Conversation #1: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Introduction: This is a new thing on this blog: a conversation with a friend about a book we both read. Boru and I have spent thirteen years meeting once a week, every Tuesday night. We often discuss literature, or our other shared passions, over cigars. (By discuss, I mean shout at each other.) We also co-founded a monthly, structured, cigar and philosophy discussion group, TOOL, where a group of our friends does their homework on a film, album, or book chosen by a member of the group, then spends four hours talking about its ideas and craft. Tuesday Night and TOOL have both been beneficial in my own life, and I think in Boru’s as well.

This conversation is something new we’re trying. It may work, it may not. Here, we have both read a single novella for the first time, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. We pre-agreed to have a written discussion about this novella, which promises to be quieter than our usual shouting. Here, as I write these first lines of the conversation, it is a Tuesday night, and our usual meeting has been cancelled this week because of Valentine’s Day. Since I do not observe this holiday, I get to begin the discussion.

Letter 1
I chose this book because it won the Hugo for novella (17,500 to 40,000 words), so it was on my list to read. I know it’s out of your usual reading radar, being science fiction, but it doesn’t appear that apologies are in order—it isn’t a mess. Thank you for reading it with me. After reading it, I do want to discuss this with somebody. Having gone in blind, I'm pretty happy about that good fortune. But it’s also not the greatest book I’ve ever read. I’ve got a few things that I want to talk about.

First, I’d like to tackle a big question. Why science fiction? Not why in general, but why here specifically. A question I often pose to things I read is why they are in the genre that they are in—be it science fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, romance, comics, or whatever. It seems to me like the genre can both help and hinder a book. For instance, my typical example presumes that somebody wanting to write about the dangers of fanatical monotheism would lose half of their intended audience if they wrote about Christian Fundamentalism or Islamic Fundamentalism; writing about a made-up religion’s Fundamentalists through the lens of science fiction or fantasy would help the author not lose half of their intended audience. On the other hand, the marketing materials and covers of typical fantasy and science fiction novels certainly chase away potential readers—but in any genre, books that are more about the genre than the characters are typically bad. (Sorry, gathering my thoughts by typing.)

So, here in Binti, for what purpose is it a science fiction story? On one hand, there could be a genre-specific reason: science fiction rarely features people racist against other groups of humans. Science fiction is often optimistic—the Cyberpunk era being the only contrast I can think of right now. In Binti, Okorafor questions that inherent optimism, pointing out that magic spaceships aren’t necessarily going to solve humanity’s problems with getting along. It’s a well-made point, and one that revolves around her technology discussion, which is on a more applicable scale. She discusses different sources of technology: the earth-based Otjize and the unknown-based Edan. Both are equally miracle workers, one is ancient as dirt, one is frighteningly futuristic. I think she’s trying to make an argument I already agree with: technology is just technology. High-tech and low-tech are the same thing. Traditional methods and technological methods differ not at all. In other words, magic shrimp space ships aren’t going to squash human hatred, they’re just going to allow it to spread across the skies. But they will change, or modify some human problems: humans aren’t the big fish in Binti's galactic pond anymore, they’re just five percent and it’s not even the strongest or smartest or most powerful five percent. And I think that’s a potential reason for couching this story in science fiction: what better genre to discuss the ineffectualness of potential future technology than that? And while she's there, she'll just point out this massive oversight within the genre too—racism. However, I realize that this is a dense book filled with tightly inter-related ideas. Boru, you don't read as much science fiction so your head is probably clearer here. You tell me—if you would like—why is she writing this story as science fiction? What would have been uncomfortable for other genres?

Letter 2
I, Boru, am happy to be a part of this. I have found Tuesday night, and TOOL, very beneficial to my mental health. It will be interesting to translate those stimulating conversations into something less ephemeral.

I enjoyed Binti as well. And it isn’t my favorite book of all time. I think I might know why it’s science fiction, though.

The sci-fi element allows Okorafor to do a few things. It helps the oppression/redemption story to seem new. We’ve seen this in many mediums over the last 50+ years: slave narratives; apartheid stories; tales of the Civil Rights struggles of the 60’s; and so on. Although this tale has been told in science fiction as well (Enemy Mine comes to mind), the future setting allows for some details that might let it seem somewhat fresh. And, it allows the author to show bigotry and redemption across several arcs. She creates several groups that get to show their bigotry and then overcome (mostly). The Koush are prejudiced against the Namib, and shed this prejudice after Binti shows exceptional ability. The Meduse are prejudiced against the Koush, whom they see as representative of all humans. Again, through her exceptional abilities, Binti wins them over. And, the faculty at Oozma show colonial instincts toward the Meduse. When given evidence that they have transgressed, they return the Meduse chief’s stinger. Okorafor shows these different levels because she gets to create them. This structure would be harder to pull off with existing earth-bound groups. She also gets to externalize, and complicate, the effects of assimilation through the transformation of Binti’s hair. A more realistic fiction would be forced to either explicate this effect through bald exposition, or through lengthy character building. The first would be ham-fisted at best. The second doesn’t fit well with the idea of a novella.

In the same vein as the first question, I am stuck wondering why this was a novella. As you know, Anonymous The Younger (ATY), I’m down with a good short story. I don’t mind having some questions left unanswered. I’m a Carver fan, for heaven’s sake! Part of my mild dissatisfaction with Binti is that Okorafor left so much unsaid. We read much about the fears of assimilation–the warnings of Binti’s parents, the Meduse calling the edan “the shame”–and the physical effects, but we are shorted on how those affected process these. The story itself made me think that I would get some insight into this, but it never follows through. I know there are more Binti books, so perhaps the author decided to honor her commitment to novella and address this topic later, but it left this reader unhappy. I’m not asking for a 600 page revision (although that might be fun), just a little more of a glimpse into how Binti, and Okwu, deal with becoming part of a different community. What say you, ATY? Should this have been a novel?

Letter 3
I'm glad you brought up that comment about enslavement by Binti's mother. That was very prominently placed there at the beginning. But, no, this should not have been a novel. Mostly because the most awe-inspiring thing about this novella is its density. Most novellas try and make a single point, or at the most three. Here, Okorafor uses these interrelated themes that every action and scene exhumes further. More characters, scenes, and exposition would probably have bogged it down and dulled this razor-focus the novella has. Listing the four biggest themes I saw, it’s easy to see how mixed together they are:

—On one hand, it’s about Binti being physically violated without her consent, being used by others: the Khoush touch her hair at the spaceport; the Meduse sting her before replacing her hair with their own tentacles, okuoko, without consent. And both of these change Binti fundamentally, so they're not sensationalist lit.

—Another theme is the role of technology and nature: the Edan and the otjize are both wonders, one technological, the other traditional dirt. The Third Fish in a giant, spacefaring shrimp used as a ship, and made in a lab/shipyard. It's probably the central metaphor for this theme, though more time is spent on the other two examples.

—Another theme is home and uniqueness. At home, we are not unique, but in the larger world, we are all unique. This is more Binti's personal journey, as much as she's allowed to have one by the circumstances.

—But I think the most prominent theme, and the one most affecting to Binti as a character, comes from her mother’s prophetic words at the beginning about the university leading her into slavery. It’s the idea of colonization, empire, and its effects on one person. I would argue against your thought that this isn't drawn out enough, and say that by being written the way she wrote it, the inevitability of assimilation is shown effectively. And that's the point that Okorafor makes: thoughts and people are equally enslavers. As you know, while I was laid up in the hospital a few months ago, I read Sandman by Neil Gaiman. The basic premise is exhumed by Alan Moore like this:

I suggest that if reality were genuinely a simple matter of forensics, ballistics, and gross physical mechanics, we’d all have things a fucking sight easier. The distressing or glorious truth is rather that our fantasies are real things. They exist, albeit in an immaterial realm beyond the reach of science or empirical investigation. They influence our behaviour and thus influence the material world, for better or worse. In effect, fantasy is a massive component of reality and cannot really be discussed as a separate entity in itself.

(Of course, this is also what Moore is getting at in From Hell, but that's strictly an aside.) Where Okorafor goes with this premise is multifaceted. On one hand, the Edan and the the otijze both react to Binti's dreams in ways that explicitly affect reality. But more importantly, Binti is enslaved as equally by the circumstances to friendship with Okwu as she is by the thought patterns of her tribe, by being a scholarship student as she is by the school's intellectualism itself, by the Medusae changing her hair as she is by her father's artistry. She has so many competing ideas and ideals that a novel would have a hard time focusing. Okorafor explores these themes to a satisfactory conclusion, and something longer runs the risk of being as repetitive as Ayn Rand. So an intriguing balance between density and length is superbly achieved here, to me. It leaves enough mystery up to the reader’s extrapolation, but gives enough facts to guide that extrapolation.

Now, I'm not saying that the point is that this is strictly defined enslavement, but that the benefit for Binti is when she manages to meld the inner and the outer enslavements to accomplish great things, things that haven't been done in years. She uses the obstacles—because of both dreams and physical necessities—to find a path that fits her. From what we know of the loosely sketched other characters in this world, only Binti could travel this path. I take this conclusion that thoughts and physics are both reality as Okorafor's main argument in the book. But is this just a case of osmosis? Is this insight only because Gaiman's earlier work is on my mind since I just read it? Is this too much of a stretch for this text?

Letter 4
I see your point about the length of the piece—a deeper exploration of all the themes of the book would have been difficult to pull off. Okorafor, by hinting at each, gives the reader many points of departure for exploration of the topics without pushing said reader in any particular direction. I can appreciate that.

And I think your Moore-colored glasses make for an interesting frame for a deeper exploration. Okorafor is dealing with some heady stuff here, it seems. Why not structure a reading around a heady premise? This works as well a some approaches, and better than most. A less secular reading of Moore's idea would lead one to see a synthesis of faith (in the broadest definition) and fact.

Binti's faith in the beliefs of her community of origin could be seen as what gives the otijze it's healing properties. Her desperate need for survival leads her to "pray" to the Edan, and it comes to life. The use of math to put one in a trance that allows for a stronger connection to universal forces would be the best example of this.

I think this might be the bigger theme. How does a person use the tools of enslavement (using your broad view of the term), faith, and fact, to forge a relatively autonomous and authentic self? To examine the tools and make them his/her own? We see Binti accepting and rejecting these tools in her struggle to be her own person, and to survive. Accept the otijze, reject the isolation. Accept the academic quest for knowledge, reject the ivory tower patronization. Accept the desire to survive, reject the drive to destroy. If we accept all outside influence, we are enslaved. If we reject all outside influences, we are a slave to our opposition. We can't escape enslavement, but we can be aware of how it affects us and how we react. I almost wonder if Okorafor is trying to show a path out of colonial influence.

Letter 5
That's a great insight into the treeing Binti does, Boru. The treeing crosses the line between faith and fact in an intriguing way that initially had me quite confused. I think your conclusion is spot on, that Okorafor is forging a path out of colonialism. But... but the path she presents is one of Binti being useful to the potential colonizers in a way that doesn't betray herself. This contrasts with being a curiosity to them, as she was in the spaceport. This usefulness seems better than being a freak show exhibit. But having to prove your worth before being accepted as who you are is an unfortunate pill to have to swallow. Maybe that's just part of what being human is all about though, for everybody.

In a way, Binti goes through the typical path of the colonized through this novel: marginalized and used as a natural resource for luxury and practical items; a remarkably intelligent colonized person then rises up and accepts an invitation to be educated and trained, accepting because of personal reasons; then is enslaved as a freak by the Khoush, Medusae, and University; then proves a innate and unique usefulness that cannot be ignored; then trying to take on the best aspects of multiple cultures to actually forge a path out of colonial influence. Again, assimilation is inevitable seems to be the point. (Or "resistance is futile," I suppose.) In this way, Okorafor seems to suggest that the colonization cannot be reversed or ignored by either the colonized or the colonizers. But because the colonization happened, the path out isn't a path back or a path in—just returning home or becoming the Khoushest Himba wouldn't be honest to the experiences and would limit future potentials in life extensively.

Letter 6
Is it possible that Okorafor might also be giving us a glimpse into the mind of The Magical Negro? Your discussion of exceptionalism struck a chord with me.

From Mammy in Gone With The Wind to Bagger in The Legend of Bagger Vance, we've seen examples of the colonized bringing spiritual enlightenment to the colonizer. Always exceptional in some way, they transcend the bonds of servitude and patronization to bring growth and awareness to their "superiors." We see the story through the colonizer's eyes, so we see their growth and the influence The Magical Negro has on them, but we rarely get insight into the mind of the "noble" colonized. Baldwin and Wright, among others, have given us modern day glimpses of the internal lives of the oppressed, but their protagonists aren't "making things better" for their oppressors. In Binti, we have a savior of not just one, not just a community, but an entire galaxy of colonizers. She shows everybody the way to peace. And we get to see what she is thinking while she does it. We get her inner monologue, not the filtered view of those she saves.

Perhaps, by subverting this trope, Okorafor shows that the "exceptional" is more like us than exceptional? Maybe she's using something familiar to further humanize "the other?"

As you know, I love it when an artist turns a cliché on it's head. Am I reading too much into this?

Letter 7
Ah, this seems to be a referential piece that I was missing. Thanks for filling it in for me. Binti has the same effect as the magic pixie dream girl on those around her, but through hyper-rationalization and accident, rather than unthinking enthusiasm. She shows a better way, even though sometimes she may not want to.

I think that we are agreed on the themes, except that I still believe the theme of thoughts as reality is in here and emphasized, and you think that's a stretch.

So, one last point specific to her writing and storytelling, the reveal in this story seems to ape China Mieville’s typical tactic—though he didn’t originate it, he has popularised it, at least for me—in that it appears about third of the way through the story. But that’s where the similarities seem to end for me. As you wrote a while ago, here on this blog, his twists reveals the fantasticness of a situation that seemed mundane up until then. In Binti, the reveal rockets the story off in a new direction. And I don’t know if it works as well. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate reading new things and I hate writing rules, but a new thing has to be effective.

So, what does Okorafor actually do? First, she sets up the relationship between the Himba and Binti herself—Binti is a minority within the Himba culture, the one who seeks the stars rather than “preferring to explore the universe by travelling inwards”. Then she sets up the Himba-Khoush antipathy: the Himba are a minority group in human affairs that are at least regionally run by the Khoush. The Khoush differ extensively from the Himba, acting as a sort of aristocracy. Then comes the minor role humans play in greater galactic culture: only five percent of the prestigious university is composed of humans. So Binti is a minority within a minority group within a larger minority group. Perhaps I'm drawing too much on Martin Heidegger with these nesting worlds, but it seems to me that this layering is a difference between the way Okorafor and Mieville deal with their reveals. While they do similar things, the setups are so different that the end-result is different. Binti takes a left turn into destiny, Mieville's characters continue on the same path but with the reader having a new understanding of the context. On my second read, the bit before the reveal seemed less altered by the reveal than in Mieville. The first part was just reading along, understanding from revisiting those words rather than from knowing the end, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. In other words, Okorafor's reveal feels more like an injection into the story to switch its tracks into a new direction, where Mieville allows his pre-reveal language to give greater context to the same story.

In the Slopes by China Miéville

0. "In the Slopes" is one of my favorite short stories from China Miéville’s short story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, which I already wrote notes about here on this blog in September of 2015. Back then, commenter Boru raised a point that got me thinking about this story more. I find I want to dig deeper into this one story to exhume the tactics and tendencies that make this a favorite of mine. I want to learn from Miéville. But not being willing to go back to school to take classes from him, I have only his written works to study.

1. Miéville uses a third-person voice throughout. It focuses tightly on McCulloch, the character whose perspective the whole story follows—except for the few paragraphs after the reveal, where Miéville offers about a page of info dump. My question is whether his voice is as tightly focused as Cherryh’s typical voice. My knee-jerk response is that the two voices are similar. But how?
—I’ll start with an example—Miéville’s description of the island’s central volcano: “The dead volcano sat sulking, hunch-shouldered.” Here, Miéville describes the mountain without describing the concept of mountain anew. He doesn’t begin at the start, talking about piles of stones, magma in the crust, the Pacific’s ring of fire, etc—he simply states it’s a volcanic island and it’s hunch-shouldered. I understand that it’s a shield volcano, but I’ve no idea which ocean it’s in. And I don’t need to because it doesn’t relate to the theme. Additionally, the description of the mountain shows how McCulloch views the thing—I bet that Soph or Will wouldn’t describe it as “sulking”. In this example, Miéville’s voice reminds me a lot of Cherryh’s. The whole story uses this voice, not just that one example. I’ll give one more example to drive the point home: after reading this story multiple times, I’ve little idea what McCulloch’s shop looks like, or his home. And I really don’t need to. The details he does give—McCulloch watches TV while at the counter, the whitewash is peeling, and the door-bell is on the fritz—show the slowness of McCulloch’s business and life, as well as his character and priorities: he can’t be bothered to fix the bell or whitewash, maybe because of the slowness, maybe because of apathy.
—What I like about this voice is pretty simply explained: it does four things for the reader that I appreciate in prose. First, it trusts the reader to figure things out, rather than spoon-feeding all the information. Spoon feeding often comes off insulting, while this voice seems like Miéville trusts his own writing and his readers. Second, it focuses on the theme rather than focusing on the context—which keeps the ideas, characters, and story moving and changing quickly. Third, it helps explain the characters through showing what they notice. For instance, when McCulloch enters the bar, which he’s been in many times before, he notices everything anew because he’s looking for Soph and Will. That helps show his mental state. Fourth, and this is most important, it allows me to fill in the blanks with my own imagination. Like the old adage “don’t show the monster”, this tightly focused, third-person voice trusts that the reader will fill descriptions in with details more effective to themselves than Miéville could ever dream up.
—At the same time, Miéville allows himself a paragraph or two here and there—or a lengthy section like the info dump after the reveal—to break with the voice and add a little context. For instance, on page five Miéville describes a little more of the nature of the culture, from a narrator’s point of view, rather than McCulloch’s. But he focuses it all on why this information is important to McCulloch, rather than leaving it out there as unimportant details. And that narrator's voice shows how his voice is different than Cherryh’s: where she allows extensive interior monologue, he frames his breaks with the voice of a narrator who consistently refers back to McCulloch. If you squint, you could say it’s summarized interior monologue. In that fifth page example, these thoughts are not being thought by McCulloch in the now, but these past thoughts and decisions are influencing his actions in the now—it seems unlikely that he is rehashing the history of the island since he moved there, all while sitting in the bar with Cheever. So Miéville summarizes McCulloch’s past thoughts, as a narrator, placing that information right there because it influences McCulloch’s next statements.
—So, there is a difference between Cherry and Miéville’s voices: it’s only the slightest difference, but it is one I noticed. But in conclusion, the answer is mostly yes: Miéville and Cherryh’s tightly-focused, third person narratives accomplish similar goals through similar tactics. And they are both effective for me. They are not exact copies of each other, but they’re closely related enough that I think of them in the same vein.

2. There is a deep care and consideration put into every word. I would call it poetic—not primarily in the sense of the whole sounding beautiful and following syllabic or stress patterns, but in the sense that every word matters.
—The example of the mountain's description shows how that word “sulking” is doing double duty: describing both the mountain and how McCulloch sees it. Even something as throwaway as Soph buying a bag of chips comes back in later, multiple times, and ends up being important to McCulloch getting into the dig site, to Gilroy accepting him there, and to his role in the later events. A third example is calling the unknown intelligences “collaborators”, which first occurs on the second page, twelve pages before the reveal. I have no context for it, no reason to think he means what it ends up meaning. So I assume that he’s talking about the culture the archaeologists are investigating, I assume he's implying they worked together more than other ancient cultures—and he is, but in a way that gives the word new meaning and importance after the reveal. Before the reveal I think it’s an egalitarian culture, a friendly one; after the reveal the friendliness with beings so other to us gives the word a new context that still perfectly describes what the world believes about these cultures. It’s a perfect word-choice, both before and after the reveal, both in the first read and in a reread. I am massively impressed by that one word. And this one word is a perfect example of the care given to every word within the story.
—But Miéville doesn’t ignore sounds. Rather, there are places within the story where sounds are important to the structure of the paragraphs.

Digs, development, and tourism were all controlled: the chamber of commerce constantly complained.

All that consonance is an extreme example, but he also uses vowel sounds intentionally and to make the prose beautiful.

“How dare you, sir? I’m curious. Oh, for a sprinkling of the old Sodium Pentothol.” Cheevers mimed opening a compartment on his signet ring and pouring something into Paddick’s glass.

In these two example, the prose’s beauty adds interest to the writing. And the story is better for it, for having this beauty. Not only is it yet another layer to dig into in this complex and beautifully crafted short story, but it also raises this prose well above the typical prose and shows how much hard work went into it.
—This level of care and consideration is a ton of hard work, and I appreciate it whenever I can find it. These are stunning combinations of words, taken as a whole, but he doesn’t let the beauty run away with the tale—it’s still efficient and tight prose that communicates effectively. Miéville shows brilliant balance, coming down on the side of efficiency, but not letting that stop him from writing beautifully. For contrast, Asimov is efficient and never beautiful. I vastly prefer Miéville.

3. To build the world through this voice and writing technique, Miéville often implies instead of stating directly. Like the example of the mountain’s description shows, he implies it’s a shield volcano rather than outright stating that the island was formed from a shield volcano. The old name of the bar, “Cunny Island”, implies that it used to be a brothel or strip club; and it also implies something about the culture of the island’s residents and tourists before the archaeology really took off—an implication which ties into every other part of the story. The season is implied as being a week past summer weather when McCulloch is said to have packed up the beach balls and towels and packed them into the store-room; as well as with the line, “The municipality had just switched over to the winter schedule and, for a few weeks, the streetlights would start to glow pointlessly early,” a line that also implies something about the lackidasical nature of the island, the lack of precision and pace of life. The line “Friendly business competitors” implies the nature of the community of the locals now, after the archaeology ramps up. Stating that the fisherman are coming up from the bay implies something about the economics of the island without telling a detailed account of the economy.
—There is some groundwork directly stated in the way the islanders tend to preserve rather than exploit, and this is on page five. But even that direct statement implies a cultural baggage that is important to the narrative and world-building.
—In short, the story implies rather than describes the world, but implications are even in the direct descriptions.

4. This method of worldbuilding is clearly secondary to Miéville building his theme, which rests in the relationships. The relationships are not restricted to being between two people: Miéville’s relationships also include corporate ones. You can look on the complex relationships here as a family tree, each level informing the two on either side of it. For instance: the locals to the archaeologists, the archaeologists to archaeology, everybody to the collaborators; each of these relationships are reinforced through the specifics of individual relationships involved—Paddick’s relationship with archaeology differs from Gilroy’s relationship with archaeology, which is different than the locals’. Through the lens of those three relationships, a corporate relationship is built.
—However, the story is about McCulloch and his relationships to his past, the island, and other people—but again, the relationships are always interconnected, and these three categories of relationship inform and build his relationship with himself. And here is the crux of the story. Miéville shows McCulloch growing increasingly integral to his world and the people around him—that’s the plot, McCulloch changing from a disaffected semi-loner to a person who is an integrated part of his society’s structure. At the start he’s not “Johnny come lately” because he’s an immigrant, it’s because he is so disaffected. At the height of the drama he’s helping people, he’s interested and invested, and this all appears to be new for him—at least since he moved to the island. He is sucked into the whole situation by circumstance, happenstance, perhaps fortune, and it affects him. He’s watching Soph unravel before his eyes, and he can’t handle it. She knows what she wants, and now she’s furious and denied. It hits too close to home for him. He is disturbed by how affected he is—especially after the fact, after he gets a chance to step back and look at it all from the outside again. While everything dies down a bit, he ignores the phone calls and stays home in order to try and recapture his disaffected habit. But at the end, when Soph walks into his shop, he caves to his curiosity and sociability and accepts the connection, realizes he needs it. From here, will he continue to cut himself off, or will he integrate? I don’t know, but Miéville leaves us on his relationship with Soph, therefore he seems to imply that McCulloch gets back to his life while accepting a new depth to his relationships, a new need for sociability. In other words, the whole situation finally illuminates to him how interconnected he already is on the island, and he finally accepts it, somewhat. Or at least has a chance to. But he probably wants it on his own terms.
—And that relationship with Soph is never explicitly one of attraction. I don’t get the sense that this is a potential romance. I get the sense that he connects with her because he is still somewhat of an outsider, she’s friendly to him first, she can satisfy his curiosity, and later because he can help her and he shares her disappointment at Paddick’s actions. They are comrades, not potential mates, throughout.

5. The dialogue is spectacular. It’s really Brian K Vaughan level stuff. Miéville rides that line between the fractured, day-to-day reality of conversations in half-sentences, and the unrealistic literary dialogue that must always make sense in the retelling. This balance is done well and I feel like McCulloch and Cheever are fairly well-spoken individuals, but not outside the normal bell curve.
—Miéville shows that he is deliberate about matching his characters’ words to their mental states. For instance, when McCulloch arrives in Banto he doesn’t know where to go. In this instance, I would be a little nervous—he’s already shown he doesn’t know that much about Banto or the people there, and his need to stop and ask directions could induce nervousness. He's outside his comfort zone, but he’s also an islander, not a tourist. So he affects a casual, “I heard there was a dig somewhere,” and this shows his mental state spectacularly.
—But the mental states are not all shown. Miéville also tells. An example would be in the scene where he guesses Sophia’s name as Sophie and she corrects him: Miéville writes simply, “He was embarrassed.” This telling line informs McCulloch’s next statements, showing him putting on bravado to cover his embarrassment.
—The dialogue fractures even more when the emotions run high, when Soph starts shouting at Paddick. This change in the length of sentences, mixed with the word choices, drives home the drama of the situation for McCulloch and the reader.
—Through all this, Miéville stays away from explaining everything between the dialogue. Instead of paragraphs describing McCulloch’s embarrassment, he simply writes, “He was embarrassed.” This is a sentence, not a paragraph. It contextualizes more than it explains.

6. That reveal halfway through stunned me the first time. It’s on page fourteen. The first half assumes the reader knows, then they suddenly do know. They don’t know everything, but they know. It is effective for two reasons: first, it makes a reread enjoyable. On rereading I finally noticed all the mentions of collaborators in the first half, and saw how integrated they were throughout. Second, the casual, foregone conclusion tone of the reveal reiterates the tone of the story. It reinforces the focus on McCulloch’s life, but contextualizes just how disaffected he is. He lives in this place where the collaborators are a daily reality, and he’s still this disaffected. The collaborators are amazing! They’re unprecedented! They’re fantastic! They change everything about Earth and humanity. But they’re already commonplace to the islanders, even to a new one like McCulloch. Sure, he goes to see the exhuming, but only because it’s a notable one. And even there, he's sort of nonchalant about the whole situation, especially compared to the excitement of the archaeologists.
—The collaborators are just another piece of this story, McCulloch’s story. They’re the most fantastic context, but they’re not the point, like they would be in many other speculative fiction short stories. The collaborators are subsumed beneath the relationships of the characters. Sure, the archaeology is central to the characters’ lives, but the story is the characters’ lives. That’s why the archaeology is in here—to help explain the characters—not the other way around.
—The question here is whether the reveal overwhelms the story or not. The danger is that the reveal is too fantastic, distracting too much from the focus of the story on mundane McCulloch. It didn’t affect me this way because even the reveal is as nonchalant as McCulloch—reinforcing the story’s thrust in the heart of the distraction. But I can see a reader being overwhelmed by it. On rereads the focus on McCulloch was driven home more than on the initial read—I was less astounded by the collaborators when rereading. But that comes with the knowledge of the reveal.

7. In all, this story is memorable to me, and I hope it’s influential as well. The reveal certainly took my breath away the first time, as a writing tactic more than for what the collaborators are. But the dialogue, the world-building, the character of McCulloch, and the voice astounded me more.

The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass has problems, but it's pretty good pulp fiction. I certainly enjoyed it more than one or two books nominated for the Hugo this year. Though I am now 100% certain that I'll vote for Ann Leckie this year, I did enjoy my first Jim Butcher novel.

1. I often say that I love pulp fiction. It’s nice to read something quickly for entertainment. This novel is pulp fiction, and I liked it. The novel consists of steampunk airships powered by crystals firing broadsides and diving in and out of the mist of this fantastical world. The characters are humans, cats, and some sort of inbetween warriorborn that look human but are part animal and never fully explained—though I understand this is a part of a series and therefore some things are left for explanation in future novels. The people all live in gigantic skyscrapers called spires and worry an awful lot about rust. Like most pulp fiction, a couple of concise truisms attempt to find some meaning within the novel, but it’s about telling a story well, not communicating a deeper truth. And I can definitely appreciate that. How wonderful that writing is robust or diverse enough to be read for so many different purposes. This would be good young adult fiction, though there is a portion discussing a song about a farmer’s cucumber that eventually falls into a mud hole that strains itself to barely keep away from stating what it’s actually talking about.

2. If there is a theme here, it’s a sort of coming of age in battle combination. The main characters are generally coming of age—Gwen, Bridget, Folly, and Benedict. But there are a couple of characters who are already there: Addison, Grimm, Cavendish, and Rowl. However, the coming of age of the younger characters is mixed up with the violence they are mixed up in. Therefore the theme is about people coming to grips with war and with themselves and with themselves in war. It’s an interesting topic that many, many authors have tackled. Butcher, writing pulp fiction, doesn’t get much deeper than introducing the topic. But rather than simply introduce the topic, he also shows it playing out: it’s a novel where people and action are the main focus, and that’s more engaging than one where technology and action take the fore.

3. The pacing of the story has a few problems, but only a few. Generally the novel clips along at a fantastic rate, going from character to character and crisis to crisis. But at least one point was entirely unresolved: after spending a couple chapters building tension up to a duel between Bridget and another house’s heir, the duel never comes off, instead being supplanted by an air raid siren and attack on the spire. This was frustrating. After convincing me to care about the duel, after successfully building that tension, it’s suddenly called off. The tension I felt didn’t transfer to the new situation because we never see Bridget’s interlocutor again. So this felt like a couple of wasted chapters that only served to build a small part of the world and, because the duel never came off, leaves me mildly unsatisfied. But outside of this, the pacing is fantastic. Not all go-go-go because there are moments of repose—whether forced by imprisonment or a period of waiting—that are spaced well throughout the novel so the reader never gets bored or exhausted.

4. But the worldbuilding is enjoyable. In a large part, the worldbuilding is typical pulp: hints are all we’re going to get about ninety percent of the details of the world. The world is still quite mysterious at the end of the novel, but I’m engaged as it goes along. Butcher basically says “this object is important to this character,” but doesn't tell the reader why in order to have more mystery in there. So, he builds the world through bringing out aspects of it when they apply, rather than foreshadowing, and that’s a pulp tactic through and through.

5. The characters are mostly interesting, though Grimm is a little flat as the all too perfect captain of a ship—not to mention the grim-Grimm pun that is played all too often within the book. A little more depth to him would have been nice, but Gwen, at least, is very well developed and interesting. She’s pushy and self-absorbed, but that covers a core of loneliness and expecting the best from herself. She can be arrogant, but is often quite understanding. She doesn’t let others see her real self because she doesn’t see the point to doing so. She is told, shown, and takes up a lot of space in the novel—which is probably appropriate to make the most conflicted, interesting character the largest part of the novel. Further, each of the chapters switches focus between the characters so that we get a taste each of the characters, and that helps the whole novel feel more varied than if it just followed one character and displayed mostly that character’s traits.

6. There were a few moments where I felt like Butcher needs a better editor. Two points stood out the most, though they were not the only points. One, when the landing is being destroyed, Butcher mixes up the names of secondary characters Kettle and Journeyman. This is unfortunate as it’s a mistake that shows a lack of care put into the novel, but it’s pulp fiction, so what can you really expect? The second example is a quote:

His softness was a favorite blanket, and his purr was as familiar as one of her mother’s barely remembered lullabies.

His noise was as familiar as something Bridget could barely remember. That doesn’t make sense at all with the way Butcher is trying to use it. But at some point, it’s pulp fiction and what can you expect?

7. Things always work out, and rarely do they not work out perfectly. This could be done better. At the end, when Cavendish rewrites the book, it’s a good example of things working out—Grimm got the book from her—but also not working perfectly—Cavendish had memorized it and still got what she wanted. These types of situations are great at setting up later story points, but they happen too rarely. More often than not, situations are resolved with too few negatives. For instance, the duel that I’ve already mentioned: Butcher builds it up to be an impossible situation to resolve, and then doesn’t. I am very curious how he could find that balance needed between Bridget winning and her interlocutor winning. But he doesn’t, he just forgets about it and has another enemy's attack go off and we never see Bridget's interlocutor again. There is no negative seen in the novel for the duel ending this way. It’s more like Butcher decides, “Nevermind.” It's like he too can't think of a way to write himself out of that corner and ends up bringing in the deus ex machina of ships attacking. My question would be, why not just take those two chapters out?

8. In all, I enjoyed this novel for entertainment, but I didn’t learn anything from it that I haven’t already. It’s a fine novel, but it’s not great by any stretch of the imagination. It’s good pulp fiction and it doesn’t try to be anything else—some pulp is overly preachy, but thankfully this isn't. The writing wasn’t something to praise—it was awkward at times and less awkward at others—but that's not why one reads pulp. I disagree with the critique from tor.com: their reviewer was rubbed the wrong way by all the characters being white, except for the cats: but since so many of these people spend so many generations inside their houses, which are inside the spires, which are inside huge banks of fog, never really seeing the sun, it makes sense to me that they’d be pale. In all, I enjoyed the novel, it was fine, but I’m not itching to read any other Butcher novels right now.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

For Connor.

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, Seveneves is a mess. Through all of 2015, I believed that this novel would win the Hugo in 2016. I saw the most people reading it and heard the most discussion about it. It also seemed to have the most pull outside of the typical speculative fiction reader base—Seattle Times, New York Times, the internet in general, all seem to love this book. This book seems a smash hit. Connor convinced me to read it, so I did. All 900 pages of it. Now that I’ve read ⅘ of the nominees for this year, I still think this book will win, but I could see The Fifth Season pulling a win as it has really gained in popularity over time. I am 80% sure I’ll be voting for Ann Leckie’s novel though.

1. First things first: after six hundred pages this book begins its last chapter with the phrase “5000 years later”, and that last chapter is three hundred pages long. Is it the world’s longest epilogue, or are the prior six hundred pages the preface to end all prefaces? Every character is now dead, even the earth and our solar system are changed beyond recognition. This works out exactly as well as you think. If I hadn’t been reading this book for a friend, I would’ve quit. After finishing the book, I’m sad I didn’t quit—it wasn't worth it to continue. Those last three hundred were more of the same.
—Why do this? Why make a reader read those prior six hundred pages then pull all the meaning out of them so suddenly? Why make one read those six hundred pages if the three hundred are all that mattered? Or why include the three hundred pages with new characters, a new world, new technology, etc? Everybody I tell about this tactic busts out laughing immediately.
—But what was he trying to do here? Why take this ridiculous step? Being optimistic, it could be said that he wanted to tell the end of the story. The first five years really didn’t resolve until 5000 years later. But that seems a stretch when so much of the text in those last three hundred pages is made up of descriptions of technology that are theories today, or imaginations—there's not enough story for me to be this optimistic. I’m not certain that this tactic inherently doesn’t work, but I am certain it didn’t work here. I almost want to admire him for trying, but it really didn’t work.

2. The last three hundred pages codifies a tactic Stephenson uses throughout that makes this book difficult to read. For every page of story—with characters and actions and dialogue—there are two pages of wikipedia-esque explanatory prose about the technologies and physics that drive the story. Some of this is quite interesting, but there is so much of it that reading this book becomes boring. Arthur Clarke finds that line between too much information boring the reader, and just enough information told in an interesting way to make learning enjoyable. Here Stephenson just loves writing about imaginary technology and scientific theories.

3. And that’s my second major problem with this novel: these technologies and theories drive the plot of the book, rather than characters being in the driver's seat. The story itself is sparse: moon explodes, humanity realizes they have two years to live, they set up a space base, they move said base to the remaining moon-core, then 5000 years later they discover two different groups of humans who survived the moon-chunk apocalypse on the earth. In each of these parts, the technologies and scientific theories take up the most room in the book and drive the plot forward. The characters are almost afterthoughts and there’s only a couple of emotional moments in the book—way too few for nine hundred pages. Most potentially emotional moments are stripped of any effectiveness the same way they're stripped of any specifics. For instance, from part one:

Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.

So, of the first crew of six Scouts, two were dead on arrival and one was killed in the Luk failure the next day. Of the second crew, one was dead on arrival. All six of the third crew made it to Izzy alive. Of the fourteen total survivors, four died from Zavod failures, one disappeared, and one was forced to “retire” from being a Scout and confine his activities to Izzy because of equipment failure.

Ivy, being at the top of the org chart, was responsible for all strange and extraordinary decisions: the problems that no one else knew how, or was willing, to handle. It became her problem to decide what they were going to do with dead people.

Oh, there was a procedure. NASA had a procedure for everything.

Death itself lacks all meaning, merely requiring a bit of administrative creativity from the leader. This fear of emotions cripples any interest I wanted to have in this book. Even the whole character of Cyc embodies this perfectly: she is simply a human encyclopedia—hence her name. This is dry: even after a couple of pages discussing some tangential technology, sometimes employing bullet points, Stephenson will admit that it doesn’t matter to the story or the culture or the characters. Admitting this doesn’t help me be more interested in these all to often digressions, even when they're interesting.

4. Hard science fiction doesn’t necessitate excluding characters or human emotions—Arthur Clarke tends to have many. But here there are only five characters that make sense and hold any interest for me: Dinah, Doc, Julia, Markus, and a kid named Einstein. The rest are obvious caricatures. They’re emotionally flat—in Tekla’s case that is the point. But Ivy coming off flat is just poor writing. Stephenson attempts to fill her out as a character, and he tries really hard, but I don’t think it works because she has too little on-screen time. The flat characters are typically flat because Stephenson tells too much and doesn’t show enough. He says Ivy cries, but we see her cry maybe once? And even that situation is just sort of glossed over in favor of getting back to some kind of wikipedia-esque technological explanation. Her tears are wasted because we aren't allowed to understand them. So instead of showing the characters through actions, dialogue, and internal monologue, he tells them through narrative and then doesn’t reinforce this telling with enough showing to make these characters stick.

5. The theme here only reveals itself in the third part and it’s not very well explored: humans are not blank slates. Most of the third portion deals with the way each of the seven eves left their marks inherent in their descendants. Though the descendants are, well, 5000 years later, they’re still adhering to types and characteristics that they can’t escape, despite the time that has passed and their own experiences. This is a fascinating topic that isn’t often taken up in speculative fiction. Typically, characters are left to their own devices and they overcome their backgrounds to become heroes. Here, though they may undergo rags to riches transformations of place, they’re still who they are as characters, and that’s couched in the extensive discussions of their genetic history.

6. Another bit of the storytelling that I don’t enjoy is the awkward shift from Kath Two’s point of view to Ty’s, and then back. It confuses me at first and I don’t understand. Then I do and it makes some sense, especially after Kath’s transition to Kathree. But initially this is offputting and distracting. Like the 5000 years later bit, by the time it makes sense a hundred pages later, I am already pretty convinced it is awkward, and even the explanations don’t justify the awkwardness of the transition.

7. In all, this book is not enjoyable to me. There are some interesting moments, but I believe this storyline should be told in less than nine hundred pages, a lot less. I mean, cut out 90% of the technological explanations and this book could be four hundred pages or so and stick to the story and characters more. But even then the characters aren’t strong enough to carry the plot along. I will not even get into the word choices—which are complex but only because of the scientific terminology and made up technobabble—because the book was boring and I still think it will win the Hugo this year. Despite the bullet points it uses in place of writing. This is what people like right now, and that’s fine. Like what you read and read what you like, but this book clearly isn’t for me.

Uprooted by Naomi Novak

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, Uprooted is a well told story, but I'm struggling to understand whether it's trying to say anything, and if so, what.

1. This seems like nothing more than pulp fiction. That’s not a condemnation: I enjoy pulp fiction and this certainly fits the bill—I enjoy reading this novel while actually reading it. But when not reading it, I am slightly bemused. The plot is simple: there is an evil Wood with sentient malice, a powerful wizard who has lost touch with his humanity while living in a tower, a young woman who doesn’t yet realize her own power as a witch, some political court drama, and a messianic tale of her understanding leading to the resolution of an old conflict. You already know how this ends. Structurally, this book captures the cliff-hanger chapter endings that help make pulp fiction engrossing to read, the constant action that leaves the reader feeling breathless, and the heroism that befits a fairy tale. Novak weaves in Polish myths because she is Polish-American, but change a few names and you have any fairy tale. The book moves from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, with the reader knowing as little as the main character about what’s coming next, outside of the predictability of the tropes.

2. And that’s where I need to start about my problems with this novel. First, because the reader has such little to go on in terms of foreshadowing, it relies upon deus ex machina moments to get to the end. Starting with the first chapter, these sudden moments of shift are passed off as the main character’s intuition and revelatory accidents. It’s something she can’t understand, so the author doesn’t either. It comes off as a bit of a disappointment to me when the river helps guide them to the sacred grove, for instance. Or that Kasia is suddenly invulnerable. Or that all the tests show the Queen is free from the Wood’s corruption before it’s suddenly obvious she is still enslaved. Later it seems to begin to contradict itself when a priest can't detect corruption, but the bishop can? Or maybe the bishop's wizard can? These moments are right in line with pulp fiction tropes, like the rest of the plot and structure.

3. As far as what themes this novel, I couldn’t say for certain. I guess it’s a general call to be nicer and understand people more, but honestly the plot gets in the way of any theme Novak put in here. If she was trying to say something, to claim some theme driving the book, it didn’t work because there is so much action distracting from it, and the plot points tend to imply different themes. For instance, Agnieszka is downright nasty to the wizard in the tower, yet she ends up gaining enough power from him to stop the Wood invading at one point. Later, her kindness and friendship to Kasia allow her to do something that hasn’t been done in fifty years. So is Novak advocating kindness or nastiness? It’s muddled. So I think we have to look to the end, to where the characters finish at, and they end up relying upon each other, trying to understand and live with the enemy, then working with the enemy to fix the underlying problem and forgive. That’s probably the theme. I think.

4. The main character, despite always shouting at the people around her, is fairly engaging. She’s iconoclastic and memorable, but not exactly understandable or interesting. Novak builds her like most pulp characters: showing Agnieszka’s reactions to dangerous situation after dangerous situation. She’s loyal but realizes she’s probably growing out of that loyalty. She strikes a good balance between shown and told—she’s a bit of a puzzle, but since she’s still trying to figure herself out, this sort of works.

5. The writing is good. There was a nice mix of sentence structures and word choices. I came across a couple of phrases that really sang, and a rare few awkward sentences. But in all, it didn’t annoy me in the least.

6. I do really like how Novak builds this world by assuming our myths are real, yet still building a mythical world off of that. It’s the myths that come after the myths. I enjoy when an author uses real-world touchstones to anchor the reader’s understanding—fruits and cows and plants that are familiar and help this world feel real rather than using made-up words as analogies to these familiar things. Typically it helps an author drive their point home without distracting the reader by making them memorize what word analogizes to horse, or hamburger, or sun. Here though, with such a muddled point, it is just good writing. And using this tactic to actually build the whole world is inspired.

7. For all that the novel tries to delve into actually probable causes for fairy tale myths, it certainly comes off as simply a wish fulfillment novel. This is the book for you if you ever wanted to be a witch or wizard.

8. In all, I feel like I missed something here. It’s a well-told story in all its parts, but it feels like it wanders overall. It’s got an engaging main character but I’m typically annoyed at her reactions—also at the reactions of the other characters. It’s got no theme really, but the myths are still interesting. It builds an engaging world, but then tells a typical fantasy messianic tale. It tries to encourage working together, then spends hundreds of pages showing how people can’t work together. It goes one layer deeper into the myth, uncovering possible causes for some of the fairy tale tropes, but doesn't really coalesce into a consistent vision of the world or myths. Based on this novel, I will not be reading more of Novak’s work, but I also didn’t hate it. If it wasn't for the one sex scene that adds nothing to either character involved, this would be a good young adult novel. Like I said, I’m bemused here: it seems to do nothing new, just does old things well and slightly shifted, but it is extremely popular all over the internet. Not the book for me, but enjoyable and a well told story.

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, The Fifth Season is a sensational book: so gripping and exciting. But I also think it’s flawed. (As a joke before my notes begin: clearly Jemisin has never watched CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada and those commercials for a bank that I will not name. After reading the title, I was half hoping for a speculative fiction hockey novel.)

1. The most astounding thing I found in here was Jemisin’s ability to delve so deeply into both the macro and micro scales in such a short space—the whole book is 520 pages or so, but much of that is appendixes. By the end, without reading the appendixes, I had a massive amount of understanding about the fictional world, its history, and its peoples; as well as about each character.
—The worldbuilding is spectacular. She even deals with geological history, which is important because it shows how consistent, interconnected, and wholistic her world building is. Geological events spark, sustain, and star in the titular fifth seasons—long periods of ash and gas blocking out the sun, and volcanic activities which are clearly the biggest influence on world history for this fictional world. Geological features determine the survivability of every community from the capital of the empire down to the lowliest roadside wellhouse, both in a fifth season and in the peaceful interludes between them. Even roads’ locations, types of material used for building, and how to engineer a flexible ridgeline are determined by the geological activity. The fifth seasons cause everybody to be insular within their community, precise and formal outside their community, and paranoid preppers on a personal level. Cultures are arranged around use-castes that are determined by a person’s essential usefulness to a community during the many emergencies geology provides. These are just a few, general examples, but I could easily list more. On a world where geology is as active as this, it makes sense that the entire culture is changed from what we are, and those changes are rooted around the geology. This is the basic premise worked out brilliantly: whether the author’s initial premise was asking what a geologically active world would cause a culture to look like, or what would cause a culture repressed to this extent, she ended up with a well-built, complex world that is incredibly consistent—to the point where I can’t tell whether the geology or the culture came first in her mind.
—And the characters are all so tied into this world-building that they’re defined by the world they live in, whether they’re for or against the repression of culture. Jemisin’s characters couldn’t live anywhere but where they do. Well, maybe they could, but that’d be unlikely. I mean, we’ve got a cast of stone-eaters and geomancers—which fit this world precisely. And that’s not to say they don’t compare to us: when they’re not informing or being informed by the world, they’re going through struggles and emotions that are understandable and relatable. Finding out everything you trusted wasn’t actually trustworthy? Check. Finding the skillful and abrasive outsider’s views on things explanatory to your own mysteries? Check. Trusting people in the moment and asking questions after the fact? Also in here. Experiencing loss and trying to continue living? Yup, a few times. Making a mistake and endangering those you love? Of course. You get the idea. There is a lot in this novel—a lot of emotional experience. And each circumstance and action serves to explain characters to a degree that I feel like I know these as people.
—Jemisin doesn’t overwhelm the novel with an intro-info-dump, forced classroom scene, or overbearing explanatory character. Rather, spread throughout the whole novel is a mix of small explanations and hints injected directly into the action and dialogue of the plot. For instance, when Hoa reveals himself as a stone-eater, Essun consciously files that away for later discussion, moves on with the immediate concern, then gets to questioning Hoa a few chapters later. This is how Jemisin builds both the world and characters: details naturally springing out of the plot foreshadow brief explanations that come a few pages or chapters down the line. This is incredible worldbuilding without relying upon the “history of every lichen-covered rock between the Shire and Mt. Doom”. This is world-building with a purpose that complements and strengthens the discussions and plot within the novel, rather than distracting from it.
—In short, while culture and geology get all combined together, the characters form a third strand in the knot. The consistency and complexity through these three threads is astounding. If this book were a person I would be amazed at their intellectual rigor. If for nothing other than this world and character building, I will be reading more Jemisin.

2. Structurally, this is fantastic. At the start, there appears to be three characters. There are three chapter families, one for each of the main characters—Damaya the child, Syenite the young woman, and Essun the woman. Each chapter focuses on one of these characters and doesn’t include the other two. But as the book progresses, realization slowly dawns, then is confirmed, that all three are the same person, but in different stages of life. Jemisin does something amazing here by collating three narratives from a single character’s life, showing successive slices of each, and effectively telling three time periods simultaneously: Damaya’s present and future; Syenite’s past, present, and future; and Essun’s past and present. It’s amazing because once this fact is confirmed in one of the last chapters, my mind immediately crawled backwards and forwards in attempting to piece everything together and that was an enjoyable puzzle. Each of the storylines works towards the fault line where Damaya becomes Syenite, where Syenite becomes Essun, and where Essun has to come to terms with being Syenite and Damaya as well. In this way, each of the three plots is engaging and exciting: even after the end is know in the sense that Damaya becomes Syenite who becomes Essun, I enjoy finding out the specifics. The whole novel has a prologue that I reread because it hints at things and contains specifics and mysteries not explained until much later. There are also two short interludes where the author breaks the fourth wall in the second person—but the first one could be from Hoa’s point of view. These help as pauses in the story to give the reader a brief respite to put all the pieces together, to foreshadow the coming chapters, and to let Jemisin drive home a few things these talking about.

3. The writing is all over the place. Some things I like, some I don’t. Really, there are four things that I want to discuss.
—First, the one everybody talks about: some of this novel’s chapters are written in the second person. At first, I was hoping that the novel would be about three characters, each one’s chapters written in a different person. It ended up being about one character but told from two different points of view—one written in third person and the other in second. That was clever and interesting. But how cool would it have been to have it turn out the way I was hoping? I was disappointed, but this disappointment is only because I expected too much. My fault for being disappointed, not hers. So I’m not judging the voices negatively—Jemisin wrote both effectively and it is a cool tactic the way she used it.
—Similarly, the fourth-wall breaking was fine. There are points in the second person portions where it’s ambiguous whether Jemisin is talking to the reader or Essun, and that ambiguity helps the reader understand what Jemisin is questioning through the plot. There isn’t too many bits where Jemisin talks to the reader directly, so it’s not overdone in the sense of explaining the whole book directly and making the narrative itself feel unimportant. She keeps a good balance between forcing the question on the reader and letting the reader come to it themselves by breaking the fourth wall so rarely.
—Third, she mixes colloquial and rare word choices in a way that doesn’t excite me, but I don’t really hate it either. It seems like some of the word choices don’t fit the tone or setting of the novel. For instance, on the same page she uses the words comm and ire—ire being a formal word choice, and comm being the colloquial abbreviation for community. This is fine, on the surface, but I don’t enjoy how much of the colloquial is within the novel. At my most pessimistic, it’s blog-writing trying to be fantasy. At my most honest, it almost works. Unlike Iain M Banks’ consistent colloquial formality played for laughs and to build characters, I found Jemisin’s colloquial-formal language to be inconsistent in density within the novel and in purpose of use. In each family of chapters, the mix of colloquial and formal is different, which makes some sense, but sort of sends me spinning. In short, I didn’t enjoy many of the word choices, though there were a couple of beautiful alliterative moments. But in a book where so much of the novel is so deeply thought through and interconnected, the word choices weren’t as well thought through.
—Fourth, the most annoying thing in the novel: Jemisin has one past tense sentence in the middle of the novel. I believe it is an error in editing, not intentional, but I spent a lot of time thinking about what it could mean.

No one in the Fulcrum talks about the Guardians’ politics, probably because no one in the Fulcrum understands them. The Guardians keep their own counsel, and they object to inquiries. Vehemently.

Not for the first time Syenite wonders: To whom do the Guardians answer?

As Syen’s considered this, they’ve reached the cove, and stopped at its railed boardwalk. The avenue ends here, its cobbles vanishing beneath a drift of sand and then the raised wooden walkway. Not far off there’s a different sandy beach from the one they saw earlier. Children run up and down the boardwalk’s steps, squealing in play, and beyond them Syen can see a gaggle of old women wading...

—Chapter 14

—In closing, the writing was fine. It wasn’t spectacular, but it didn’t hide points Jemisin was trying to make.

4. Thematically, Jemisin is talking about minorities and advocating understanding and working together among different people. She does this through showing how one character’s outsider point of view can influence and benefit another person. She does this through describing how the different people groups react and interact to the geology and each other. She does this through the universally second class geomancers. She does this through the unknowns in the history. She uses the theme to focus the novel, to tie all the threads of world-building and characters together. She uses the unique geomancers, who are inherently interesting because they are so different from us, as a central part of the novel, and this insures the reader never forgets the theme. In short, as everything here, the theme is rigorous.

5. The sex is overdone. After the first few times, I get what she’s trying to do with the sex—explaining that certain characters are less jealous than others. But after that, it just seems sensational and uninformative, and that’s a real bummer. I mean, if you’re putting sex in a novel, you necessarily limit the potential audience. And if the sex doesn’t payoff for the reader’s understanding, or the world building, then why is it in there other than sensationalism? To be clear, my complaint isn't that there is sex in the novel, it's that the sex doesn't inform the reader to the same extent the other aspects of the novel do. In point one above I state, "each circumstance and action serves to explain characters to a degree that I feel like I know these as people." The sex didn't always accomplish this, and that's my main complaint here. In this, it was slightly discongruous.

6. I am amazed by how rigorous and complex this novel becomes without losing its excitement. It remains an exciting adventure throughout, but is also a wonderful study of this fascinating world she has created. The way she focuses on the macro and micro is spectacular. My two big annoyances were the sex and the word choices. But they weren’t significant enough to turn me off of this novel or from reading her other works. I’m excited to read the next book in this trilogy, and some of her past work as well. Yet another example of fantasy being used to explain something in our own culture by recontextualizing it. And this is a good, good book. I can see why it’s so popular. I really, really enjoyed reading this novel!