The Obelisk Gate Is an Impossibly Good Sequel

N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate is a sequel as impossibly good as its predecessor, the Nebula-nominated, Hugo-winning The Fifth Season. The first book’s title refers to the season of the end on the geologically shuddering continent of the Stillness. Every couple of centuries, an extinction level event—a Season—strikes the Stillness, and its inhabitants, the people of the empire of Sanze. Maybe tsunami ravage both coasts and flow hundreds of miles inland, or fires smudge the skies so that everything green dies for years. The people of Stillness have developed a systematic lore that has thus far managed to carry just enough people through each Season to rebuild and repopulate. Until now: an orogene—a immensely powerful magical stone worker—raised his hands and ripped the continent asunder. It is going to be a millennia until this season ends, and no lore can account for that.
The Fifth Season follows a character just up to the cataclysm, and then just after. The book opens with Essun sitting in her living room, contemplating the corpse of her toddler son, kicked to death by his own father for being an orogene. Essun bears the same secret burden, inadvertently (and unfortunately) passed on to both her children. Essun’s husband has killed their son and left with their daughter, Nassun, in the hopes of “saving” her from her own orogeny. Which is just when the world breaks, for entirely separate and yet intimately related reasons. Essun spends the book chasing after her surviving child as the world crumbles around her.
The Obelisk Gate widens the scope of its predecessor, following Nassun, the daughter, out on the road in a broken world with her broken father, and Essun, who has found a temporary home in a community that dwells underground, trying to wait out this Season. Nassun encounters one of her mother’s former teachers, a man who was always dangerous, and is now much more so. Essun treats with the man who destroyed the world—her old mentor and (once, uncomfortable) lover. But The Obelisk Gate is written largely in the second person, the one telling your story is someone you don’t expect, and can’t quite name.
Why it will win:

Like The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate slips and slides and then eventually, impossibly, comes together in a fashion that is just so unbelievably cool. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Jemisin has always been an impressive talent, but her writing in the Broken Earth series demonstrates a quantum leap beyond her earlier books, both in terms of writing style and sheer ambition.
Some may grouse about writing in the second person and deliberately complex plots can be alienating to readers, but I think Jemisin’s skill quashes any qualms. She is taking on tricky literary devices and totally freaking owning them. The Obelisk Gate is big, and the series only promises to get bigger before it ends.
Nebula voters also tend to vote for writers who have been toiling in the trenches for a long time without winning a Nebula. Both last year’s winner (Naomi Novik’s Uprooted), and the previous year’s (Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation) were the work of well-established writers. The Nebula, after all, is an industry award, given to writers by writers. While Jemisin’s The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award (the other big deal SFF award, voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Convention), it missed the Nebula that year. Maybe The Obelisk Gate won’t suffer the same fate.
Why it won’t win:
There’s not really a strong precedent for a sequel winning Nebula, especially if the first book didn’t. Sure, Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead took the big prize a year after its predecessor, Ender’s Game, won as well, but if you’ve ever read them both, you know how incredibly different those novels are; one could pick up the second without reading the first, and it would be no impediment. Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace, ostensibly a sequel to the seminal The Forever War, won in 1998. Forever Peace was written more than 20 years after its predecessor, and was never intended as a direct sequel. Similarly, David Brin’s Startide Rising, book two of the Uplift series, won in 1984, but it’s hardly a traditional sequel to Sundiver.
Not so, with Obelisk Gate; this novel decidedly builds on The Fifth Season. While I have no problem with that as a devotee of the trilogy (in fact: yassss), there’s going to be n-percent of voters who simply haven’t read the first book, and overcoming that is going to be tough sledding.
I’ve been totally burned on this observation before, but I’m also going to mention it anyway: The Obelisk Gate lies somewhere in the fallow region between science fiction and fantasy. (Previously, I noted that Annihilation was an exemplar of New Weird & Gothic fiction, which is why I thought it wouldn’t win the Nebula. But then it won, and I was so happily wrong.) Jemisin notes that she conceived of the trilogy while at a NASA-funded science workshop, and it shows. While there are a lot of the earmarks of epic fantasy—a sort of pre-industrial or mid-industrial society, the semi-magic worked by orogenes—the sensibility of the novels suggests a scientific reason that is “indistinguishable from magic,” to quote the inimitable Arthur C. Clarke. This sort of not-one-thing-or-the-other can both help and hurt, depending on the mood of the voters. We’ll see!
This is the first novel I’ve considered for its Nebula chances this year, and I’m very excited to get to the next four. It promises to be a very strong collection of books.
Find all entries in this year’s Blogging the Nebulas series here.