Jemisin: The Obelisk Gate a The Stone Sky

Sú to druhá a tretia kniha z trilógie The Broken Earth (prvá bola The Fifth Season). A sú parádne. Druhá je trochu slabšia, klasický osud druhorodených kníh, ale v tretej sa to výborné rozprávanie z prvej knihy vracia s ešte väčšou silou. Konvergujú v nej dávna minulosť a osud matky a dcéry.
 
Fantasy knihy presne ako majú vyzerať. Komplexný svet so zvláštnou mágiou a narážkami na ten náš, plastické postavy, ktoré sa menia počas príbehu, v ktorom nič nie je čierno-biele, netradičné metafory a krásne písanie.  Tie Hugo ceny boli zaslúžené.

A dúfam, že autorka už má rozpracované niečo ďalšie.

The Obelisk Gate:

They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them.

… speaking as if it, the planet, is real. Alive, I mean. Aware. All that stuff about Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.

And the world is just shit. You understand this now, after two dead children and the repeated destruction of your life. There’s no need to imagine the planet as some malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion.

The Stone Sky:

They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.

Would’ve been nice if we could’ve all had normal, of course, but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn.

Not so very different, really, from the people who run the Fulcrums, or raiders, or her father. So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped.
For some crimes, there is no fitting justice – only reparation

She wants to be a person.
She wants the impossible, Dushwha will say. Gallat thinks it better to own her himself, rather than allow Syl Anagist to do the same. But for her to be a person, she must stop being… ownable. By anyone.

Hoa just looks at you. How the rust does he manage to convey such emotion with a stone face? Even if that emotion is dry skepticism of your self-abnegating bullshit. You laugh – once, and it’s rusty. Been a while.
“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”
So many layers in the strata of that statement.

He watches as you stand and stretch, and it’s a thing you’ll never fully understand or be comfortable with – the admiration in his gaze. He makes you feel like a better person than you are. And this is what makes you regret, again, endlessly, that you cannot stay to see his child born.

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