The Earth, the Moon, and politics

I fell behind on my NaNoWriMo writing because I had a book to return to the library, and I’d be absolutely damned if I didn’t actually finish reading it first. There was a waitlist, so I couldn’t renew, and I don’t think I could have handled having to re-request it and wait for it to circle back around to me while I was only halfway through. The suspense would have killed me.

The book in question was N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the eagerly awaited third book in her fantastic Broken Earth trilogy, which I’m fairly certain is going to become a giant of the genre. The first two books each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the years they came out, and I hope The Stone Sky does as well, because I’ll be very surprised if a better novel has come out all year.
 

At the end of the last book, Alabaster Tenring died, having been turned into stone by doing magic—not just orogeny, but magic—and eaten by a stone eater known as Antimony. Quite technically, our protagonist, Essun, killed him, turning the last of him to stone and inheriting his power when she activated the Obelisk Gate to save her experimental newfound comm, Castrima-Under, from an invading army of raiders from the city of Rennanis. This had effects not only on the invaders but also on Rennanis, so Castrima, their underground geode now destroyed, set out across the wastes of falling ash toward… the city of Rennanis. 
 

Essun, meanwhile, is turning to stone, just like Alabaster was. And she still has to catch the Moon.
 

Like the other books, this book has three different timelines/viewpoints that it shifts between. Essun in the present is the main one, narrated in second person by the stone eater Hoa. The second perspective follows Essun’s daughter Nassun, in the same timeline and also narrated by Hoa, as she travels with Schaffa, her Guardian, away from the comm of Found Moon after some really serious stuff goes down there. Nassun’s also on a quest that involves traveling to the other side of the world and activating the Obelisk Gate, but hers is different: She plans to smash the Moon into the Earth, putting the world out of its misery and permanently ending humanity’s ability to oppress each other. It’s a very effective twist on what would otherwise be a traditional James Bond-villain bit of supervillainry, because Nassun’s not evil—she’s a traumatized eleven-year-old girl, the only remaining child of the protagonist, and her loyalties make perfect sense. 
 

The third perspective is also Hoa, but this time he is telling his own story in the first person, tens of thousands of years ago in a civilization that consists of one massive, sprawling, continent-wide city named Syl Anagist. The civilization that created Syl Anagist has advanced plant-engineering skills and believes life is sacred, and they are the ones who built the obelisks. They were for a project. The project, as you may have guessed, went horribly wrong, in a way that resulted in a pissed-off Father Earth and the Seasons and a load of obelisks floating around in the atmosphere for millennia, but this doesn’t give anything away about how the world got to that point or why or what it all means or how to fix it, so it’s still a tense, gripping, unpredictable storyline, a backstory that could stand entirely on its own. But it’s better that it doesn’t, because the story of Syl Anagist is necessary to figuring it out how to end the millennia-long war between the humans and Father Earth. 
 

The story of Syl Anagist is also begging for an hours-long discussion by the nearest group of socialist SFF nerds you can find, but in the meantime, I’m just gonna say that the relationship between Syl Anagist’s belief that life is “sacred” and the stuff they actually do with it is some extremely pointed commentary on commodification and the ways in which unsustainable growth-based economic systems enable horrific abuses on an industrial scale, and the way in which the very industrialization of those abuses becomes itself a way of papering them over so nobody has to see or think about it. It’s about imperialism rather than about capitalism per se but the destructively self-perpetuating expansionism thing should be recognizable to anyone with any grounding in either early- to mid-modern imperial history or modern globalization (which is basically imperialism via finance). There’s also a bunch of stuff in there about civilizational mythmaking, and I wonder if I’m the only reader who thinks “Syl Anagist” sounds kind of like “Los Angeles”—you know, the enormous sprawling city where so many of our myths are made and exported from. I may be overthinking that last bit. 
 

With all of Essun’s family dead except Nassun, who is now basically the antagonist, this book also has a lot of stuff to say about family relationships, but especially about family relationships within wider political contexts, including really uncomfortable stuff like trying to figure out the appropriate ways to prepare your children for facing extreme and life-threatening oppression from the rest of society. I feel like I’m not really qualified to make any sort of coherent commentary on this but from other readings I’ve done, especially when I was doing freelance research on child protection systems, I’ve run into discussions about communities in which parents from marginalized communities are harsher disciplinarians toward their children than is considered acceptable by the sorts of white bourgeois families that judges and lawyers etc. tend to come from, because they know that their kids don’t have as much room to screw up as middle-class white kids, and then this in turn increases the likelihood of the parents being deemed abusive and having the kids taken away from them, and it’s a whole complicated mess of there being basically no good answers (other than, like, for society to stop being oppressive, but we obviously can’t do that, can we). With the orogenes, this kind of reasoning is encapsulated into the ritual of breaking an orogene child’s hand as a test of discipline. Schaffa broke Essun’s hand back when she was first discovered when she was young; Essun broke Nassun’s hand when she was secretly training her as a child in Jekity. One result of this chain of events is that when Schaffa becomes Nassun’s Guardian, he doesn’t have to do quite all the same dreadful disciplinarian things he did to Essun, because Essun has already done them to Nassun—and this has pretty major effects on Nassun’s relationships with her mother and her Guardian.
 

Anyway, that is just one aspect of things that jumped out at me as being a very clever way of creating distinctive world-building for this series that explores really deep and uncomfortable real-world issues, but frankly, everything N.K. Jemisin writes is like that, all the time. All her books are as serious and complex as a world war. Grad students are going to be writing master’s theses on her stuff centuries from now (if we still have grad programs and aren’t all dead of climate change). If America ever decides to stop being a bunch of total dipshits, we’ll make her more famous than the Kardashians. If the TV series adaptation of the Broken Earth trilogy doesn’t fuck it up, I hope it gets bigger than Game of Thrones and that Jemisin makes dump trucks full of money. In short, I am, in fact, dead now, but in a good way. 
 

And yet for some reason, the second Dreamblood book has just been sitting on my shelf for like two years now. I think it’s because I got it signed and now I’m afraid to touch it? I also don’t want to be in a state of having no more N.K. Jemisin books to read; that would be an empty and barren existence. But I know I’m missing out on an excellent story by not reading it, and I have only myself to blame.

 

Five-card spread, NaNoWriMo

I did a five-card spread with the vampire deck, thinking vaguely about my NaNoWriMo project. Will I complete 50,000 words? Will I be able to stand anything I write? Should I continue drafting the new project, or should I edit the old one and find a way to make that count for wordcount? Will the old novel be editable into something decent? Will I be able to outline the new project into something that could someday make sense? I do not know.



The first card, the Past card, was the King of Wands, representing air of fire. He is an ambitious dude--a driven, highly motivated, creative person who is always keeping his eyes on the prize. Apparently I was once like this? Or at least I was about my writing. Possibly back in 2010 when I started Tess. I feel like I've always had problems with motivation but perhaps I'm retconning to make up for how much I do now. The Louis book calls this guy "Leadership" and "Enterprise," perhaps a nod to the self-directed and entrepreneurial nature of writing if it is something one wants to take seriously and sell, which I am no longer certain I do. The King of Wands indicates that you may receive sound advice, mix with interesting people, negotiate well and convey your point of view. His placement in the spread indicates that I have already had this opportunity, which could possibly refer either to creative writing classes back in the day or to finding BSpec. He indicates that I may become restless and irritable if given "routine work" to do, which would possibly indicate that I have gone into the wrong career field. Ah well, too late now. This King would be better to have at the end of the spread than at the beginning of it; I think this indicates that I have backslid in some way.

The second card, the Present card, is the Six of Cups, "The Good Old Days," representing Nostalgia. I have a lot of cups in this spread, which would seem to mean that my writing progress is going to be closely related to my feels. The Good Old Days card represents innocence, reviewing childhood memories, sentimentality, that sort of thing. It could indicate the opportunity to renew and old acquaintance or that someone from the past will pop up in your life. More likely in this case it is referring to the possibility that "some matter with roots in the past comes to fruition" (finishing the first draft of Tess, maybe?) or advising that it is important to "recover and deal with old memories." It advises that "You will need to review some aspect of your past life, perhaps during an honest talk with a trusted advisor. You may have occasion to use old skills that have lain dormant for a long time." This seems to be pointing me more toward dealing with Tess than with the new project. 

The third card, Hidden Influences, is Major Arcana XX, Judgment. The Judgment card represents summing up or rebirth, and can mark hitting a developmental milestone, "the ending of a phase of life and the assessment of its worth." Finishing a first draft of a novel that's not co-authored by anyone might count, but it's not especially hidden, unless it's having a greater effect on me somehow than I realize. This card indicates the possibility of facing a crucial decision, which is unhelpful if the decision is whether I should spend the rest of November editing Tess or drafting the secret agent story, All the associations of this card are basically about graduating from one arc in life to the next one, which I have feelings about considering I turn 30 one week from today. Perhaps I am fundamentally changing life stages in ways that I'm not entirely aware of, which will probably affect my writing (or lack thereof).

The fourth card, the advice card, is a little weird, since it's the Seven of Cups, "Daydreams," which indicates a lack of focus or sense of confusion. I have certainly been lacking focus enough lately, and do not need to be advised to focus less! Basically, this card warns that I'm facing a choice that I might be too muddled to figure out clearly--either the options are too numerous or too balanced or they all have trade-offs, or some other factor that makes it hard for me to pick a direction to go in. If this is about which project I should work on, I know that, which is why I did a spread on it. The advice the card does give is that I need to figure out some way to focus and concentrate on a single goal to succeed (so, don't try to do both), and that success will depend on "weighing matters carefully to reach a thoughtful and focused decision." I'm going to have to, at the very least, plan my time out a lot better if I want to hit 50,000 words this month; I am indeed still behind even after the retreat, because I didn't write for the two days before it. This card warns that my thinking may be unrealistic, so I'm guessing specifically it's warning me not to think I can spend the whole month doing what I did yesterday, which is basically pantsing out the new story without doing much research or any outlining. The Louis book says "You would be wise to take your time and seek more information. On the other hand, this is an excellent time for creative projects of any kind." So probably, if I'm going to not make a total hash out of either project, I need to plan it, take it seriously, do my research, and not get my expectations too high for what I'm going to complete this month.

The last card is a shitty card to see on the Final Outcome part of the spread; it's the Five of Cups, "Loss and Disappointment." It indicates "mourning," regret, self-blame, sadness, an unhappy ending, all sorts of other stuff. "Unused talents" is one of the listed keywords. Somehow I suspect I'm not going to be especially happy with whatever I end up producing by the end of the month, regardless of which story it is. But this card does advise that "All is not lost... Something remains to be salvaged from the situation" and that "If you are involved in a painful relationship, it is best to sever the emotional tie that has led only to regret and disappointment." So basically I am on track to mess something up and wind up with a project that I'll eventually have to just let go of. This means I need to either prepare myself to let the project go, or really figure out how to get myself on a more productive path.

In short, that wasn't quite as uplifting a spread as I'd hoped, but it probably gave me the sort of advice I needed to hear. I am not where I wanted to be with either this year's NaNo or with my writing in general, and it's really entirely my own doing and no one else's. I've been blowing off readings telling me to prioritize stuff better for several years now. The cards aren't going to keep telling me that it'll all turn out great, because I haven't been doing what I need to do to make stuff turn out great.

Anyway, it's not even seven o'clock. Can I write more tonight? Should I write more tonight? Or should I do some research so I can do outlining tomorrow before I get any further into this story?

Someone tell me what to do; I'm still just as torn as when I started this reading!