The Obelisk Gate

The Obelisk Gate

N. K. Jemison, 2016

Well I enjoyed The Fifth Season, despite having misgivings about the seemingly gratuitous violence and gore, so I went ahead and started on The Obelisk Gate but I couldn't keep going to the finish. Somewhere around page 355 (out of 407) I decided I'd had enough, that the author was in love with inventing novel but uniformly grotesque ways for characters to kill each other, and that a lot of the plot and characterization was just vehicle for the spectacle of terror. Hugo winner or not, I'm not interested. TBH in the 87 percent of the book I read, I'm not sure what the Hugo was for. The world had been mostly presented in The Fifth Season, which yes I see a Hugo there easily, but I had way less sense of wonderment with #2. There's a third book as well.

See also The Fifth Season