{"id":11322,"date":"2026-08-10T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11322"},"modified":"2026-08-09T23:07:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T03:07:44","slug":"the-killing-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/10\/the-killing-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Killing Moon."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before she became the<\/em> N.K. Jemisin, first Black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and first author to win that award in three straight years, she was an acclaimed but at least less-known author of sci-fi and fantasy novels and perhaps better known for her speech standing up to the Christian nationalist shithead Theodore Beale, a.k.a Vox Day, who was so mad about it he later tried to blow up the Hugos entirely. Then Jemisin published The Fifth Season<\/em> and became a literary superstar, quite deservingly so, putting the focus squarely on her writing output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Killing Moon<\/a><\/em> is one of her five pre-Hugo novels, a work that stands alone but that came with a sequel published a month later (The Shadowed Sun<\/em>), forming the \u201cDreamblood Duology.\u201d Reading it now, it\u2019s easy to see the seeds that eventually grew into Jemisin\u2019s Broken Earth trilogy, and in some ways it features even stronger character development than those three novels worked into their vast plotlines, producing a book that\u2019s lighter thematically but incredibly fun and gripping to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Killing Moon<\/em> takes place mostly in two rival cities, beginning in Gujaareh, where power is shared between the Prince, who succeeded his father to the throne, and the clergy of the Hetawa temple, who practice magic powered by dreams called narcomancy. Some clergy members known as Gatherers can enter dreams and reap \u201cdreamblood,\u201d which is an extremely powerful substance with addictive properties, while they can also guide dying people gently into death \u2013 or kill those the temple has deemed \u2018corrupted.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story follows Nijiri, a young acolyte in the temple who becomes the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of an elder Gatherer named Ehiru, who is dealing with a spiritual and professional crisis after losing his focus during a gathering and failing to capture the target\u2019s soul, leading to its destruction; and the ambassador from the neighboring city of Kisua, Sunandi, who visits Gujaareh in her professional capacity but becomes the target of an assassination plot involving Ehiru and Nijiri. The three of them begin to work together to unravel the conspiracy behind this scheme, to determine who or what is harvesting souls in Gujaareh beyond the purview of the Temple, and to stop a potential war between the two cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n