Weaving their stories together is Hoa's narration, explaining the dead world he came from, the origin of the Obelisks, orogeny, and how - not to mention why - they lost the moon in the first place.įrom a storytelling perspective, The Stone Sky satisfied me completely. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Stillness, her young daughter Nassun's powers are growing - and a rival faction of Stone Eaters are guiding her to use the Obelisks for their own ends. If the Broken Earth trilogy as a whole shows a world where cataclysm and upheaval is the norm, 'The Stone Sky' interrogates what right worlds built on oppression and genocide have to exist.Įnter Essun, a middle-aged woman who's lived through more horror than most, and who is now the world's most skilled orogene, given the unenviable task of harnessing power from the Obelisks in order to catch the wayward moon and bring the Seasons to an end with the help of a Stone Eater named Hoa - not quite human, and older than the Seasons. The only reason humanity's survived this shifting landscape at all is the work of orogenes, people born with the innate ability to manipulate thermodynamics and quell a quake before it starts - but this power has made them a degraded, detested and oppressed minority for centuries.

Life has bent over millennia to accommodate Fifth Seasons, the world-changing experience of an earthquake that damages the environment for generations. Strange remnants of dead civilisations, called Obelisks, float through a sky with no moon in it.

The world of the Stillness is one of constant turmoil: The ground beneath people's feet is treacherously prone to quakes, to the point where everyone speaks of the Evil Earth. The gratitude and love I feel for these books, and for what The Stone Sky adds to the triptych, is staggering. Jemisin's The Obelisk Gate, like The Fifth Season before it, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel last weekend, just in time to pave the way for The Stone Sky with well-deserved acclaim.īut the fact that The Stone Sky sticks the landing of this astonishing trilogy with timeliness and rigor is the smallest, simplest thing I have to say about it. How?Īmal El-Mohtar is the Hugo Award-winning author of The Honey Month and the editor of Goblin Fruit, an online poetry magazine.Ĭoncluding a trilogy is a tricky business - not least when its first two installments have been justly honored with the highest awards in genre fiction. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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