wsgy
16d ago
I just finished the last book in the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin and feel compelled to ramble about it. The reason why I picked it up in the first place was I have been completely divorced from the state of modern sci fi/fantasy and was still under the impression that a Hugo award is a mark of quality. Each book in the trilogy won a Hugo, which is a first, so I was looking forward to it, and I checked all three from the library before going on a trip I knew would include a lot of downtime I'd rather not spend doomscrolling. It's very mediocre, not bad just kinda whatever, and had I done any digging at all into it or the state of the Hugos I should have known. From Wikipedia:
Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The novel was inspired in part from a dream Jemisin had and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri about the death of Michael Brown.[27][28] The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.
So a black woman wrote a fantasy book about racism and quite literally black girl magic, and was rewarded handsomely for it by the Hugos (and had it optioned by Sony for 7 figures). In it, some people are gifted in orogeny, allowing them to manipulate the earth, and stop things like volcanoes and earthquakes. Someone who is skilled in this is really quite useful, but also obviously dangerous. As such, there's a class of people called Guardians who find new orogenes, and train them at Hogwarts in order to control them. If they try and run away or can't be controlled, they are killed. Normal people, by and large, hate them, and will try and kill them if discovered even if they have literally saved their communities in one way or another, and even if they are firmly under the yoke of the Guardians. They've even got their own slur. It's a bit... on the nose. Also a lot of characters are bisexual for some reason.
Again it wasn't a bad read. I'm not much of an anti-woke crusader myself; I find it mildly annoying when I realize what is going on, that's about it. But I was shocked it won a Hugo, and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?
Anyway I'm looking to read some dumb male-oriented sci fi if you guys have recommendations.
wsgy
17d ago
The short answer is probably the biological model of species distinction as "they can breed and make fertile offspring" is out of fashion. There are a few things to consider. For instance jackals and coyotes would never encounter each other in the wild so they don't hybridize. The animals also have pretty different patterns of behavior and ecological niches, at least wolves compared to the other two. Polar bears and Grizzlies can mate and make fertile offspring too, but they also rarely encounter each other in the wild to the point that we didn't know if they even could interbreed until someone saw a weird bear 20 years ago and tested its DNA. There's a bit of "the Categories were made for Man not Man for the Categories" going on here too. If I called a coyote a wolf I'd get called a dumbass in turn; they're obviously very different even just morphologically.
Actually now that I think a bit more about it it's a lot more of a historical inertia kind of thing. We gave them different names hundreds of years ago because they looked different and by the time we figured out they could make babies the names were entrenched.
Friend, I don't like the sound of this at all.
I'm reading a whole lot of you offering compromises and trying to make this work, up to and including possibly sending yourself to the hospital from mental distress, and a big fat goose egg nothing on her end. This whole thing is completely lopsided. When you find some reasonable solution to her objections to moving to your town, she comes up with a new reason/excuse why she can't move to you. This sounds like she's stringing you along. You say you're terrified of losing her, and I believe you, but does she echo the same feelings? I doubt it. It doesn't sound like she cares about you enough to overcome any obstacles to more permanent physical proximity.
I don't like to say it, but I've seen this behavior before. It sounds like there are irreconcilable differences, but really I think she's stonewalling you, stringing you along in case something better falls in her lap. It's also much more common for women to be the ones pushing for more commitment and it sounds like your constant attempts to fix the situation is actually pushing her away. She should be wanting to have these conversations, not ending them with her latest excuse and letting you stew about it. I'm wondering what your friends' takes are on this. It's hard to see these things from the inside.
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