It was such an emotional end to such a brutal trilogy. And it will be so strange no longer being immersed in the strange world of the Stillness. I loved the ending and how everything consequential played out. It felt natural and tied into the first books phenomenal opening paragraph so well. The reveal of what Hoa had been doing all along or why the story had been told the way it had been(the shifts between 1st,2nd and third person)was ingenious. Rarely do you ever get to encounter a trilogy that’s solid the whole way through and has such a unique premise. Unabashedly queer and political her work feel very reminiscent of Octavia E Butler(a noted influence of N.K)but feels more modern in it’s voice.

Essun character arc hit me the hardest because of how much she reminded me of not only my mom but also my relationship with her and my gran. The way her and Nassun feel about each other felt too close to comfort.

Now that I’m at the end I’d love to hear what others who have read the series think of the not only the final book but of the series overall. Which characters did they like or hate ? What did you think of the perspective changes or Jemisin’s prose? How does it rank for you compared to other sci-fi or fantasy novels you’ve encountered?

  • felagund@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I thought the first two books were wonderful and deserved all the accolades. I think she really, really botched the landing, but what was botched and how it was done is subtle, and it would be easy to read the third book and not see the problem, so I’m not going to haze you, OP, for liking a book with such a huge flaw. Lots of people did and do.

    Here’s what I mean. SF usually works by what we call “estrangement”, which is really just allegory. Jemisin’s Stillness is both a world unto itself, and an allegory for our own world, just like so many other SF novels. In the case of this trilogy, the allegory is about slavery/racism: this is pretty easy to see, for the most part. The powers that be chain up another group of people, all for the powers’ benefit. Just look at all the language in the first two books that dehumanizes orogenes and turns them into threats and outcastes.

    Now, the tragedy of slavery is that black Africans are just like everyone else: ordinary people. But a whole intellectual superstructure gets invented to dehumanize them: think conservative political cartoonists drawing Michelle Obama as having gorilla arms.

    In Jemisin’s first two books, it seems clear that anyone can be unfortunate enough to be born an orogene. It might run in families, but it’s not a racially-linked characteristic: Jemisin meticulously describes the racial characteristics of pretty much everyone in the first two books, and they’re all over the map.

    But in the third book, she starts to make the point that the orogenes are a particular subrace of humans: this race IS special/different. It ruins the allegory, which only works if anyone could be an orogene, and turns the final novel into a polemic.

    I mean, the world is cool-ass as hell and she’s a really good prose writer, but I got halfway through the third one and was like OMG really? and had to put it down for a long time before I could go back and finish it, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.