The stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

[lightreads]

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).

Comments

[cyprinella]

Interesting to hear that about the POV choice. Andrea was listening to one of the books from this series on one of our livestock roadtrips and I couldn't get past the POV. Didn't help that it was probably somewhere in the middle of the book but that and the narration put me off from ever picking the series up.

[lightreads]

Yeah, there's an actual reason -- the second person narrator is literally relating parts of the story to one of the characters, who for reasons has forgotten most of it. But yeah. It takes some adjusting.

[jadelennox]

while I agree that it was anticlimactic, it's more than a 3/5 in my personal ranking system. I definitely thought it was stellar.

But I know what you mean about that phenomenon where providing the explanation undercuts it. It's actually the reason I never liked conspiracy theory books or television shows, because the puzzle is always fascinating and the resolution is always either boring or nonsense. (There are exceptions -- Orphan Black was so well acted and written that I didn't care that the conspiracy eventually just got silly. But for the most part, from Foucault's Pendulum to Snow Crash to Alias to Crying of Lot 49, the more convoluted the narrative's puzzle, the sillier or nonsensical the resolution.) The Stone Sky worked for me because it wasn't that convoluted a puzzle.

interestingly I wasn't sure that the trilogy had clear answers. Like, definitely I felt that the trilogy was against any kind of appeasement, but it also didn't particularly like the alternate solutions that had been proposed.

In general I've really been enjoying stories (pro and fan) that wrestle with the reality that the shitty actions of people in the past put people in the present (both people in power and people who are being hurt) into really unsolvable puzzles, and the best you can do is... Well. Try to fail in the best possible way.

[lightreads]

Yes, it's not so much a clear answer as a "well, this is the best of a bad set of options." I assumed basically from page one of this book that we were heading for a scenario where the kid would have to make the painful decision to "fix" the problem instead of burning it all down, despite her completely understandable inclinations. And I like that her desire for destruction isn't just a function of her youth -- there are notable adults who would have completely agreed with her. But the decision she makes seemed inevitable to me. That's part of the point, I think -- that the people who have arguably paid the highest price and suffered the most are the ones who have to stand up and make the hard call.

I contrast the ending to that of The Girl With All the Gifts, which, spoilers, comes down on the other side. The burn-it-all-down-we're-all-fucked-anyway side. Though in that case there isn't as much blame to go around.