The Kingdom of Gods - N. K. Jemisin
Jan. 30th, 2019 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkI read the first two books of the Inheritance Trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, several years ago, but I didn't like book 2 that much and then somehow never got around to getting book 3. Now I finally have, and I really need to get a copy for my bookshelf. (I have a paperback version of the American version for book 3, but I want the UK version to go together with books 1&2.)
So many tropes I love! God&mortal relationships, complicated parent&child and sibling relationships both among gods (and therefore spanning millennia) and humans, betrayals and their aftermath… and many queer characters, and a society/political system on the verge of collapse. (That last bit could really have used some more fleshing out to be really effective, and so could a few of the characters, but what was there was good enough and I really enjoyed what my imagination filled the blanks with.) The ending was fittingly epic.
It's a book written from a god's PoV, but a god who is becoming/has become mortal, which seems to be a surprisingly popular approach – right now I can only recall the Apollo books by Rick Riordan, but I'm sure I've heard of several other stories with that premise. Writing gods is always a challenge: how do you convey that they are not human? Depending on how different from humans and with how many abilities/different perspectives these gods are in a world, that presents different problems.
Sieh is millennia old, to start with; he has known and experienced and done so much but he's still a child, because that's his nature. And godlings have to act according to their nature (childhood in his case, supplemented by games and trickery and mischief), but staying a child through all of that is difficult; a lot of this book is him struggling with that, not always consciously, and he's influenced by his mortal body as well. Though mostly his emotions seem to be quite human – quite cruel at times, even; he's been through a couple of thousand years of trauma but probably even before then, somewhat.
Of course as soon as he learns about Kahl, his son, that means he can't hold onto his nature of "childhood" anymore, so it would destroy him. That would have happened no matter what Kahl's nature was. Though I wonder why Enefa didn't just kill Kahl, she didn't generally seem to have a problem killing godlings and that would have been the neater solution. Alternatively, she could just have erased the knowledge that Kahl was Sieh's kid without shutting him away – risky, especially if Kahl does look like the two of them, but she probably could have managed somehow.
Mostly Sieh's PoV worked for me as that of a god becoming mortal – and Deka had explicitly wished for him and Sieh to be equals, so it makes sense that Sieh kinda grows toward that. Occasionally I thought Sieh's different perspective on everything as a millennia-old god could have been more emphasized, but overall I liked it.
I really liked his relationship with his parents, especially Nahadoth and Itempas. What a fucked up family, with so many terrible things in their past and none of them are innocent (well, some of Sieh's siblings probably, but certainly none of the Three and not Sieh himself.) And so much incest, technically, though that's kinda different for gods. And so much jealousy. (Poor Yeine.)
I love that Sieh managed to forgive Itempas eventually. And in the end he told Itempas his plan before going off to kill Kahl – did he also tell Itempas that the plan involved his own death? In that case I would have expected at least something like a short goodbye, so I don't think so.
As for Sieh, Deka, and Shahar as a new god triad: (idk how it worked with Deka and Shahar, btw. Did Sieh "ascending" pull them along with him? Probably the connection formed when they swore the oath and it went wrong. Did the Maelstrom get involved, noticing that Sieh would ascend soon, and something got mixed up with Deka and Shahar too? And then maybe Sieh absorbing the Maelstrom reinforced that?)
At first I was a bit skeptical about how well that would work/be stable because Sieh wants someone who is his, and Deka could offer him that, and that would leave Shahar on the outside. (Similar to Enefa with Itempas and Nahadoth, and we know how that ended…) But on the other hand because Sieh and Deka died so early Shahar has just had decades of experience living her own life. She's not as dependent on Sieh and Deka as Enefa was on Itempas and Nahadoth, not even if/when they find a new universe to play with. Things might be tense at first, depending on how long it takes Sieh and Deka to trust Shahar again, but I'm confident they'll work it out. (When Sieh meets him again Deka says he expects Shahar to fill out his semisigil, so it seems like more than threatening to do put the full sigil on him at all it was that she did it out of jealousy and to hurt them, which was what made Deka think that she was turning into a monster like so many of their family. And she didn't.) They have time. And more importantly, the three of them are forever linked now, so they already have precisely that closeness that Sieh craved. No matter if they have fights, they'll always find their way back to each other.
I wonder what will Deka and Shahar's natures be, as gods? As full gods, not godlings, they can have a wider "range." Still, it needs to be a complementary pantheon in some way. What about Sieh? He can't keep childhood, at least not in the same way, but maybe mischief and games? Hmmm.
On her blog N.K.Jemisin posted a second appendix that was later cut, Spider Speaks, that gives a glimpse at the three in their new universe. Not canon, but still nice.
Right now, one of the stories I want is Deka at scrivener academy in Litaria: dealing with being sent away, slowly learning to forgive Shahar, learning about Sieh, never getting over Sieh even though they met as children, and then when he learned about Sieh returning (and older!), the long wait until he shows up. Shahar managed to call Sieh out of Nahadoth simply by cursing his name – did Deka never do that? He planned to go looking for Sieh, did he never even think to pray to him?
I wish we had gotten to know Deka a bit better, especially considering how important he becomes to Sieh, that was a bit of a shame. On N.K.Jemisin's blog I found a character study of Deka, that was nice supplementary material.
Now a reread of books 1 and 2, and then the novella and short stories.
So many tropes I love! God&mortal relationships, complicated parent&child and sibling relationships both among gods (and therefore spanning millennia) and humans, betrayals and their aftermath… and many queer characters, and a society/political system on the verge of collapse. (That last bit could really have used some more fleshing out to be really effective, and so could a few of the characters, but what was there was good enough and I really enjoyed what my imagination filled the blanks with.) The ending was fittingly epic.
It's a book written from a god's PoV, but a god who is becoming/has become mortal, which seems to be a surprisingly popular approach – right now I can only recall the Apollo books by Rick Riordan, but I'm sure I've heard of several other stories with that premise. Writing gods is always a challenge: how do you convey that they are not human? Depending on how different from humans and with how many abilities/different perspectives these gods are in a world, that presents different problems.
Sieh is millennia old, to start with; he has known and experienced and done so much but he's still a child, because that's his nature. And godlings have to act according to their nature (childhood in his case, supplemented by games and trickery and mischief), but staying a child through all of that is difficult; a lot of this book is him struggling with that, not always consciously, and he's influenced by his mortal body as well. Though mostly his emotions seem to be quite human – quite cruel at times, even; he's been through a couple of thousand years of trauma but probably even before then, somewhat.
Of course as soon as he learns about Kahl, his son, that means he can't hold onto his nature of "childhood" anymore, so it would destroy him. That would have happened no matter what Kahl's nature was. Though I wonder why Enefa didn't just kill Kahl, she didn't generally seem to have a problem killing godlings and that would have been the neater solution. Alternatively, she could just have erased the knowledge that Kahl was Sieh's kid without shutting him away – risky, especially if Kahl does look like the two of them, but she probably could have managed somehow.
Mostly Sieh's PoV worked for me as that of a god becoming mortal – and Deka had explicitly wished for him and Sieh to be equals, so it makes sense that Sieh kinda grows toward that. Occasionally I thought Sieh's different perspective on everything as a millennia-old god could have been more emphasized, but overall I liked it.
I really liked his relationship with his parents, especially Nahadoth and Itempas. What a fucked up family, with so many terrible things in their past and none of them are innocent (well, some of Sieh's siblings probably, but certainly none of the Three and not Sieh himself.) And so much incest, technically, though that's kinda different for gods. And so much jealousy. (Poor Yeine.)
I love that Sieh managed to forgive Itempas eventually. And in the end he told Itempas his plan before going off to kill Kahl – did he also tell Itempas that the plan involved his own death? In that case I would have expected at least something like a short goodbye, so I don't think so.
As for Sieh, Deka, and Shahar as a new god triad: (idk how it worked with Deka and Shahar, btw. Did Sieh "ascending" pull them along with him? Probably the connection formed when they swore the oath and it went wrong. Did the Maelstrom get involved, noticing that Sieh would ascend soon, and something got mixed up with Deka and Shahar too? And then maybe Sieh absorbing the Maelstrom reinforced that?)
At first I was a bit skeptical about how well that would work/be stable because Sieh wants someone who is his, and Deka could offer him that, and that would leave Shahar on the outside. (Similar to Enefa with Itempas and Nahadoth, and we know how that ended…) But on the other hand because Sieh and Deka died so early Shahar has just had decades of experience living her own life. She's not as dependent on Sieh and Deka as Enefa was on Itempas and Nahadoth, not even if/when they find a new universe to play with. Things might be tense at first, depending on how long it takes Sieh and Deka to trust Shahar again, but I'm confident they'll work it out. (When Sieh meets him again Deka says he expects Shahar to fill out his semisigil, so it seems like more than threatening to do put the full sigil on him at all it was that she did it out of jealousy and to hurt them, which was what made Deka think that she was turning into a monster like so many of their family. And she didn't.) They have time. And more importantly, the three of them are forever linked now, so they already have precisely that closeness that Sieh craved. No matter if they have fights, they'll always find their way back to each other.
I wonder what will Deka and Shahar's natures be, as gods? As full gods, not godlings, they can have a wider "range." Still, it needs to be a complementary pantheon in some way. What about Sieh? He can't keep childhood, at least not in the same way, but maybe mischief and games? Hmmm.
On her blog N.K.Jemisin posted a second appendix that was later cut, Spider Speaks, that gives a glimpse at the three in their new universe. Not canon, but still nice.
Right now, one of the stories I want is Deka at scrivener academy in Litaria: dealing with being sent away, slowly learning to forgive Shahar, learning about Sieh, never getting over Sieh even though they met as children, and then when he learned about Sieh returning (and older!), the long wait until he shows up. Shahar managed to call Sieh out of Nahadoth simply by cursing his name – did Deka never do that? He planned to go looking for Sieh, did he never even think to pray to him?
I wish we had gotten to know Deka a bit better, especially considering how important he becomes to Sieh, that was a bit of a shame. On N.K.Jemisin's blog I found a character study of Deka, that was nice supplementary material.
Now a reread of books 1 and 2, and then the novella and short stories.
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Date: 2019-01-31 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 09:43 pm (UTC)