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Craig, Ryan, and Sara give their takes on the The Fifth Season, the first in the three-time Hugo award-winning Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. There’s a lot to dig into with this book, thanks to plenty of Discord comments from the listeners (thank you!), and there’s even a little surprise at the very end, so stay tuned.
Music: “Adventure Time” and “The Seven Seas” courtesy of https://www.philter.no/
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Ted Kooser refers to those moments where the author distracts the reader out of the story “dropping your sunglasses in the bottom of the boat.”
The Malevolent Cabal would be a great band name.
Ever hear of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women?
Good show.
Negative
Has the same conceit. They are the same woman at different ages. My cousin was in a production of the play in Ann Arbor back in the 1990’s, probably not long after Albee wrote it.
Oh, boy. I really despised that book. A real disappointment after the excellent The Broken Kingdoms.
Jemisin’s heroine is a mass-murderer, but we’re supposed to sympathize with her.
Unlikely I will spend 84 minutes listening to this!
Fair enough. But a protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be a heroine.
Jemisin’s heroine is Oppressed, so whatever atrocities she commits are not her fault.
It seems I’ve heard that before somewhere …
I read this when it was nominated. Voting for the Hugo Awards means rank-choice voting, so rather than voting for one entry in a category, you rank your preferences among the 5 entries. I ranked it number 3. I recall thinking it was good, but not so good that I bothered buying the rest of the trilogy.
I wrote a post about my Hugo voting at the time.
I like to say that, with three Hugos in a row, N.K. Jemisin is either the greatest fantasy writer writer of all time — or extra-literary considerations influenced the voting!
Sigh. Yeah. I was really taken aback at the Hugo Awards ceremony at the Kansas City WorldCon. To hear so many award winners saying stuff like, “I’m so proud to be the first overweight Puerto Rican to win this award” or whatever suggests that some people believe it’s all about the intersectionality. Silly me, I voted based on the quality of the work without a thought to the race, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, etc. of the authors.
I thought about voting only for men, to make up for the feminists who explicitly state that they will be voting only for women until “historical imbalances” are righted. (100 years?)
But then I read a good story by a woman and end up voting for it anyway.