#n. k. jemisin

[demekii]

I am here once again to ask everyone to read The Broken Earth trilogy ❤️

#the broken earth #the fifth season #n. k. jemisin #dani art

[st-just]

Istanbul is cats, as much as people. And dogs, but more cats. Cats don't do politics. Cats don't commit genocide, unless one counts rats, and Istanbul is still raw about the Black Death so he's fine with those little bastards going down.

-The World We Make, by N. K. Jemisin

#quote #funny #the world we make #n. k. jemisin

[deramin2]

Omelas

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

By Ursula K. Le Guin 1973

This haunting short story is about a city that can be a utopia only if a single child suffers. You will forever be thinking about this story after reading it.

Fun fact, she chose the name from a passing road sign. Salem O (Oregon) spelled backwards. This story is very much grounded in colonized Oregon's long history of utopia projects (that all eventually fizzle out, many after becoming dangerous cults).

"Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole"

By Isabel J. Kim, 2024

Kim tells the story of what happens if the suffering child of Omelas is killed. Outstanding new story that powerfully examines Omelas vs. our world.

"The Ones Who Stay and Fight"

By N. K. Jemisin, 2018

Jemisin's rebuttal to "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" about a society that achieves utopia through honoring all people as having inherent worth. It asks the reader why that sounds so impossible.

#Ursula K. Le Guin #Omelas #The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas #Isabel J. Kim #Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole #N. K. Jemisin #The Ones Who Stay and Fight

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

#short story collections #short story collection #how long til black future month? #how long 'til black future month? #n.k. jemisin #n. k. jemisin #black literature #african american literature #american literature #21st century literature #english language literature #have you read this short fiction? #book polls #completed polls

[therefugeofbooks]

coffee and second-hand books

#booklr #books #book photography #n. k. jemisin #the fifth season #coffee #archictecture #city views #around the city series #the refuge of books

[literary-illuminati]

Like I'm sorry 'eldritch abomination in human skin who tries to be this omniscient manipulator but keeps forgetting how to pretend to be human and what directions our joints can turn and keeps going off on exuberant rants about higher-order metaphsics when trying to intimidate/(metaphorically) seduce people into working for her' is just an amazing character concept. Incredibly endearing tbh.

#the world we make #n. k. jemisin #sff #tht

[qbdatabase]

Ahoy, mates and mutineers!

This month’s list features some of my top picks for women who rule the high seas–and the occasional space ship. Or really fucked up ghost ship. Plus a couple extra disaster male pirates 😘

Book descriptions and rep for lesbian, bisexual, butch, disabled, autistic, and women of color below the cut!

*Barbary Station / R. E. Stearns: Sci-Fi; grad students turn to space-piracy to pay off their debts but find they’re trapped on-station by an evil AI, feat. autistic lesbian x bi girlfriend

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea / Maggie Tokuda-Hall: YA Fantasy; a genderfluid pirate accidentally bonds with their noble Lady passenger, set on a wild escape, and free a captured mermaid

Ship of Smoke and Steel / Django Wexler: YA Fantasy, Action; Asian bisexual crime boss fights a ghost pirate ship (yes, the ship itself) with her lesbian healer girlfriend

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy / Mackenzi Lee: YA Historical; an aro-ace lady schemes to become a doctor, but she’ll settle for being a pirate!

The Fifth Season / N. K. Jemisin: Fantasy, Dystopia; a poly bisexual woman sets out on a vengeance quest to rescue her kidnapped daughter the day the world ends

Compass Rose / Anna Burke: Fantasy / Sci-Fi; a black lesbian goes undercover as a pirate in the 26th century

Windfall / Shawna Barnett: Fantasy; a secret-princess pirate Captain is blackmailed into protecting a runaway real princess in bisexual love square

A Song of Silver and Gold / Melissa Karibian: Fantasy; retelling of The Little Mermaid with enemies-to-lovers, butch lesbian pirate Captain x siren warrior who must cut out her heart

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach: Sci-Fi; bisexual dead cop comes back wrong and works w/pirates to stop a plague

*Captain Raven and the All Girl Pirate Crew: YA graphic novel; Raven needs revenge against her brothers, so she hires a female crew, feat. Deaf, lesbian, and women of color

(extra) The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue: YA Historical; alcoholic bi male x epileptic biracial gay male; the first in the series by Makenzie Lee

*(extra) Kidnapped by the Pirate / Keira Andrews: Romance; a young gay man offers himself as hostage to an older pirate Captain to save his sister

*titles with an asterisk next to them have been featured on QBdatabase.com as a daily book; this lists the book's full jacket summary, detailed notes on representation, and a link to its goodreads page!

#barbary station #R. E. Stearns #The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea #Maggie Tokuda Hall #Ship of Smoke and Steel #Django Wexler #The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy #Mackenzie Lee #The Fifth Season #N. K. Jemisin #Compass Rose #Anna Burke #Windfall #Shawna Barnett #A Song of Silver and Gold #Melissa Karibian #The Dawnhounds #Sascha Stronach #Captain Raven and the All Girl Pirate Crew #Kidnapped by the Pirate #Keira Andrews #adult books #science fiction #sci fi books #book series #fantasy #YA #YA books #romance #historical romance

[glace-the-cloudwatcher]

Read N. K. Jemisen's Inheritance Trilogy recently and god. So fucking good snsnsn like the worldbuilding and the play with power dynamics and the gods and godlings, it's all just *chefs kiss*. First proper book series I've read in ages and I regret nothing

#the hundred thousand kingdoms #n. k. jemisin #the inheritance trilogy

[onlycosmere]

Contemporary Literary Merit

calmabiding1: If it isn't too late, Brandon, do you have anything to say on the criticism that contemporary popular fantasy novels do not have much artistic merit in them?

Brandon Sanderson: I'd say that literary merit is poorly defined, and even when it is well defined, it is extremely gatekeeperish and the definitions aren't particularly useful.

There is obviously great fantasy that is both popular and meets traditional artistic and literary definitions. I have access to the numbers, and N. K. Jemisin is one of the bestselling authors in the genre. I'd define her sales as far more than just popular. And few are debating her literary merit.

I'd say that popular fiction, as a category, is trying to do something different than these particular critics are looking for. Why criticize a steak for not being duck? For many of us, our goal is compelling characters, interesting worldbuilding, and intriguing plots. That's what we set out to do--to change lives, to make people feel things, to bring joy through storytelling.

It's hard to argue that much of this does not fit someone else's rigid standards of what a story should be--but it's what we want the stories to be, what we created them to be. They connect with the people for whom we created them, and evoke the emotions we want. Is that not the definition of art?

#brandon sanderson #n. k. jemisin #cfsbf #root #branderson #wob #kind of #writing

[dduane]

Hi there! I just finished the book "The City We Became" by N.K. Jemison and I wanted to see if you'd heard of it. It's a fantasy of sorts about New York written in such a particular way that I couldn't help but think back constantly to how you've described Manhattan in SYWTBAW and the Feline wizards stories. It's very much an homage to the city, the good and the bad parts and I enjoyed the story as much as the nostalgia it gave me to think back to the first story with Nita and Kit (and Fred!). Anyway, hope you have a lovely day!

Thanks!

I definitely know of the book (as N. K. Jemisin is a fabulous writer), but haven’t read it as yet. Along with a whole lot of others, it’s on the list. …Anyway, thanks for the rec!

#The City We Became #N. K. Jemisin

[gepwin]

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin

#book quote #fifth season #n. k. jemisin #respectability politics

[caribeandthebooks]

Caribe's Fantasy TBR - Part 5

#fairy tale #stephen king #the killing moon #n. k. jemisin #some kind of fairy tale #graham joyce #once and forever #kenji miyazawa #the poppy war #r f kuang #the human origins of beatrice porter #soraya palmer #fantasy #fantasy books #books #book tumblr #booklr #bookblr #tbr list #tbr jar #book blog

[st-just]

This is actually kind of adorable, in a creepy eldritch abomination way?

#the world we make #n. k. jemisin #sff #pg

[number1iowan]

Alex Karev is from Grey's Anatomy, which I have never seen, but I gather that he's a bit of a Bad Boy. He appears to have had abusive parents and a family history of schizophrenia, and then he becomes the chief of pediatric surgery. Good for him!

N. K. Jemisin is a hugely decorated science fiction author, known for being the first author to win the Hugo Award for best novel three years in a row. Her current series, The City We Became, features personifications of cities, but she was 37 in 2009, well out of the target demo, so it probably wasn't inspired by that anime.

#iowa #Alex Karev #nk jemisin #N. K. Jemisin #the city we became #greys anatomy #grey's anatomy

[wideeyedreader]

Recently Read: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

5 amazed stars!

#the city we became #n. k. jemisin #books #just finished #bookblr #bookblogger #book photography #book blog #booklr

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 10 - The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

I’m generally a huge fan of Jemisin, so of course I had to read this as soon as I realized it existed, even if I really didn’t think The City We Became needed a sequel on pretty much any level. And yeah, it didn’t!

Like, I’ve already posted about my issues with this book extensively, so will try to keep this relatively succinct. But broadly – there were about twice as many POVs as the wordcount could actually support with their own subplots, Ry’leh and her minions had all the threat and grandeur of a Saturday morning cartoon villain, the broader metaphysics/plot didn’t actually much sense at all , basically every actual problem the characters had was resolved as soon as they actually tried, and, generally, the book’s highest aim really seemed to be more engaging in some cathartic effigy-burning of various political analogues than it did really telling any sort of coherent story.

The book has virtues – the sentence to sentence prose is very good when it doesn’t read like a DNC campaign mailer, and the characters who actually get screen time and internal conflicts are all very compelling (somewhat unfortunate that half of them are the villains). But just – it’s impossible to really feel like you’re rooting for the underdogs when the protagonists start the book in a commanding position with everything they need to win and nothing that happens over the course of the entire story actually puts them on the back foot for a couple of hours? Or I mean, I tell a lie, technically the entire book is a race against the clock of impending universal extinction, as caused by...Fox News and right-wing twitter running a bunch of anti-New York smear campaigns? Which was just so obviously arbitrary and driven by the needs of plot it was impossible to take seriously.

Just, generally, there is a real upper limit to how far you can stretch ‘the divine avatars of quite possibly the richest and most politically powerful metropolis in the world fight proud boys and a no-hope Trump wannabe running for Mayor’ into something that compelling. The literal global capital of financial capitalism, not an easy sell as ‘scrappy underdog’! Especially when the dominant tone used to talk about any of the human opposition is just sneering contempt. Which I mean, very true to life, but doesn’t do a great job establishing a sense of threat. Especially when the sneering contempt is just entirely justified, and every action on the part of the enemy basically just happens to allow one of the avatars to do an incredibly self-indulgent New York-themed bit of magic, probably humiliating an obvious analogue for some prominent right wing figure or archetype (trucker convoy, proud boys, etc) in the process. It’s just, so incredibly cheesy. At one point a city councilwoman is revealed to be a friendly acquaintance with Beyonce and able to call her in to help with her mayoral campaign. Wretched of the earth these are not.

But okay, to try and make this a bit more analytical and a bit less me ranting – I really don’t think the book’s conception of the soul or character of New York really coheres? It’s New York, but, like, the nostalgic fantasy of pre-Guliani New York mixed with the parts of it that modern progressives take pride in. At no point does the book explain in any even close to satisfactory way why the transparent Trump analogue winning would be more spiritually damaging than Bloomberg (or hell, Moses) was – we’re just supposed to take it as read that being the beating heart of progressive America is at the soul of what it means to be New York.

On a similar note – there’s a real ambiguity to what Ry’leh is supposed to, like, be, thematically? Or I mean, not really. She’s gentrification, not necessarily in the social displacement sense (but that too) as in the way that every central business district in every major city in the world increasingly looks the same, in the way that identical chain stores replace local small businesses, the tendency of modern capitalist development to erode the difference between places until a city is a city is a city, no matter what continent you’re on. Local restaurants bought out by numbered holding companies or international franchises and getting their menus and recipes from a focus group in California. Which is a great, meaty association for your villain! But, like, isn’t especially well served by also being specifically alt-right and Trumpist American right-wing politics (very, very much not the same thing!). And as soon as we get into what she and the Ur actually want everything just kind of stops making sense entirely. (She’s also just so, like, cartoonishly evil and constantly talking about wanting to end the world and make things worse that it’s impossible to take seriously and she just ends up one of the most endearing characters in the entire story.)

Anyway, yeah, Neek and Manny and Ry’leh and Aislyn were all great, but otherwise The City We Became really didn’t need a sequel.

#book review #the world we make #n. k. jemisin #sff