After reading through some feedback from Dr. McCoy on my first few blog posts, I have decided to go back through those previous blog posts to sift through and think about some of the things that I had begun to put together, but never revisited after the initial post. It was great to look back at the first posts I made to reflect on all the little, yet equally important things, that have happened throughout the course of The Fifth Season, as well as The Obelisk Gate.

What I would really like to focus in on a bit is the development and change we see in Essun’s character between The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate. Specifically, her negative self-esteem and self-worth is something worth noting. In my Optical Illusions post, I touched upon the shifting between identities that Essun experiences throughout The Fifth Season, and how this shift between three different, separate identities can represent a continuous growth of maturity in Damaya/Syenite/Essun’s character. Essun is able to change and grow stronger-both physically and mentally- while remaining in her current identity once she is introduced to a new society where she is not (for the most part) discriminated against. Continue reading “Backtracking”

On Monday, Dr. McCoy split us into groups and asked my group to research “solarpunk.” We learned that solarpunk inspires Jemisin’s world, Syl Anagist, in The Stone Sky. I had never heard of solarpunk, but I found learning about it fascinating, and it inspired me to think about concepts in Jemisin’s trilogy that I had not yet considered. Solarpunk is an idea discussed on many sites such as Tumblr, in which one blogger pictured a “plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement… a balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics.” The idea developed into a movement focused on sustainable cities with different systems of energy delivery, and imagining a future much different from typical apocalyptic cli-fi novels, in which the future is only imagined as bleak, and the Earth seen as being in a slow decline that will eventually result in disaster. Jennifer Hamilton, a professor at the University of Sydney explains of solarpunk: “Solarpunks argue that the problem with imagining such a dark future (or no future, for that matter) is that, while failure may be cathartic, it thwarts the possibility of thinking about alternatives.” Continue reading “Solarpunk and Solving “Real World” Problems”

Reading The Fifth Season, I was irked as I came across a male Breeder’s weak attempt at a compliment as he said “you’re only forty-three” to Essun in Chapter 14. It was a brief comment, and holds no real significance to the development of the plot. But in the time humans have occupied the planet, women have consistently been categorized and assigned a “worth” based on several physical attributes. But, especially age.

Continue reading “Women and Their Age”

This post was directly inspired by and partially a response to Abby’s wonderful post. In this post, she makes a connection between commentary by Toni Morrison on how “slavery broke the world” and the way Jemisin has Alabaster literally destroy the earth in defiance of the slavery orogenes are put in to.

Continue reading “The Fall”

One of the many books I regret not finding the time to finish is psychologist Robert Jay Lifton’s The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. While I will discuss the insights and illustrations in The Broken Earth series regarding fragmentation in a future blog post, I would like now to address how Lifton and Jemisin are in conversation regarding the age-old topic: “the end of the world” (Jemisin, 2015, literally page 1). More specifically, why do writers such as Jemisin view apocalyptic scenarios as useful for an exploration of Afrofuturism? The key lies not just in what the Afrofuturistic movement is, but what it is not.  Continue reading “Jemisin, Sessing the Symbolic Power of Apocalypse”

I made a very interesting and unintentional connection a few weeks ago between Jemisin’s work and the occurrences in my every day life; I forgot about this connection (in the moment I didn’t even think to write it down, ugh!), but it came back into my mind when I was reading The Obelisk Gate and was grappling with the many questions that encompassed my overall thought of “what the rust is going on?!”.  Continue reading “Parallel Fulcrums”

After watching a part of the “1933 Master’s Race” episode of People’s Century, I became increasingly aware of the parallel between the propaganda of Nazi Germany and the stonelore of The Broken Earth trilogy. Continue reading “Power of Lore”