BROKEN EARTH RPG in the works

Green Ronin are adapting N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy as a tabletop roleplaying game for release this autumn.

Green Ronin already publish licensed RPGs based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series and James S.A. Corey's Expanse books, as well as tabletop version of BioWare's Dragon Age franchise.

Jemisin's Broken Earth series (comprising The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky) is one of the most critically-acclaimed fantasy series of the decade, selling over a million copies and winning an unprecedented three Hugo Awards for Best Novel. The series has also been optioned for television at TNT.

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The world is reeling under the advent of a new Fifth Season, one that threatens to destroy civilisation altogether. Essun and her daughter Nassun are both aware that the return of the long-lost Moon may help resolve the crisis, but their goals are diametrically opposed. With Essun's community recovering from a brutal military confrontation and Nassun's mentor critically ill, both will have to overcome great obstacles to reach their goal...and each other.

Concluding a trilogy when the first two volumes have been acclaimed as the finest fantasy novels of the decade, won a multitude of awards and been optioned for television is a bit of an undertaking, but one that N.K. Jemisin has pulled off with an aplomb. The Stone Sky concludes the Broken Earth trilogy, a post-apocalyptic fantasy of the "Dying Earth" school, set in the far future when the world has become a stranger place where the lines between sorcery, magic and science have become blurred by tens of thousands of years of progress.

The previous volume in the series, The Obelisk Gate, left our characters in difficult predicaments. The Stone Sky soon sets them on their way to a final confrontation where the fate of the world will be decided. So far, so standard. But The Stone Sky isn't your standard fantasy novel. The final confrontation is a clash of ideas and perspectives informed by the well-developed characters and their experiences, not a rote clash of armies (which arguably we got in The Obelisk Gate anyway).

Instead, The Stone Sky is a surprisingly quiet novel. The principle action unfolds through conversations between the characters and through lengthy flashback sequences revealing how the Earth lost the Moon in the first place and how the highly advanced civilisation which caused the Shattering fell from grace. Woven through this is a theme of intolerance: the orogenes of the present-day story being outcast and persecuted for being Other, but also used for their power. This is echoed by events in the flashback story, where entire races are enslaved and persecuted out of fear, but then used for their power.

The Stone Sky, as with the rest of the trilogy, explores powerful themes of disempowerment, slavery and fear of the unknown, but also wraps an interesting and gripping narrative, all built on some very accomplished worldbuilding. This mix of atmosphere, character, theme and story is excellently-handled and recalls the best work of Ursula K. Le Guin: a book where all of the individual pieces that went into making it complement one another and deliver a novel that is far more than the some of its parts.

The novel is not quite perfect. Like The Obelisk Gate, the pace sags on occasion and this is made more noticeable by the lengthy flashbacks to the Shattering. These flashbacks are interesting and beautifully-written, but only reveal a moderate amount of new information not previously given in dialogue. The book isn't quite the equal of The Fifth Season in its pacing and story structure, although the difference is not too egregious.

Overall, The Stone Sky (****½) ends one of the finest fantasy series of recent years in final form, wrong-footing expectations and building on the accomplishments of the first two books in the series. It is available now in the UK and USA.

NK Jemisin sells one millionth novel

N.K. Jemisin has sold over a million copies of her novels, as Orbit Books have announced via the following helpful infographic.

Jemisin published her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in 2010. Since then she was published an additional seven novels and multiple short stories and novellas. She has won three Hugo Awards (including a record-breaking three in a row for Best Novel for all three books in her Broken Earth trilogy), two Locus Awards and a Nebula in her career so far, which is still in its early stages. It'll be interesting to see what comes next.

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

A new Fifth Season has fallen on the world, the worst one in history. It may last a thousand years and forever end what vestiges of civilisation remain in the Stillness. One orogene, battered and dying, has a plan to end the Season and indeed all of the Seasons: to recapture the Moon, which was moved out of its traditional orbit more than a thousand generations ago, unbalancing the world. Recapturing the Moon requires that Essun find and harness the powers of the Obelisk Gate. But this may be harder than she thought, as enemies are moving against her new-found home and, in the distant south, her daughter discovers that she herself has an unforeseen destiny.

The Obelisk Gate is the sequel to the excellent The Fifth Season and the middle volume of the Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin's critically-acclaimed take on the venerable Dying Earth subgenre. The Fifth Season was a highly accomplished novel, describing a brand new world with skill and intelligence and blending together elements of fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction and a dash of the weird to create something compelling and interesting.

The Fifth Season was also helped by its structure, in which we follow the same character at three different points in her life. The story rotated through each version of the character in term, gradually giving the readers all the pieces to assemble the full narrative. It was a great literary conceit, well-conceived and executed, which allowed the reader to really get to grips with the character.

The Obelisk Gate can't use the same structure, so instead adapts it by moving between Essun's story and that of her daughter Nassun. Whilst the first book was an extended road trip, the second book alternates between Essun's static story and Nassun's long journey across thousands of miles into the far south. This changes things up nicely and means that Essun, now a guest of the community of Castrima, has to actually stay put, learn what's going on from Alabaster and help defend the community.

It does mean a slightly more uneven book than The Fifth Season. Not actually a huge amount happens in this novel, especially for Essun's storyline, and some implausibility creeps in when you realise she is spending months and months hanging around in Castrima (to allow Nassun to travel many, many thousands of miles from almost the equator into the Antarctic region) but doesn't seem to really learn a lot of new information despite Alabaster being right there. That said, there is quite a decent amount of character building and atmosphere here and Castrima, a subterranean city suspended in a giant geode, is a terrific piece of worldbuilding.

Nassun's storyline is more dynamic and disturbing, as her father tries to take her to safety but instead brings her into an even more dangerous and unstable situation, with her own burgeoning powers to contend with. There's a dark mirror here to Essun's childhood upbringing as related in the previous novel, with the feeling that Nassun is what Essun could have become if she was indulged more instead of tortured.

The result is a sequel which expands on the world and the story but, in a common failing of middle volumes of trilogies, can't quite match the relentless pace and sense of discovery from the first book. There's a lot of introspection in this novel which is beautifully written, but risks redundancy later on. However, the book ends with an explosive confrontation between Castrima and a rival community which once again shakes things up and leaves them in an interesting place for the final book in the series to pick up on.

The Obelisk Gate (****½) is a readable and strong sequel to The Fifth Season, if a slightly less original and relentless one. It is available now in the UK and USA. The story concludes in The Stone Sky.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

In a remote future, the Earth's landmasses have been fused together into a supercontinent called the Stillness. The geological catastrophe which caused this event still haunts the planet, with frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions causing devastation across thousands of miles in titanic disasters known as Fifth Seasons. Many civilisations have risen and fallen, with the world currently dominated by the Sanze Empire from its grand capital of Yumenes.

A new Fifth Season has arrived, heralded by the opening of a vast volcanic rift below Yumenes. Chaos grips the Stillness as thousands takes to the roads to flee the devastation. Among them is Essun, an orogene, one who can use the powers of the earth to her own ends. Her son has been murdered by her husband, who has fled with their daughter. Essun sets out to find them, as all around her the world begins to end.

There is a long and honourable tradition of genre fiction set at the end of the world, when confused humans try to live their lives in the shadow of earlier, more ancient and glorious civilisations. Jack Vance arguably became its first champion, with his 1950 novel The Dying Earth and three sequels. This accomplished, erudite, witty yet melancholy series gave the subgenre of fiction its name and directly inspired arguably its most famous work: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, sometimes cited as the greatest work of science fiction or fantasy ever written. More recently the Dying Earth subgenre has gained increased fame from Monte Cook's excellent Numenera RPG setting (and its video game spin off, Torment: Tides of Numenera).

N.K. Jemisin's sixth novel fits nicely into this genre: it is, at the very least, tens of thousands of years in the future (possibly millions). Strange obelisks float in the sky for unknown purposes. The ruins of ancient, baffling civilisations lie everywhere. Recurring geological catastrophes seek to destroy humanity, but powerful humans known as orogenes seek to defy them. But the same orogenes who can stop the quakes can make them vastly worse, so other humans - "Guardians" - are appointed to guard them and, if necessary, kill them if it looks like they are going to be come a danger themselves. It's a world of terrible inequality, where people are born into castes and forced to stay there for their entire lives. Selective breeding experiments are commonplace, and orogenes are treated like animals by those who fear their power.

The Fifth Season is thus a novel about many things: humanity and bigotry, history and myth, life and death, and the unquenchable desire of human beings to survive and seek happiness. It's a book that's received a lot of critical acclaim, with the trilogy it opens winning no less than three Hugo Awards and a score of other awards. This acclaim and the book's literary qualities have, paradoxically, put off a lot of readers who prefer their fantasy more straightforward and predictable.

Which is a shame because The Fifth Season is also a rollicking good epic fantasy novel. There's massive and awe-inspiring displays of apparently-magical power. The "magic system" is given consistent rules and treated with as much respect and seriousness as in any Brandon Sanderson book. The worldbuilding is vigorous, original and well-thought-out. There's even pirates, and some nice action scenes on the high seas. There's moments of strange alienation at the discovery of awe-inspiring remnants of earlier ages, and moments of horror at some of the creatures and powers unleashed by the same.

The book's structure is also innovative: the narrative is split into three strands, and we follow each strand with a different character at the centre of it. Each strand is set in a different time period, and as the book continues the characters and time periods converge until the book's ending results in a moment of catharsis: less of a twist ending and more one of simple revelation that makes what you've been reading make sense. Each strand is also told in a different writing style (moving from second-person/present-tense to third-person/past-tense to third-person/present-tense) which I expected to dislike, but instead it worked extremely well. The different writing style acts as a consistent reminder of what part of the story and the timeframe you are reading at any given moment, and transitions did not jar at all.

It helps that Jemisin is one of the stronger prose-writers in modern SFF, consistently nailing great moments of dialogue and deploying formidable powers of description. The book's themes are big ones, taking in ecological and environmental issues, gender relations, sexuality (especially interesting when some of the far-future humans are evolved in some unexpected manners) and inequality, but the book never remotely becomes preachy or bogged down in some semantic political argument. Everything services the world and the story that Jemisin has created.

The book also has pace. This book is 450 pages of relatively big type, and the sequel is even shorter. This modest page count helps move the story along at a brisk clip, with the narrative rotating between its three POV characters like a well-oiled machine, until the book brings its various strands together in a satisfying manner that sets the scene perfectly for the sequel, The Obelisk Gate.

The Fifth Season (*****) is one of the best opening volumes to a science fiction or fantasy trilogy of the past few years, and is strongly recommended. It is available now in the UK and USA.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 34

In 2015 epic fantasy is in the best health it's been for a long time. Game of Thrones is the most popular drama in the world, publishers are putting out more books and series than ever before and fantasy video games are shifting vast quantities. Even better, the genre is evolving and getting more original, casting aside the trappings of the past to explore ever more interesting ideas about people, magic and worlds.

God's War & The Mirror Empire

Few authors have arrived with such ferocity as Kameron Hurley. Her first novel, God's War (2010), is an SF-fantasy hybrid where technology is replaced by the use of magically-controlled, genetically-engineered bugs, who are manipulated and directed by wizards. Her world is gripped in a centuries-long war between two rival cultures both following radically different, differently-descended versions of Islam (one male-dominated, the other female). Cultural and gender issues are explored against the backdrop of an action-packed, well-realised story featuring Nyx, the most conflicted and amoral protagonist to be seen in many a year. Two sequels followed.

More traditional in its epic fantasy construction - if only nominally - is The Worldbreaker Saga, which commenced with The Mirror Empire (2014). This chronicles a fantasy world that is being invaded by forces from its own parallel universe, where invaders can only cross over if their counterpart in the other timeline is dead or never existed in the first place. Angry matriarchs do battle, armies clash and massive plant-monsters abound. It's a fantasy series that does things differently to the norm whilst also ensuring the more basic tropes of the genre are engaged with.

In between, Hurley has found time to write insightful and passionate essays on the nature of genre fiction. The most notable of these is the Hugh Award-winning "We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative", which argues for a more nuanced and complex view of the role of women in history, and in genre fiction which apes it.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms & The Killing Moon

Nora Jemisin exploded onto the scene in 2010 with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, a mind-bending story of floating cities, gods imprisoned to be used as weapons, and a young woman searching for her destiny. Original and thought-provoking, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and its two sequels in The Inheritance Trilogy (2010-11) are representative of a new breed of epic fantasy which is more bizarre, strange and original whilst also delivering fascinating characters and a well-described secondary world.

Jemisin's second published work (although written earlier), The Dreamblood duology (2012), is set in a fantasy kingdom heavily inspired by Ancient Egypt but which also steers clear of cliche: no pyramids or mummies here. The duology revolves around a form of magic that is drawn from people when they sleep, but when a contagion is relased that kills people as they sleep the sect known as the Gatherers must investigate. The result is a more traditional epic fantasy (if only relatively) than The Inheritance Trilogy but one that still riffs of different cultures and fuses elements of religion and war to a murder mystery investigation.

Jemisin's latest work is The Broken Earth Trilogy.

Prince of Thorns

Released in 2011, Prince of Thorns achieved almost immediate success. The UK publishers packaged free copies of the book alongside George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons and canny use of social media was made to promote the novel. The book gained an unfair degree of notoriety when on early review criticised it for graphic sexual violence which simply does not exist in the novel, but it went on to become hugely successful.

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future where Europe has been partially drowned by rising sea levels. Magic exists, but is apparently a form of highly advanced technology. Computer AIs play a key role in the story. At a key point, a horrific magical weapon turns out to be nuclear device. This is the traditional "rationalised fantasy" story, where the magic is actually explained by science. But the setting takes a back seat compared to the thorough exploration of the main character, Jorg Ancrath.

Jorg is an unapologetically amoral murdering prince who holds no qualms about killing those who stand between him and his goals. He has a rough loyalty to his men and a highly idealised obsession with the woman he loves. As the initial Broken Empire trilogy (2011-13) progresses, Jorg seems to learn and grow, but not necessarily in the healthiest or most positive of ways. His politicking, ruthlessness and military acumen leads to success, of sorts. He is an easy character to despise, even if you admire his ingenuity. It's a difficult balancing act with Mark Lawrence pulls off with huge success.

His subsequent series, The Red Queen's War (2014-16), follows a Flashman-esque coward and fop who is thrust into the middle of epic events (some of them crossing over with the Broken Empire series) against his will. His next series, The Red Sister, will be set in a new world with a female protagonist.

Range of Ghosts

Elizabeth Bear published her first SF novel, Hammerhead, in 2005, after several years of writing acclaimed short fiction. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has gone to win many further awards, including three Hugos. She has written in multiple generes, including science fiction, cyberpunk and general fantasy, but her most notable work of epic fantasy is The Eternal Sky Trilogy (2012-14).

This trilogy is set in a world that echoes the Middle and Near East during the Middle Ages, revolving around the struggle for power and dominance in a Mongol-esque horde. At the same time, events are unfolding beyond the Khaganate's borders which gradually engulf multiple people from radically different cultures. As epic fantasy set-ups go, it's a fairly standard. However, the author uses excellent, original prose and vivid characters to create a story about different cultural groups learning to work together for a common goal. The setting, with a sky that shifts depending on the dominant socio-religious make-up of the land, is original and interesting despite its echoes from our own history.

Blood Song

One of the biggest shifts in writing in the 2010s has been the explosion of self-publishing. At the vanguard of this in genre fiction were SF author Hugh Howey (writer of the Silo series starting with Wool) and fantasy author Michael J. Sullivan, whose Ririya Revelations series, throwing back to an older, more traditional form of fantasy, was a major success.

The success of the Ririya series inspired the publishers, Orbit, to take another look at the self-publishing sphere. With collaborative websites where self-publishing writers could look for feedback and Amazon providing avenues for self-publishing to work, there was lots to choose from but one book stood out. Blood Song (2012) by Anthony Ryan is a fairly traditional epic fantasy, with a band of brother warriors, feuding empires, massive battles and so on, but it is notable for its above-average prose and rich characterisation. The perceived wisdom about self-publishing was that books that couldn't get a publishing deal were inevitably rubbish, badly-written or self-indulgent. Blood Song proved this was not the case, and along with its sequels in the Raven's Shadow series has been a huge success.


Other recent fantasy series of note include Helen Lowe's Wall of Night series, John Gwynne's Faithful and the Fallen quartet, Brian McCellan's Powder Mage series, Luke Scull's Grim Company, Sam Sykes's Aeon's Gate trilogy and Brian Staveley's Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne.

If the way epic fantasy writers release their series is changing, so is the way fantasy readers are consuming them. Forums and blogs drove a lot of readers to good new books in the 2000s, but this decade social media has come to the fore. Thriving communities on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit allow readers to find recommendations and pick up books, and the Goodreads site has been hugely successful in getting readers to compare their bookshelves and talk about their finds. Writers of all stripes need to engage with these resources to publicise their books and spread the word, and fantasy writers in particular seem to be very adept at this.

From the dawn of the modern genre of epic fantasy over a century ago to the current explosion of creativity, epic fantasy has always been a hugely popular but critically under-appreciated genre, despite the creativity and intelligence many writers have brought to it (others, who have just wanted to ape Tolkien or Martin, not so much). But today it feels like the genre has finally come of age, no longer shackled to just retelling the same story of farmboys and kings and wizards in a vaguely medieval world again and again. In print, in the cinema, on TV screens and in video games, the genre is being used to tell increasingly interesting and challenging stories. Long may this continue.

The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin

The city of Gujaareh chafes under the rule of the Kisuans, who lack respect for the traditions of the city and its priesthood. When a son of the previous, deranged prince emerges as a warleader of a fierce barbarian tribe, the inhabitants of Gujaareh prepare for a rebellion...until a mysterious plague begins striking at the populace through their dreams.

The Shadowed Sun is the second and concluding volume of the Dreamblood duology, following up on The Killing Moon. This book sees N.K. Jemisin shifting gears from the first volume, which was focused more on investigations and conspiracies within the city. This second book is more about politics, the gathering of armies and, well, perhaps what can be described more as 'traditional epic fantasy guff'. However, Jemisin's take on traditional epic fantasy guff is refreshing, with the narrative never caving in to cliche and with widely-diverse storylines converging in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

As before, this is a character-based fantasy. The surviving characters from the first book take a back seat: Sunandi only gets a few scenes and Nijiri is in a supporting role only. The focus is on Hanani, the first woman to join the priesthood of Hananja, and Wanahomen, the exiled prince-in-waiting. Jemisin handles these characters with impressive skill: Hanani is inexperienced but rapidly learns the ways of the world and proves more resourceful than she was expecting. The usual learning-and-growing stuff, sure, but depicted with some interesting twists. In particular, Hanani's success in navigating the shoals of the culture of the Banbarra tribe is down to intelligence and being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Wanahomen is presented initially as a very unlikable character, which is an interesting choice for one of the major protagonists. His own character evolution, which involves learning the art of dream-magic and discovering the true nature of his father, is successfully depicted.

Other characters swirl around this central duo, though they risk feeling under-developed in comparison due to a lack of page-time. This does have the benefit of keeping a tight focus on our two main characters which the book does benefit from, but several fascinating side-characters (like Tiaanet, Nijiri, Sunandi and the Kisuan Protectors) do feel a little sold short as a result.

The thematic idea from the first novel - of people trapped in rigid and small world-views who have those views changed through a widening of their experience - is pursued and if anything is explored more intriguingly in this second volume. Wanahomen's world-view is restricted by him believing that his father was murdered and that the priesthood of Hananja is an enemy that must be punished. His own experiences in the dreaming world and his experiences with Hanani change that in a very plausible fashion. Jemisin tackles a wide variety of issues related to sexuality, abuse, gender politics and religion in the book, but never in a preachy way. Instead, she organically lets thematic elements arise from the story and characters to form a very satisfying and well-written whole.

The Shadowed Sun (****½) matches its forebear in quality and is available now in the UK and USA.

The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin

In the city-state of Gujaareh, power is split between the ruling Prince and the priests of the dream goddess Hananja. The priests have magic based on the power of dreams, with which they can heal the sick. One sect, the Gatherers, is dedicated to helping people peacefully pass over when their time has come. However, when the Gatherer Ehiru discovers he has been manipulated into trying to kill an innocent, he realises that Gujaareh is threatened by a conspiracy lurking at the very heart of the nation.

The Killing Moon is the first novel in the Dreamblood duology, the latest work from N.K. Jemisin (the author of the Inheritance Trilogy, which I have not yet read). It's an epic fantasy, but one that proudly discards the limitations of a Medieval European setting. Gujaareh is inspired by the legends and mythology of ancient Egypt, although it is not a carbon copy (there are no pyramids, sphinxes or mummies), and the novel draws upon Carl Jung's ideas about the collective unconscious to provide its unique magic system.

The setting is vividly described. The planet Gujaareh is located upon is a moon circling a gas giant (the 'Killing Moon' of the title is actually the gas giant, although confusingly the cover art depicts a red-coloured version of our moon) which makes for an interesting day/night cycle. This feeds into the power of night, sleep and dreams which provides the book with its spine. Gujaareh itself is a compelling location, built to withstand annual floods and with a complex mixture of native and foreign influences: like ancient Egypt, Gujaareh is not a monolithic state, but one where people from across the world can be found, trading or negotiating.

Ehiru, our central character, is an expert at using the power of dream magic and is trying to pass his knowledge onto his apprentice, Nijiri. This process is interrupted by the discovery of a possible threat to the country, which Ehiru is compelled to investigate. Sunandi, an ambassador from the southern nation of Kisua, completes our central triptych of characters. Though there are occasional chapters from other POVs, these three viewpoints dominate the novel. Each is a fascinating character, with Sunandi being a capable and intelligence diplomat who is sometimes undone by arrogance. Ehiru is determined and resolute, but is also prone to become unhealthily obsessed, to the point of endangering himself. Nijiri is highly capable but lacks confidence. He's our 'young, tallow youth' viewpoint but amusingly that's more his own assessment of his abilities than the reality. All are painted with colour and depth.

The novel is a fast read, with a cracking pace that still allows time for some interesting characterisation. Something that Gujaareh shares with ancient Egypt is a certain rigid inflexibility in its traditions (something Pratchett notably satirised in his novel Pyramids, the only other Egyptian-flavoured fantasy that immediately comes to mind) but also the ability to adapt once those limitations are exposed. This extends to the micro-level of the characters, who each find their view of the world widened by the events of the book. This self-realisation is hardly new in concept (Nijiri becomes more confident, Sunandi becomes a bit more open to other cultures) but is executed with skill.

Where the novel falters is in its denouncement, which feels both rushed and a little too neat. This does mean that The Killing Moon works excellently as a stand-alone novel (there are little to no elements left dangling for the sequel, The Shadowed Sun).

The Killing Moon (****½) is available now in the UK and USA. The sequel will be published in June.

Source: This was a review copy sent to me by the publisher.