The stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky

3/5. Conclusion to this well-decorated trilogy about the earth periodically destroyed from within and the people enslaved to stop it.

This was a little anticlimactic, even as it . . . climaxed and did all of the (mostly wrenching) things I was expecting it to do. I think it's that phenomenon where finally providing the science-fantasy explanation for WTF has been apocalyptically happening sort of . . . undercuts the wonder/horror of it.

But. But this is still thematically lovely, and painful, with interlocked adult/child, slaver/enslaved pairings that shift configuration in unexpected ways. And fundamentally this book is wrestling with some of the basic questions I see my friends wrestling with in a different context: when you live inside an unjust system, is it better to push for change or burn it all down? Better for whom? This trilogy's answers were what I thought they would be, though of course the road to get there, and all its complications, is the point.

Also, for those who care about these things, yes, there is ultimately a Watsonian explanation for the use of the second person POV. It's not just a random structural choice Jemisin made (I mean, it's really not random anyway, it's doing some important load-bearing, but you know what I mean).

The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

The Will to Battle

3/5. Yeah, either you know what Ada Palmer is about by now or none of this is going to make sense.

It took me six months to finish this. To be fair, there has been something increasingly awry in my brain for about that length of time, rendering it difficult for me to start a book and read it straight through. (This is a great trial, let me tell you. I'm genuinely upset by how many books I have in progress at any given time). But also, this isn't really a novel? I mean, this entire series has been couched in enlightenment stylings and structures, rendering it odd to the modern sense of rhythm. But this book in particular flings a lot of science fictional and novelistic conventions out the window and strings together a lot of set pieces and philosophical dialogues with, I am not kidding, increasingly bizarre imagined conversations between the narrator, the reader, and Thomas Hobbes.

Either you're down for that or you're not. I mostly was – this is a kind of diverting batshit erudition that you just don't see every day. But also, it's becoming increasingly clear that the philosophical questions Palmer is interested in may be interesting to me, but only so far as they are an unusual frame for science fictional storytelling. And not because, say, I'm actually interested in thinking deeply about providence.