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NK Jemisin - any good?


zelticgar

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I really didn't like the Inheritance Trilogy, well the first book anyway as that's as far as I got, but her Broken Earth books are really good.

It was a while ago so I can't really remember too much of the details of why I didn't like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I think it was quite romance-y in a bad way.

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While it doesn't comprise as much of the book as a lot of people remember it doing, the romance part of Hundred Thousand Kingdoms does hold the book back. If I recall correctly, I also felt it didn't quite make as much use of its awesome setting as perhaps I wanted it to.

The second and third in the series were significant improvements though.


That said, Broken Earth, while completely different, is on a whole other level.

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I liked both The Inheritance trilogy and Broken Earth trilogy but found the latter significantly better than the former. I didn't actually mind the romance (to be honest it's more complex being straight up romance imo) parts of it but would have liked to see more of the setting Jemisin had created. This was rectified somewhat in books #2 an 3 when we see more than just Sky the Palace of course. I really enjoyed the Godlings in the final two books though.

 

But I would still recommend trying Broken Earth if you want to start reading Jemisin

 

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I just noticed she blocked me on twitter and I legitimately have no idea why. I don't think I've ever even @ed her.


Oh wait, a quick look at my twitter archive says I did. She asked for someone to summarise her acknowledgments in one of her books that she didn't have to hand, and I had my e-reader with the book next to me, so I did.

Quite why that warranted blocking, I'm not entirely sure?

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I read the Inheritance Trilogy a few month ago and enjoyed it a lot, but there was definetely room for improval. I didn't mind the Romance that much, but the main reason for this is that the German translation was marketed as Romantasy and I expected half of the book to be Romance scenes. So there was less Romance than I had expected. 

The world was really interesting and I would have loved to see more of it. 

17 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I just noticed she blocked me on twitter and I legitimately have no idea why. I don't think I've ever even @ed her.

Same here. No clue why or how that happened. 

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16 minutes ago, Queen of Procrastination said:

Same here. No clue why or how that happened. 


A quick google suggests she uses a few blocklist and some kind of chain blocker thing. Based on my limited understanding of how these things work, we might either follow someone she's blocked and been auto-added to her list or possibly have been followed by some bot at the time she blocked them?

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33 minutes ago, TheRevanchist said:

Is there some story behind this?

When her first novel was published there was a big hoo haa on here about ewww girl writers and there yucky sff and their icky romance cooties. Keep in mind this was the same time The Wise Man's Fear came out and no one said shit(at the time) about the 400 pages of ninja sex. There was also a separate topic on here along the lines of "Why Female Authors cant write Fantasy" or some such. All together it gave her a horrible impression(rightly so st the time, imho) of the place.

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:


A quick google suggests she uses a few blocklist and some kind of chain blocker thing. Based on my limited understanding of how these things work, we might either follow someone she's blocked and been auto-added to her list or possibly have been followed by some bot at the time she blocked them?

Yeah she had horrible, horrible issues with white supremacists lead by Vox Day. I don't blame her for using stuff like that at all.

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27 minutes ago, polishgenius said:


A quick google suggests she uses a few blocklist and some kind of chain blocker thing. Based on my limited understanding of how these things work, we might either follow someone she's blocked and been auto-added to her list or possibly have been followed by some bot at the time she blocked them?

She has twitted in the past: "In my case, if we've never interacted and I've blocked you, it's b/c my friends blocked you. I have 13K followers. But I'm picky like that."

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Of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms series (It's not really a trilogy as they are separate stories in the same world rather than the connected stories of a trilogy) I loved the first two, the third was a bit of a letdown. I didn't really mind the romance, I usually don't unless it becomes the single dominating feature of a story.

The Broken Earth trilogy is absolutely outstanding - worldbuilding, character construction, writing technique - I loved every aspect, and I usually don't read or enjoy postapocalyptic stuff.

There's also the Dreamblood duology, but I haven't read those, so I can't comment.

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The Broken Earth series deserves all the praise it's been getting and then some. Just fucking phenomenal stuff. Also second the Dreamblood duology as underrated - if you normally read sorta classic high/epic fantasy, that's probably the best starting point for NKJ.

I remember 100K Kingdoms not being to my taste at the time but that was a while ago. I should give it another go.

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On 24/11/2017 at 3:16 AM, Andorion said:

 

Of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms series (It's not really a trilogy as they are separate stories in the same world rather than the connected stories of a trilogy) I loved the first two, the third was a bit of a letdown.

 



Well, I wouldn't say that. It's not one plot over three books, each one stands alone to an extent, but unlike, say, Discworld or Bas-Lag or The Culture, where order mostly doesn't matter, each one does directly pick up on things from the previous ones.

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1 hour ago, Lies And Perfidy said:

The Broken Earth series deserves all the praise it's been getting and then some. Just fucking phenomenal stuff. Also second the Dreamblood duology as underrated - if you normally read sorta classic high/epic fantasy, that's probably the best starting point for NKJ.

I remember 100K Kingdoms not being to my taste at the time but that was a while ago. I should give it another go.

Agree with this. 

 

Broken Earth > Dreamblood > Inheritance Trilogy 

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2 hours ago, polishgenius said:



Well, I wouldn't say that. It's not one plot over three books, each one stands alone to an extent, but unlike, say, Discworld or Bas-Lag or The Culture, where order mostly doesn't matter, each one does directly pick up on things from the previous ones.

Oh yeah, reading order definitely matters, but the story itself is quite detached from book to book.

BTW Discworld does have something like an internal reading order logic though. If you consider the sub-series like the City Watch or the Witches books.

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I hated the first book of the 100K Kingdoms, or is that the name of the book and not the series?  I literally do not remember and can't be bothered to look it up.  So much so that I was sure I would never read another book of hers again.  And while I have yet to read another thus far, I have purchased and plan to read The Broken Earth. 

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