The stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
Jan. 27th, 2019 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe 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).
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).
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Date: 2019-01-27 09:20 pm (UTC)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.