The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.