Review: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

[Russ Allbery]

The Stone Sky
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Broken Earth #3
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: August 2017
ISBN:      0-316-22925-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     464

So, this is it: the epic conclusion of the series that began with The
Fifth Season. And it is a true conclusion. Jemisin's world is too large
and her characters too deep (and too real) to wrap up into a simple
package, but there's a finality to this conclusion that makes me think
it unlikely Jemisin will write a direct sequel any time soon. (And oh
my do you not want to start with this book. This series must be read in
order.)

I'm writing this several months after finishing the novel in part
because I still find it challenging to put my feelings about this book
into words. There are parts of this story I found frustrating and
others I found unsatisfying, but each time I dig into those
disagreements, I find new layers of story and meaning and I can't see
how the book could have gone any other way. The Stone Sky is in many
ways profoundly uncomfortable and unsettling, but that's also what
makes it so good. Jemisin is tackling problems, emotions, and
consequences that are unsettling, that should be unsettling. Triumphant
conclusions would be a lie. This story hurt all the way through; it's
fitting that the ending did as well. But it's also strangely hopeful,
in a way that doesn't take away the pain.

World-building first. This is, thankfully, not the sort of series that
leaves one with a host of unanswered questions or a maddeningly opaque
background. Jemisin puts all of her cards on the table. We find out
exactly how Essun's world was created, what the obelisks are, who the
stone eaters are, who the Guardians are, and something even of the
origin of orogeny. This is daring after so much intense build-up, and
Jemisin deserves considerable credit for an explanation that (at least
for me) held together and made sense of much of what had happened
without undermining it.

I do have some lingering reservations about the inhuman villain of this
series, which I still think is too magically malevolent (and ethically
simplistic) for the interwoven complexity of the rest of the
world-building. They're just reservations, not full objections, but
buried in the structure of the world is an environmental position
that's a touch too comfortable, familiar, and absolute, particularly by
the standards of the rest of the series.

For the human villains, though, I have neither objections nor
reservations. They are all too believable and straightforward, both in
the backstory of the deep past and in its reverberations and
implications up to Essun's time. There is a moment when the book's
narrator is filling in details in the far past, an off-hand comment
about how life was sacred to their civilization. And, for me, a moment
of sucked-in breath and realization that of course it was. Of course
they said life was sacred. It explained so very much, about so very
many things: a momentary flash of white-hot rage, piercing the
narrative like a needle, knitting it together.

Against that backdrop, the story shifts in this final volume from its
primary focus on Essun to a balanced split between Essun and her
daughter, continuing a transition that began in The Obelisk Gate. Essun
by now is a familiar figure to the reader: exhausted, angry, bitter,
suspicious, and nearly numb, but driving herself forward with
unrelenting force. Her character development in The Stone Sky comes
less from inside herself and more from unexpected connections and
empathy she taught herself not to look for. Her part of this story is
the more traditional one, the epic fantasy band of crusaders out to
save the world, or Essun's daughter, or both.

Essun's daughter's story is... not that, and is where I found both the
frustrations and the joy of this conclusion. She doesn't have Essun's
hard experience, her perspective on the world, or Essun's battered,
broken, reforged, and hardened sense of duty. But she has in many ways
a clearer view, for all its limitations. She realizes some things
faster than Essun does, and the solutions she reaches for are a
critique of the epic fantasy solutions that's all the more vicious for
its gentle emotional tone.

This book offers something very rare in fiction: a knife-edge
conclusion resting on a binary choice, where as a reader I was, and
still am, deeply conflicted about which choice would have been better.
Even though by normal epic fantasy standards the correct choice is
obvious.

The Stone Sky is, like a lot of epic fantasy, a story about
understanding and then saving the world, but that story is told in
counterpoint with a biting examination of the nature of the world
that's being saved. It's also a story about a mother and a daughter,
about raising a child who's strong enough to survive in a deeply unfair
and vicious world, and about what it means to succeed in that goal.
It's a story about community, and empathy, and love, and about facing
the hard edge of loss inside all of those things and asking whether it
was worth it, without easy answers.

The previous books in this series were angry in a way that I rarely see
in literature. The anger is still there in The Stone Sky, but this book
is also sad, in a way that's profound and complicated and focused on
celebrating the relationships that matter enough to make us sad. There
are other stories that I have enjoyed reading more, but there are very
few that I thought were as profound or as unflinching.

Every book in this series won a Hugo award. Every book in this series
deserved it. This is a modern masterpiece of epic fantasy that I am
quite certain we will still be talking about fifty years from now. It's
challenging, powerful, emotional, and painful in a way that you may
have to brace yourself to read, but it is entirely worth the effort.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-22

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>