Lucas Blogs About Books

I So what's this book's deal? Oh, this is The Obelisk Gate , it's the second entry in N.K. Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy. Wait, did you blog about the first book  without me? I did. And you expect me to be able to keep up? I mean, I can write you however I like. Maybe you read the first book but haven't read the second and I don't need to fill you in. Well, maybe you could just give me a quick recap of the story so far. Okay. So on this continent called the Stillness there are people called orogenes who can control seismic activity. They are feared and oppressed. An annoying feature of life on the Stillness are Fifth Seasons which are seismic catastrophes leading to conditions not unlike nuclear winter. The main character is Essun, an orogene who tried to escape and live a normal life until her husband, Jija, learned the truth, murdered their son, Uche, and ran off with their daughter, Nassun. All of this happens against the backdrop of a Fifth Season that is p...

Oops! I left in the bookmark. You may have heard of N.K. Jemisin because she's been a bit of a big deal in the speculative fiction scene lately. And there's a good reason for that: each entry in her Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. That's three consecutive Hugo wins (obviously), and it's also the first time every entry in a series has won. Which is why I picked up this book and decided to give it a shot. The Fifth Season  is the first of the Broken Earth books, and it begins with the end of the world, sort of. See, it takes place on a supercontinent known as the Stillness. This is a bit of a misnomer as there is a colossal fault running along its east-west axis which is subject to extraordinary seismic activity, These earthquakes and volcanic flare-ups are referred to as seasons, and when they're bad enough to cause something akin to a nuclear winter, they're referred to as fifth seasons. But we're just getting started on the...