N K Jemisin

So, I read her Broken Earth trilogy last year and really enjoyed it. My daughter is reading it now and it reminds me how good it was. What are your suggestions for what I should read next by her? I was thinking either The Dreamblood Duology or The Inheritance Trilogy. Is one of those any better than the other or are all her works simply excellent and well worth reading?

I know this may be veering into more fantasy rather than SF. I hope you will indulge me.

>1 Neil_Luvs_Books: "I know this may be veering into more fantasy rather than SF. I hope you will indulge me."

To my mind, The Broken Earth is science-fantasy. It has the feel of fantasy but, once the end of the story approaches, the reader comes to the realization that they have been reading science fiction all along, (FWIW, I had a similar experience with Wolfe's Book of the New Sun).

I personally preferred the Dreamblood Duology over the Inheritance Cycle. In my opinion, The Broken Earth stands head & shoulders above her other works, with the caveat that I have not read her newest duology, (I have them both on the shelf but have not yet cracked them open).

If you are interested in other authors, another excellent trilogy that is also more fantasy than science fiction is The Divine Cities by Robert Jackson Bennett. I am much more a science fiction reader than fantasy but this series was right up my street. So much so that I ended up buying them in print after first borrowing from the library. I did the same with The Broken Earth, Emma Newman's Planetfall series, and Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn coins her corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently immersive fantasy is indistinguishable from science fiction" (62). I felt like that was very much true of Jemisin's The Broken Earth, especially the first book. I didn't get that vibe from the only other Jemisin novel I've read, The City We Became, where in fact the worldbuilding kept throwing me out.

The other contemporary fantasy I've read that hit that vibe for me was Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower.

>3 Stevil2001: her corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently immersive fantasy is indistinguishable from science fiction"
I cannot at all concur, unless "immersive" means something very different from what I understand by it. I have read very immersive fantasy that I would never call science fiction, and a great deal of highly-canonical science fiction with very little sense of immersion.

I'd say go with the "Dreamblood" books. The problem with Jemisin's current project is that she's quite honest about it having been a chore to finish, and it feels like it too; though even her "B List" feels stronger than a lot of folks' best work.

>4 paradoxosalpha: Have to agree, not sure what is meant by 'immersive' in that context. A truly immersive fantasy is just that.

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I’ll next pick up the Dreamblood duology.

The Broken Earth trilogy kept flipping back and forth for me from SciFi to fantasy. >2 ScoLgo: I think the end of it did try to bring the fantasy into the realm of science but it was still a bit of a stretch for me. Regardless, still an outstanding set of novels! I also enjoyed The Imperial Radch series. All four books were excellent. Leckie is very good.

By "immersive," Mendlesohn means a self-contained world with its own logic, where the logic is thought through. I felt Broken Earth started from a fantasy premise (what if people controlled rocks with their minds) but pursued its worldbuilding implications with rigor.

>8 Stevil2001:
OK, that's understandable, although the sense of "immersive" is highly etic. I still have some resistance, though. I'm trying to think of an apt counterexample. Maybe Tolkien's Middle Earth? That's as Mendelssohn-immersive as all get out, but I don't know who would put it on the sf side of the sf/fantasy boundary.

>9 paradoxosalpha: Oh, it's worth pointing out that "immersive" is one of her four categories of fantasy, not a term she's using nonspecifically; she counts Tolkien as what she calls "portal/quest."

Maybe not a good sentence for me to use without context! Sorry to have derailed the thread.

>8 Stevil2001: >10 Stevil2001: Thanks, makes more sense now. I put that series in the fantasy category though I did not finish it.

>10 Stevil2001: Derail away! I have been enjoying the discussion. :)