This third and final part of N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy begins where the previous installment left off. Essun, with her powers of orogeny and magic that allow her to control organic and inorganic matter, is on the road again, after assisting her adopted community of Castrima defeat a marauding enemy. They are heading north towards the Rifting that has split the continent of the Stillness in two, an apocalyptic event known as a Fifth Season in the law of the land. Essun has been tasked with bringing back the Moon, which was sent spinning off into space at some point in the distant past, an event that began the geological instability the Earth is currently facing. Exhausted and cynical from a lifetime of violence and oppression, Essun is dragging herself to her story’s end.
To the south, Essun’s 10-year-old daughter Nassun is continuing her journey to her own lunar task, in this case to use her powers to catch the Moon and drive it into Earth, so ending the world finally and completely. After recently killing her biological father in self-defence, she is accompanied by Schaffa, a man whose complicated allegiances have seen him harm and aide people with powers like Nassun and her mother. Mother and daughter have separately come to the same tool to end the violent inequality of the Stillness; they differ only in the severity of their solution.
But first The Stone Sky takes us back in time, to the ancient civilisation of Syl Anagist, a seemingly utopian society that has discovered how to extract energy from life. It’s here that we learn the origins of Hoa, the trilogy’s narrator, who in the present is a being made entirely of rock known as a stone eater, but in the past was rather more flesh and blood. We learn that this was by design, people like Hoa created by Syl Anagist for their powers of magic and orogeny. This was also the civilisation that created the obelisks, the giant floating crystals that we have previously seen used by mother and daughter with dramatic and horrifying results.
Using the same split narrative of the first two books, The Stone Sky follows Hoa as he learns that he has no freedom at all, that he is enslaved and at the whim of the people who made him. “Some worlds,” Hoa tells us, “Are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares.” The world-building and evocation of history is rather vertiginous — found texts used throughout the trilogy make it feel like Jemisin’s vision for this world is almost limitless.
The Stone Sky is about origins and endings, revealing that the latest apocalypse is just part of a fight for freedom going back forty thousand years. While the novel’s pathway might be convoluted at times as it weaves together threads, it ultimately rewards by enriching the themes the trilogy has been developing. There are here clear allegories for the colonisation of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous people, followed by the importation of slave labour from Africa, and its fantastical elements reveal truths about our non-fantastical reality.
For people who have known oppression, as one character states, “Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends”, illuminating that for many people, apocalypses aren’t scary end-of-the-world stories but lived experience. Over the trilogy, Jemisin has demonstrated the fracturing impact of state-inflicted, systematic trauma. At it’s best is has the power of Parable Of The Sower, with which it shares some of its apocalyptic road trip vibes, showing the fragility of community and the complicated tradeoffs between group and individual safety.
Gay rating: 3/5 for numerous queer characters.
The Library Is Open 