Grand beginnings

Over the past year I have been reading a lot by N K Jemisin.  I raved about her book Fifth Season, and I stand by that.  I finished that series and also read two other series by her, the Dreamblood series and the Inheritance series.  There was a pattern in these series, which is that the first book absolutely rocks my world and then it goes downhill from there.

That sounds bad but it isn't like the followup books in Jemisin's series are bad, just that they don't measure up to the standard set by the first.  Sort of like The Matrix, where you are filled with wonder and excitement at the first installment and hope for exactly the same feeling when the next section arrives... and it doesn't do the same thing.  I wouldn't rate Jemisin's followup novels quite as badly as The Matrix 2 and 3, but the sense of disappointment was similar.

The reason they feel similar, I think, is that our minds fill in the gaps when we don't have enough information.  When we wonder why the Guardians do what they do in Fifth Season, we don't have much in the way of information.  When the stone eaters appear only in brief flashes with minimal explanation we have to guess at where they come from and what they are.  Jemisin is phenomenal at creating worlds where there is just enough information to feel satisfying and we spend our time wondering at what is around the corner.  The Matrix original was the same way because we didn't understand how things worked exactly but the parts that we saw were SO COOL.

But like The Matrix Jemisin kind of falls down when she tries to explain everything.  I don't know if she didn't have it all planned ahead and couldn't make it work or if she did have it planned but couldn't write a book where all the information came out in a way that would be completely satisfying to the reader, but the third book of the Inheritance trilogy and the Broken Earth trilogy both were big letdowns.  They tried desperately to show us all the things behind the curtain and ended up being far weaker than the first books in those series - they simply didn't achieve what they set out to do.

I think perhaps many great science fiction authors would struggle in the same way if they ever tried to follow up an amazing book with more story in the same universe.  While it might seem like it would be easy to simply continue on with a story you already have going I think that this is only true when the world is one that is familiar.  When you are trying to cope with a completely different world with rules and physics that are foreign to the reader it is extremely difficult to continue to write amazing fiction without running into all kinds of problems.  It is too easy to realize that the story you want to tell no longer works with the physics you have created, or that when you try to explain further the things you sketched out in earlier editions that they all fall apart.  Sometimes you have to just write something great and leave it, knowing that the conclusion that the readers will come up with in their own minds are better than what you can build yourself.  Many great science fiction books are like this, full of cool stuff that there isn't time to fully flesh out, and then left to the imagination of the reader.

This all shouldn't be taken as advice to avoid Jemisin's work.  Thankfully the first books in all her series are fantastic, engaging stories in magnificent worlds and you honestly don't need to read more of the books to feel happy with what she has created.  You can simply stop there if you like and you will have read a great book with wild and wonderful ideas.  I also love her seamless inclusion of a wide range of characters including queer people, trans people, poly people, and people of colour - these things are often a rarity in science fiction.

If you do continue on you will find good books, reasonable books, just not books that will blow your mind.