The Obelisk Gate

I finished the Obelisk Gate today; it’s book 2 of NK Jamison’s Broken Earth series. I want to write some notes here about the book to cement them in my mind. Spoilers ahead.

I mentioned on Mastodon that the series had been pretty striking for me. It’s the story of a future (probably) world in which scientists have accidentally thrown the moon out of regular orbit by trying to tap power sources in the Earth’s core. The result has been millennia of unstable geography, devastating weather, and repeated civilizational collapse.

As I said, “The questions raised are so relevant for today; the changing of the world, the question of whether destroying an old and unjust order is worth the destruction of so much more; the value of traditional wisdom; what place people of the present have in the long line of time and what we owe to others in other places on that line; what obligations persecuted people have to the rest of the world.”

This book struck me well in some ways, and also interlaced generational struggle, as a mother and daughter find themselves on opposite sides of a factional battle.

But other parts have been weak. The identities and motivations of those factions have been really unclear — who wants what and why. Side characters who seem to be on one side do things to favour another side. At least one character has turned traitor on his original faction, but it’s not clear who he’s defected to or who he started from.

As with a lot of apocalyptic fiction, the motivations of the characters is also hard to understand. Sometimes they seem to be doing things for the good of all humanity, to preserve some parts of civilization and life until the current crisis is over and the next livable period on the planet. At other times, they do horrendous harm in order to preserve their own small group — even though the group’s ability to survive will require collective support.

I’m going to take a break from the series and start another few books before I come back to the trilogy’s end. I’ll let you know if the threads come together for me, or if it continues to feel like a lot of overlapping paths not resolving to a single way forward.