Fantasy Series that Ruined My Life, Vol. 4

In the desolation of adulthood, time becomes thin. Ages come and pass. Stretches between books become echoing rifts. When you finally look back, the path may be lost to sight. Don't lose heart, traveler - there are new roads yet ahead. Jemisin's Broken Earth is one such, and the final chapter in this reverie. 

The Broken Earth
There’s always a wasteland before the end​

By the post-Rona years, the obtrusive process of living — changing jobs, moving cities, divvying time between muggle work and social functions — had left me with several years’ worth of unfinished series on the shelf. Apart from occasionally checking to see if Gurm’s football blogs had any buried references to The Winds of Winter, the big debuts and marquee titles flowed past me. I was writing stories here and there, polishing pilots and availing myself of inane online writing contests, but I was out of the scene and off the road, shacked up in another cottage town, my travel cart parked and filled with potted plants. You never see them coming, the somnambulant diversions — the seductive islands of Circe, the soporific streams of Mirkwood, the poppy fields of the Emerald City. One day you’re about your noble quest, the next you’re disarmed, dispelled, domesticated. A lesser dork might call it growing up. Who can keep up with endless fantasy series when the porch needs replacing, or a family member is sick, or the mice keep getting in? So, you park your cart, sit for a spell, admire the flowers, try the wine. Next thing you know, there’s Aunt Em and Uncle Henry hovering over your bed, and your noble quest and strange friends and the little orange dudes start to fade away, and the yellow brick road slips from your mind like a trail of sand.
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On the fantasy map of life — and I’ll be honest, I hadn’t seen that thing in a while. Stashed away in a treasure chest? Plundered by a goblin? Eventually I found it, rolled up in a poster tube. I unfurled it and blew off the dust. Yep, I was lost. I knew my general location, somewhere to the north of the Mire of Responsibility, but I had no inkling through which stony pass I’d come or in which direction I was going. Couldn’t have told you which duke or lord ruled the fiefdom. Did the endless stream of fantasy releases flow around me, or had I been swept away?

​Thankfully I caught a handhold, a rough stone called The Broken Earth trilogy. Winner of three consecutive Hugos, the crown of every book shop’s staff rec display — some tidings reach even the remotest peasants’ ears.

I read the first book, and it stirred the runes in my warlock brain. It was, in fact, the temblor that drove me back to my moldering tomes. I devoured The Fifth Season like I had a quiz to procrastinate for, but what about Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God, there on the shelf above them? Surely I hadn’t left Malazan forever? And those Sanderson Wheels up there on the top shelf? It was then that I began to trace the path from Jemison back to Tolkien, and to understand how entwined each was with my journey, and how those old roads led to my present. Not just because The Broken Earth is great fantasy, but because it’s so clearly drawn from the miles of Jemison’s own journey. It’s a raw and personal story of ancestral pain and lonely otherness, set in a bitter world of hard conditions and stratified societies. There are stark echoes of segregation and slavery, hard truths from our past and future incarnated in a fantasy vessel. It’s easy to imagine how inheriting those truths shaped the author who shaped the story. She walked her roads and found something to give. No doubt needed to get those ravaging truths out of her soul, to strike them into a million paperback flames for others to carry.

It made me consider the miles behind me and the things I’d picked up along the way. The solitudes of adolescence, the disappointments of high school, the deliriums of college — and all the stories that burned in me as I made my way through. The variegated grinds of life, mnemonically linked to allegories of dark towers and noble quests. The troughs and tragedies of adulthood, salved by the wisdom and humor of travelers who’d gone before.

Could those experiences, gathered up and lined with newspaper, give a bit of light of their own? My dark roads weren’t beset by physical danger or hunger or injustice. The only discrimination I’ve faced is as a Dave Matthews Band fan. But I am a millennial. I know the kids who get left behind. I felt my friends’ anxiety when it was time to go home. I saw how neglect and abuse dim the light in people’s eyes. I watched classmates give up their education and disappear on the other side of the chainlink fence. My generation watched the towers fall and the oligarchs whip our country into a blood frenzy to plunder the Middle East. I’ve grieved and lost and seen death and madness up close. Who hasn’t? That’s living.

And as the wheels of living turned, I had stories that turned with me. Always there was a door to step through, a parallel path that helped make the main quest make sense. For each drudgery, a world; for each doom, a lesson; for each disillusionment, a new dream. Is that not the point of epic narratives? What culture didn’t grow up swaddled in mythology? Homer, Dante, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana and the Vedas — stories are the foundation of civilizations. To the individual nerd, epic works are less an escape than a way to process life, less a distraction than a companion. They’re a refuge for the vulnerable or ruminative mind, and a cipher of physical and emotional memories made as we navigate our roads.

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” ― Cyril Connolly

And so here I am, countless fantasy series later, a dagger on a map made of stories, with a lifetime of weird winding roads behind and parts unknown ahead. My shelves are lined with the chronicles of my journey, companions caked in the muck of the mires they drew me through. Still they call to me, encouraging me to continue our travels, and to remember the dreams of that young warlock with unlimited orb-gazing time. Reminding me to covet every minute I can scrape from my day, to grind eternally and make a point of this story. They inflicted on me a need to write things down, to tell people where I’ve been and what I learned and where to find the best falafel. A need to produce, if not the great American fantasy novel, at least some stories that illuminate dark places. And they helped me understand why people who create are compelled to do so, why they set themselves assignments and deadlines and agonies on top of their muggle work and responsibilities.

It’s because it’s all real. There are dark lords and hoarding dragons, and cults of delusion and servants of evil. Always have been. But as those demons are real, so are there brave and noble ordinary folk, who use their talents to put out the eyes of tyrants or carry their friends up burning mountains or just tell the ringwraiths to fuck off their mushroom farm. There are fellowships of valor and networks of resistance. And there are creators whose work helps us understand this world of heroes and monsters. They do it to help themselves feel better, and maybe even help someone else along their dark roads. 

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Review: N.K. Jemison, The Obelisk Gate

​The Broken Earth is the lone recent release on this nostalgia trip, and the first multi-volume fantasy series I’d started after a long drought. Having that space from the scene, I was able to experience it outside the context of the current genre wave. (What wave are we on? Four? Five? Surely we’re past the Age of Ice and Fire. Is this the Maasozoic?) 
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It’s a work of art. When a movie fires on all cylinders — acting, directing, cinematography, sound, editing — you get an experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts. You get The Godfather. You get Lebowski. With Broken Earth, the characters, structure, pacing, language, and lore all coalesce and compress and transmute their rough aggregates into gold. To use a rock analogy.

Jemison’s Stillness is a supercontinent governed by rigorous, if mysterious, geologic mechanics. Its lore is deep, its history fathomless. The prose and fantasy vernacular score the world with terse, rugged textures. The nonlinear structure and shifting viewpoints immerse you in mystery and invite critical speculation — and Jemisin trusts you’ll find your way without needless exposition. The magic, the rules, the culture are revealed in subtle hints and glimpses, just peripheral details that serve a very character-driven story with a molten-hot social impetus.
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The first book left me with wounds that needed dressing. Back, then, to the stone eaters and the roggas and the obelisks, and the grim humorless people scratching out an existence on Father Earth. Back to Essun, Nassun, and Alabaster, characters whose own wounds shake civilizations and move mountains.

The Obelisk Gate broadens our relationship with each viewpoint character, particularly Essun. Essun the woman, Essun the mother, Essun the outcast. Her epic quest isn’t to defeat a dark lord or dispose of a cursed artifact, but to survive in a world of ineffable hostility, in a culture that vilifies her very existence. To live and protect the few things she finds worth living for. In this middle book, we get to see some of that living — Essun at moments unpursued, belonging, even loved — reprieves that raise the emotional stakes and give new weight to the corn-brained wickedness and cosmic horrors that dog her existence throughout the series. There is some healing, and there is some resolution, followed naturally by new pain and mystery and epic convergence. It’s a rough ride, uncomfortably familiar, a Butleresque grimdark fantasy to unscab our own grimdark history. Colonial-style caste system, backward-thinking muggles, a world defined by eternally recurring apocalypses…

The tropes are well worn, but the series feels like a fresh take, way outside the gravity of Tolkien, Gurm, Maas. The narrative layers and experimental structure create depth and mystery without feeling gimmicky or sacrificing intimacy. You’re working the whole time, figuring things out. Maybe the 2010s and 2020s are full of other bangers that slid past me, but I think the unprecedented Hugo threepeat is well deserved. The writing hits on every level, and what is written is important — an unflinching interrogation of our own broken societies, broken hearts, and broken Earth.