Category: McCoy 101/431 Jemisin Fall 2018

While many of us try to put forth a final effort in fulfilling the remaining posts, I’d be lying if I felt super confident when conceiving the building blocks for the reflective essay today. The benefits of starting now are sure to be a blessing for brainstorming. The brainstorming also gives way for me to look at some of my earliest notes – as far back as the visit to the ISC building. It’s been a while since I’ve remembered how fondly the Welles building felt in late August, and even more of a while since I’ve looked at rocks for class. Geodes forever, right?

As for the ISC, I’m looking back and noting the “geological mind” aspect of minerals and sedimentary material that makes up a great deal of the great rock, and noting the previous depth of ones whom consume rocks and things that erode really give a shape as to what may come together. Would it be fair to consider this assignment as a means of heavy erosion, development, and a thorough representation of the rocks we have been musing on? I’m especially referring to the rock paper we were given so long ago (to which I still have mine, actually). I remember writing down the line from the professor speaking with us: “There’s constant recycling, and the rocks are persistent.” While the ties in whatever we may be writing about or the context of our literature need not be exclusively tied to geology, their similarities speak a great deal of things when revisiting the parallel designs of our world and that of the fictional one we’ve been acquainted with.

Seeing a number of these fascinating images of the world may not encourage me to become a geologist anytime soon, but the assimilation of the world around us may be no different than assimilating our own material into a profound piece that concludes all that we’ve studied so far. Just a thought.

I believe that one of the most unfair parts of life, considering both reality and the world that resides in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, is generalization and the misleading, overarching idea that one individual can represent others as long as both parties can be remotely categorized into the same group. In the prologue of The Fifth Season, in reference to who I am assuming is Father Earth and a stone eater (because it does not explicitly say), it says, “She often treats him as though he represents his whole species. He does the same to her.” (The Fifth Season, 6) This line sets the scene quite well for the rest of the trilogy, because it emphasizes a very real and unfortunate phenomenon that is visible in both the way orogenes and other minorities are treated in The Stillness as well as how minorities are sometimes treated in our own society. Continue reading “You Are Your Own Person”

A big question that I wrestled with throughout this series was how reliable is our narrator? It was something I struggled with more in The Fifth Season more than any of the other books because, up until the end, we did not know who the narrator was. At first he seemed unreliable because he had information he was deliberately not sharing with us, talking about obelisks in the prologue he says that they’re “blurring now and again as if they are not quite real-though this may only be a trick of the light. (It isn’t)” (Jemisin, The Fifth Season, 8). And he does this again when in the scene where Alabaster creates the rift, “When she turns to the man—slowly; stone eaters are slow aboveground, except for when they aren’t” (Jemisin, The Fifth Season, 6). It is all apart of Jemisin’s style of course, she deliberately withholds information from us for a bigger payoff later when it all seemingly comes together. However, because this is her style I was very vary of Hoa for a long time.

Continue reading “Coming To Terms With An Unconventional Narrator”

In The Broken Earth Series there is no moon, and because of that the Earth is altered. As I’ve read this series, I’ve wondered what actually would happen if the Moon were to cease to exist. Continue reading “What Would Happen If We Lost The Moon?”

Thinking about world-building and the different components necessary to flesh out a story before the actual drafting process begins brought me to the concept of magic systems. In The Broken Earth, orogenes’ magic system relies on energy within the earth or, as we eventually realize, on the “magic” which exists within all living things. But what makes a magic system successful? Is it the scope? Or is it the rules and limitations which inhibit the system?

Continue reading “Magic Systems: The Restricted Section”

When Dr. McCoy assessed my group’s collaborative blog post, she asked how we accomplished working together and being able to formulate our thoughts as a group. I’ll admit I am usually skeptical about group projects: I like to work on my own. However, I think that working with my group on this blog post opened my eyes to the rewards of being able to not just discuss texts with other people, but to be able to put this analysis in writing in the form of a group blog post. I think my group members worked off of each other to build a strong analysis of the catastrophe we wrote about, the impact it had on society, and how this related to Jemisin’s trilogy. Continue reading “The Benefits of Collaborative Work”

Coming into my final blog post of the semester I was unsure of what I wanted to write about. For most of my previous blog posts I had a general idea either from a class period or from something I thought about while reading of what I wanted my blog post to be about. This final post came in the moment as I was listening to music while doing work and happened to be listening to a song called “Chum” by one of my favorite rappers, Earl Sweatshirt. Listening to this song clarified something I had been thinking about in The Broken Earth Trilogy since we started reading The Fifth Season.  Continue reading “Forming an Identity”

 

“Indifference is worse than hate” (341). In The Obelisk Gate, Essun relays her devastation once realizing that one of the people in Castrima has decided that Essun is not a person, because she is a rogga. In that woman’s eyes, roggas are not worthy of humanity due to the way roggas are placed in the social hierarchy in the Stillness. In my perspective, indifference largely stems from ignorance.

Continue reading “Indifference :/”

As someone who has always been interested in reading and writing, the intricacy of Jemisin’s fictional world in The Broken Earth really threw me for a loop. How do you create a world? What makes it actually work? Where do you even start? It just so happens that lately I’ve been watching some author panels at conventions like Comic Con (Nerdy? Maybe so.), and these questions seem to come up quite often. While every author’s mind works differently, and various processes will certainly work for some while not for others, I was really interested in hearing what popular authors had to say. Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicle series, talked about the aspects of fantasy world-building. J. R. R. Tolkien, Rothfuss explains, included rich languages in his creation of Middle Earth because he loved language. That was what interested him. Rothfuss also said in this video (around 23 minutes in) that he himself likes to focus on currency:

“I’m a geek for currency. And so my economy, I actually have it all worked out, and that filters into my books… you’re a geek for something. And if that’s, like, herbology, or, like, the nature of the night sky, or plate tectonics, it’s like, revel in your geekery, roll around in it and make that a part of your world, because that will be really interesting to the people reading because you’re interested in it.”

Continue reading “Building the Stillness”