OK, so how is N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series?

Cafe Society
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I tried reading The Fifth Season three times…once per Hugo. I can’t stand it and won’t be going back to the series. Jemisin got her three strikes and she’s out.

The three attempts wasn’t because of the awards or the reviews. It was mostly because of the quality of her world building. It really is excellent. It’s complicated, detailed, and nuanced. Jemisin manages that without allowing the world building to crowd out the story and characters. There’s a TV series in development. If that comes to fruition I’d be interested in revisiting the world in another medium.

I’ve got a lot of little quibbles with her writing. Some have been mentioned. Trying to re-read a book that I already had a negative opinion of after the first attempt probably made me notice some of them more. Even taken together they wouldn’t have ruined the book for me or made me think the book wasn’t potentially award worthy. I’ve read and liked books that had bigger issues.

Unlike Scalzi’s implication, I read enough of the book to know the second person chapters killed it for me. On the third read through I came up with a theory for why some could absolutely love the book while I was moving towards hate with each attempt. I spent a lot of years as a volunteer crisis counselor along with quite a bit of experience training new volunteers. The 2nd person portions included a lot of sentences that were similar in construction to the active listening skills we used. For someone who’s reactions and feelings to the situation are close to Essun’s that could create a powerful emotional response. Even with differences in response, I could see it being powerful since the experience of being listened to like that is rare.

Unfortunately, I’m not those people. I had different responses to the situations than the character. Those differences were both in feeling and in how I would have reacted. What I got was a narrator that IME I would say wasn’t listening to me. It was a bit like a trainee struggling to adapt our crisis center’s helping model using something that sounds like our skills to shut down the conversation rather than listen. I was in a constant state of struggle against the 2nd person narrator. I was pulled out of the story for those entire portions of the book. An entire character got lost to me; she was a bystander in her own portion of the story. I even missed some pretty big details of Essun’s story on the first read.

I can see how Jemisin won the Hugo. She combined great worldbuilding with a technique that helps make the story emotionally vivid for some. That same technique also made the book unfinishable for me.

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This? THIS is what a legitimate criticism of the book looks like. Thanks for that perspective; I can totally see how that’d go down that way.

Everyone doesn’t need to like it, of course, but criticisms of the book should be founded in something real.

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I just reread that excerpt you linked to. About that “omniscient author descriptions of …the internal mental state a character would not know”?

I mean, c’mon, man.

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That’s fair. After having it pointed out, I might even call it less minor.

I appreciate your weighing in. I’ve got to strenuously disagree with that last assertion, though—and I’d add that it has the effect of shutting down discussion, because most people just haven’t read the 48 novels nominated for a Hugo over the past eight years.

As I said upthread, a novel can go astray after a promising beginning, but poor writing is not going to magically improve.

What did you think about the writing of the Tom Swift bit, BTW? Surprisingly not that bad, right?

You should have stuck with the explanation in the spoiler. This here is not a good justification for adopting an omniscient voice. Not unless the narrator says something like “He might have been thinking…” within the actual sentence.

And I just don’t get an impression of a character with any kind of consistent personality from someone who says “doing leaderish things”, “because why not?” and “ha ha”, but also “delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity”. It’s like if Huck Finn had a passage like the following:

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No, it doesn’t shut down discussion. It just shuts down ignorant discussion.

I haven’t read all 48 novels nominated in the past eight years; hell; of last year’s six nominees, I’ve only read four, and five of 2017’s. You wanna know my opinion of the three books I haven’t read?

That’s too bad, because, and this is key, I don’t have one.

If we look at a different award, say, the Edgar Awards, I’m actually surprised that I’ve read even one of this year’s nominees. I started a second one, but discovered it wasn’t really for me, after reading a chapter or two. Wanna know my opinion of that one taht I read a chapter of? See the previous paragraph. Wanna know my opinion of the winner that year, and whether it was better than Prussian Blue (the one that I read)? See the previous paragraph.

I don’t read many mysteries. That means I don’t get to go spouting off in a thread about mystery novels and whether a particular one (such as The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, which I read more of than you read of Fifth Season) is any good.

But I read my fair share of fantasy/science fiction, which means I feel pretty confident declaring that Jemisin is one of the best goddamned writers the genre has seen since Le Guin–and why it’s irritating for someone who’s read five pages or so to keep saying, “But SEE? She’s like TOM SWIFT!” over and over and fucking over.

You just don’t. know. what. you’re. talking. about.

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I don’t? You say you won’t judge writing based on less than the full book, but you did right in this thread when you critiqued that “sun-warmed” passage (and I agreed it was a legitimate criticism for sure). Now you’re saying I compared Jemisin to Tom Swift “over and over” when I actually didn’t do that even a single time. So…whatever, dude. :dubious:

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The Doerr excerpt is a lot better. I haven’t read Willis. I’ve tried a couple of times to get into Jemisin, but I don’t enjoy it. That kind of writing doesn’t personally appeal to me, but it may be a matter of taste.

Maybe we should start a separate thread about good writing, but for the moment, here are a couple of descriptive passages that I would say are excellent.

These two examples are not SF. They are from the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, children’s books, or at any rate books about children. The extracts are very simple - deceptively simple. They don’t distract the reader, and they give a clear, brief, vivid picture. They are not boring, and not written to impress or to draw attention to the writer. They don’t take you out of the story. They are meticulously written, without appearing to be.

A path in the woods:

It was pleasant to come into the shade of the woods after the long trek in blazing sunshine along the valley road. There seemed to be less dust in the air, and there was a clean smell of resin from the scattered pines, with their tall rough-scaled trunks, that towered among the short bushy hazels, the rowans, and the little oaks. A track wound upwards through the trees. Anybody could have told that it was very little used. Here and there were stony patches in it, where dried moss covered the stones. Here and there were little drifts of last year’s leaves. Here and there under and near the big pine trees the path was soft and brown with fallen pine needles. The track was not wide enough for a cart, and probably it had been used only by sleds bringing bracken from the fells above.

Sailing on the Norfolk Broads in a storm:

Threads of bright fire shot down the purple curtain of cloud into which they were beating their way. There was a tremendous roll of thunder. And then, just as they were coming out of the Dyke into the Broad, the rain turned to hail, stinging their hands and faces, bouncing off the cabin roof, splashing down into the water. In a few moments the decks were white with hailstones. The noise of the hail was so loud that no one tried to speak. It stopped suddenly, and a moment later the wind was upon them again. The Teasel heeled over and yet further over, till the water was sluicing the hailstones off her lee deck.
“Ease away mainsheet,” shouted Tom. “Quick!”
There was a crash somewhere close to them, in the Teasel herself. They looked at each other.
“Water-jar gone over,” said Port.
“Ready about!”
Crash.
“There goes the other jar.”
“Ease out. In again. Must keep her sailing.”
“Look out, Tom, you’ll have her over.”
“Sit down, you two. On the floor,” said the Admiral. “My word,” she murmured, “ Richard ought to see this.”
It was a gorgeous sight. There was that purple wall of cloud, with a bright line along the foot of it, and against this startling background, white yachts and cruisers afloat at their moorings in the Broad shone as if they had been lit up by some strange artificial light. The green of the trees and gardens looked too vivid to be real, wherever it was not veiled by a rain-squall.

That’s what I would call good descriptive writing.
George Orwell’s famous advice about writing:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you–even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent-and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

I. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
II. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
III. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
IV. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
V. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
VI. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
From an article about bad writing in the Guardian:

Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.

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SlackerInc, why don’t you read all of the two books you’ve explicitly quoted from and compared - Blackout by Connie Willis and The Dervish House by Ian McDonald? I think that if you do that, you certainly have as much right to pontificate on which one is the better book as anyone else. And, for all I know, you may be right. Perhaps fifty years from now the general opinion will be that the McDonald book is the better one.

As to whether I read a few pages of a book in a bookstore before I buy it, well, I never do that. The books I bought or borrowed (and generally eventually read) at first were the ones that happened to be in the school library when I went there. Then they were the ones that happened to be in the public library when I went there. Then they were the ones that happened to be in the bookstore when I went there. Then they were the ones that someone I knew recommended to me or were mentioned by reviewers or authors I liked. Then they were the other books by authors I liked. Then they were the ones that someone in my book discussion group (which mostly does science fiction and fantasy) chose. Then they were the ones in the lists in one of the books with titles like The 100 Greatest Science Fiction Books Ever Published that I own.

Does that mean that I’ve read the best science fiction of all time? Of course not. I’ve just read what I hope were the best ones I could find using the sources I had. There are no perfect sources for what the best books are. None. I don’t remotely expect the Hugo winners or the Nebula winners or any other source for recommended books to be perfect (and sometimes not even to be very good). All lists and awards are just the product of flawed human beings choosing which books they like. If I recommend a book to someone, I hope they recognize that I’m a flawed human being too. We all have to limp along as best we can choosing books using all the flawed resources we have to decide which book to read, borrow, or buy next.

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GreenWyvern, I agree that the Ransome passages are indeed examples of very good writing. But…well, I think you are right that we have veered way too far off topic. Why don’t you start that thread, maybe repost these passages and the “Dervish” one you disliked, and I’ll comment at length there.

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Ah. Now I see why you were hounding me to respond to your irrelevant passages. You were desperately hoping I would fall into your trap, and you could have your big GOTCHA! moment. So, congratulations?

Except.

  1. My “critique” of the McDonald passage was hardly what you’re doing. I responded only to that one paragraph with a minor editorial suggestion. And certainly, if it turns out in the novel that “sun-warmed” is a description of, say, a particular technological innovation, I’d happily retract that editorial suggestion. And even more certainly, there’s no way I’d show up in a thread about McDonald’s novels and offer that passage as evidence that his books are written poorly; that’d be laughable behavior.
  2. Your Tom Swift argument struck me as so profoundly silly that I ignored it, until you repeatedly hounded me over it. Yes, I was wrong about exactly which author you were trying to condemn through this dumb argument; my apologies. Change the antecedent for “SHE” in my quote, though, and my mockery of your really dumb argument remains intact.
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Oh jeez. :rolleyes: Paranoid much? I was not setting any kind of trap for you, good grief. I would have been perfectly happy to just talk about different authors’ styles and skills based on writing samples of a reasonable length. I was glad that you responded about the “sun-warmed” stuff, and I agreed with you about it.

In fact, what you are accusing me of doing would be precisely the kind of shutdown of discussion that I’m averse to, that in your case comes from insisting someone go and read entire novels before they can talk about a writer’s skill or lack thereof.

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News on that front: Maybe you all already knew this, but when I went to see “BlackkKlansman” last night, I saw a trailer for an upcoming movie billed as being from the same writer-director as “Moonlight”, although it’s adapted from a James Baldwin title. The trailer features audio of that electrifying Baldwin voice. I’m pretty stoked for that.

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Why didn’t you give us the title If Beale Street Could Talk? That would only have taken you a few seconds to look up if you had forgotten it from last night. You’re doing a lot of “Well, I can’t be bothered to spend a lot of my valued time before discussing something, since that’s other people’s jobs”-type posts. I think a minimum amount of work before comparing two books in their literary values is reading those two books.

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Yeah. I’ve encountered hundreds of famous, award-winning, bestselling, or well-received books in my lifetime that I couldn’t finish. And that includes books by authors I already knew and liked. I’d expect this to be true for anybody who reads a lot of books of any type, including nonfiction.

It didn’t work for me is totally valid criticism. I can give my reasons for saying that and they’re totally valid for me.

Nobody who finished a book and liked it, or give it an award, or reviewed it favorably, or recommended it to friends should put more than two seconds thought into what I say about that book. They found something in the book I didn’t. They’re more qualified than me to discuss it. I picked up Fifty Shades of Gray at a bookstore counter, opened to a random page, read it, laughed heartily, and let the book drop from my embarrassed fingers. I will never get into a discussion with someone who read it and liked it because my opinion is worthless. Making fun of them or the book diminishes me, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I haven’t earned the right to spout off. Listening to my uninformed babbling diminishes them.

That’s the unwritten first rule of booktalk. Break it at your peril.

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I should have spent those few seconds looking up the movie’s title. You are right about that, mea culpa.

But it takes a lot more than a few seconds to obtain and read two entire novels, so the leap you made there is a bit much IMO.

I don’t know if anyone listens to the Scriptnotes podcast, but the successful screenwriters who host it regularly judge and give feedback to aspiring screenwriters based solely on the first couple pages of their scripts. I worked at a SoHo literary agency and they did not read entire novels when evaluating prospective clients.

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I wonder if those successful screenwriters would, if they had no experience in the field, feel similarly comfortable slagging off Oscar-winning screenplays if they had only read a couple of pages?

The answer to that question helps me figure out what sort of critics they are :).

Remember: when your criticisms are shown to be objectively wrong, you move the goalposts instead of admitting error:

The narrator clearly explained that he believed he knew the thoughts in the orogene’s head, and explained why. That tells you something about the narrator. If you think that’s not sufficient justification for adopting an omniscient voice, you just learned something about the narrator.

Unless you believe the author and the narrator are the same person, in which case, watch out for earthquakes.

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So it’s special pleading for an unreliable narrator now?

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I initially read this as an accusation against me, but based on your recent posting history, I can only conclude it was actually meant as advice, for how to follow your example :wink:

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Yes, because digging through the slushpile and reading multiple-award-winning finished works are the sane thing…

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You…you don’t know what “moving the goalposts” means, do you?

Huh.

I’d advise you to look it up, but you’ve made it clear how unlikely you are to do so.