By Sarah Bracy, Lauren Ngo, & Jose Romero
The first line of our blog post, “Starting Over After the End of the World” reads, “With pain there is beauty…” and now that we have finished reading The Stone Sky and have learned about Syl Anagist, we realize this line carries a much deeper meaning. We now know that Syl Anagist was built on the pain and suffering of stone eaters (at that time called tuners), who were treated as less than humans because they were created to emulate the Niess people, for whom the people of Syl Anagist had a deep distrust and hate. We were originally led to imagine Syl Anagist as a beautiful utopia, an unattainable ideal that everyone needs to work towards. But Jemisin soon revealed to us that the breathtaking Syl Anagist was only so beautiful because its people gleaned power from Father Earth without a second thought. In The Stone Sky, Hoa says at one point that these Sylanagistines used the magic that came from Father Earth because they believed he had no feelings — in short, they assumed he had no humanity. Continue reading “Beauty is Pain”