Sean Gillies (Posts about broken earth)https://sgillies.net/tags/broken-earth.atom2023-12-31T01:26:18ZSean GilliesNikolaThe Broken Earth Trilogyhttps://sgillies.net/2018/01/21/the-broken-earth-trilogy.html2018-01-21T11:30:00-07:002018-01-21T11:30:00-07:00Sean Gillies<p>I've just finished "The Stone Sky," and with that, J.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth
series. Damn, what a trio of books. I haven't been this engrossed in novels in
a long time. I'm behind the curve in reading and figure that almost anybody
reading this post has already them. If you haven't, don't worry, no major
spoilers here. There <em>are</em> spoilers in the blog posts that I link below,
however.</p>
<p>I predict that I'll be coming back to this series in time, like I have with Le
Guin's Earthsea books. <a class="reference external" href="http://nkjemisin.com/2015/08/tricking-readers-into-acceptance/">Essun</a> is,
I think, right there with Ged as the most complete and most human wizard in all
of fantasy literature. And her <a class="reference external" href="http://nkjemisin.com/2015/10/on-family/">family</a>, allies, and enemies are also
portrayed with great care. The descriptions of the landscapes and cityscapes,
both living and dead, warrant another read, for sure.</p>
<p>I shouldn't compare Jemisin to Le Guin, but I always (guiltily) wanted more
action in Le Guin's stories, and I found myself instantly hooked by the
punctuations of danger, force, and urgency in the Broken Earth series. It's
a thrilling tale that lives up to all the hype.</p>
<p>Next up on my reading list: "The Trail Runner's Companion" and "The
Architecture of Open Source Applications." I'm going to cherry pick some
chapters from the latter. I'm mostly interested in lessons from Berkeley DB,
HDFS, and LLVM.</p>