense), but in fact it did turn out to be the case. I basically finished this book saying to myself, "Yup, don't even need to read anything else published this year," because I will be shocked if this one doesn't win both the Hugo and the Nebula. (That being said, I have read really not that much published this year, including Provenance, so I should perhaps hedge my bets — and feel free to suggest other possibilities to me :) ) Also, I turned out to be wrong about the second book, which I like a lot more in retrospect, and I thought there was a particular mode of failure in this book (but I might be wrong given that I was wrong about the second book).
The worldbuilding in these books is spectacular. I loved that we got a thorough explanation of everything I was wondering about in the first two books. I have heard complaints that the Syl Anagist sections were not so great, but I loved them because I eat up that kind of backstory explanation of what the rusting rust is going on!
(Although I did have issues with these sections, as you will see. But as infodump-explanatory sections I loved them.)
Where I was wrong about the second book: I said I thought that the narrative was much more in sympathy with Nassun than Essun, and in particular that Essun's unorthodox parenting was frowned upon by the authorial voice. I still think that is a valid reading of the second book taken by itself — but the third book makes it clear that everyone in these books is super messed up and messing each other up, and there is both an understanding of dysfunction and sympathy for it, and it becomes really a very interesting commentary on how dysfunction begets dysfunction.
In general, there is a deep compassion for all the characters in this book, from Essun to Nassun to Schaffa to Hoa, and that is perhaps one of the most compelling things about an extremely compelling series.
But also, this deep compassion just makes the failure mode stand out even more — there is no compassion and sometimes (in my opinion) a lack of clear sight on a societal level. And I want to be clear: these books are all about the ways that societies fail, and I am not saying that there should be compassion for the ways in which societies fail, especially those failures (as in Sky, as in our own world) that involve the literal and metaphorical destruction of people. But there is seeing things clearly and uncompassionately (as Le Guin sometimes does, for example), and then there's what turns out here to be a certain cartoon-villain-ish quality to the Syl Anagists, who literally and explicitly genetically engineer entities (they code to me as basically equivalent to androids, wholly created beings with abilities that make them very useful as tools, and human/human-level intelligence) to look like the people they conquered so that they can enslave them and feel superior to them.
The problem here is, I was nodding along with the seamless way that Jemisin was integrating thoughts about oppression and race and fear and ability and the way that oppression propagates itself and — and it's all really well done and thoughtful and relevant to present-day situations and making me examine uncomfortable things and — and then we get something like this and I'm like… this isn't… relevant to anything in my experience, or in the way people behave in my experience. People don't do that. They in fact do the opposite. Think about all the stories ever told by white people about robots and androids built to look like humans, including the ones where the robots are evil and take over and definitely including the ones where the robots are inferior to humans (the vast majority of them). Are they ever coded as non-white? They are not! I generally feel like in the modern US, at least, the failure mode, the racism, if you will, is generally not in deliberately coming up with people to subjugate — the failure is still there, but it's exactly the opposite failure. If you don't see someone as fully and equally human, it doesn't even occur to you to make your creations in their image. (*)
This makes the people of Syl Anagist, who do apparently think that they have to deliberately generate their creations -- with much care and trouble! -- in the form of their enemies, seem alien and not like us, not like their faults are ours, which I feel works very much against what she's going for.
But, I mean, she's done something similar in two out of three of the other books I've read by her (Obelisk Gate I can't remember a really egregious example of this), so it wasn't like I didn't know what I was getting myself into — and in basically every other respect it is pretty amazing.
(*) I guess there are stories about men making female robots/androids. I'd argue that is a little different, though, in the sense that I feel like that's about objectifying rather than subjugation.
The worldbuilding in these books is spectacular. I loved that we got a thorough explanation of everything I was wondering about in the first two books. I have heard complaints that the Syl Anagist sections were not so great, but I loved them because I eat up that kind of backstory explanation of what the rusting rust is going on!
(Although I did have issues with these sections, as you will see. But as infodump-explanatory sections I loved them.)
Where I was wrong about the second book: I said I thought that the narrative was much more in sympathy with Nassun than Essun, and in particular that Essun's unorthodox parenting was frowned upon by the authorial voice. I still think that is a valid reading of the second book taken by itself — but the third book makes it clear that everyone in these books is super messed up and messing each other up, and there is both an understanding of dysfunction and sympathy for it, and it becomes really a very interesting commentary on how dysfunction begets dysfunction.
In general, there is a deep compassion for all the characters in this book, from Essun to Nassun to Schaffa to Hoa, and that is perhaps one of the most compelling things about an extremely compelling series.
But also, this deep compassion just makes the failure mode stand out even more — there is no compassion and sometimes (in my opinion) a lack of clear sight on a societal level. And I want to be clear: these books are all about the ways that societies fail, and I am not saying that there should be compassion for the ways in which societies fail, especially those failures (as in Sky, as in our own world) that involve the literal and metaphorical destruction of people. But there is seeing things clearly and uncompassionately (as Le Guin sometimes does, for example), and then there's what turns out here to be a certain cartoon-villain-ish quality to the Syl Anagists, who literally and explicitly genetically engineer entities (they code to me as basically equivalent to androids, wholly created beings with abilities that make them very useful as tools, and human/human-level intelligence) to look like the people they conquered so that they can enslave them and feel superior to them.
The problem here is, I was nodding along with the seamless way that Jemisin was integrating thoughts about oppression and race and fear and ability and the way that oppression propagates itself and — and it's all really well done and thoughtful and relevant to present-day situations and making me examine uncomfortable things and — and then we get something like this and I'm like… this isn't… relevant to anything in my experience, or in the way people behave in my experience. People don't do that. They in fact do the opposite. Think about all the stories ever told by white people about robots and androids built to look like humans, including the ones where the robots are evil and take over and definitely including the ones where the robots are inferior to humans (the vast majority of them). Are they ever coded as non-white? They are not! I generally feel like in the modern US, at least, the failure mode, the racism, if you will, is generally not in deliberately coming up with people to subjugate — the failure is still there, but it's exactly the opposite failure. If you don't see someone as fully and equally human, it doesn't even occur to you to make your creations in their image. (*)
This makes the people of Syl Anagist, who do apparently think that they have to deliberately generate their creations -- with much care and trouble! -- in the form of their enemies, seem alien and not like us, not like their faults are ours, which I feel works very much against what she's going for.
But, I mean, she's done something similar in two out of three of the other books I've read by her (Obelisk Gate I can't remember a really egregious example of this), so it wasn't like I didn't know what I was getting myself into — and in basically every other respect it is pretty amazing.
(*) I guess there are stories about men making female robots/androids. I'd argue that is a little different, though, in the sense that I feel like that's about objectifying rather than subjugation.
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Fifth Season is... intense. And quite violent and ragey and I wouldn't rec it to my spouse or sister, who don't really go for that sort of thing. But it is very very good!