Sometimes, it’s nice to sit down with a book that doesn’t demand too much attention. Unfortunately, this can often translate into a book that feels unfinished. Or that supplies its conflicts with too many easy solutions. None of this is the case for N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, a novel that is at once breathtaking in scope and yet intimate in its many characterizations. Moving at a pace that feels more like a modern film than standard prose, Obelisk correspondingly has no extraneous parts. Everything, from the early introduction of what are identified as “boilbugs” to the mysterious inclusion of sporadic paragraphs that break into the first-person perspective, comes to have a lasting importance throughout Jemisin’s swift, spare plot. In many respects, it’s better to think of this second novel in the Broken Earth series as a kind of short story than a full fledged epic. One of the few shortcomings of this book is that it expects you to remember all of the events of The Fifth Season, to the point that readers might become lost in the opening chapters if they haven’t very recently finished its first installment. But for fans of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy, another Orbit Books publication, this will be a very familiar experience—once you start considering each entry as part of a larger whole, as opposed to something more self-contained, this issue becomes muted.
Just as with Fifth, and as so many of the best fantasy books do, Obelisk ends at an even brisker pace than it began, answering the previous pages’ most pertinent questions with higher and higher fantasy elements while still opening up all new questions, in a process that feels much like solving a difficult but satisfying puzzle—confusing at first but obvious once all the pieces have fallen into place. However, this fantasy book exists in a world all its own. Whereas so many other entries in the fantasy genre are beholden to authors like Tolkien or Martin, Jemisin’s world is consummately unique. The further the book progresses, the more ambiguous its setting becomes. To the point that a looming question becomes whether or not this book should be considered as science fiction more than fantasy. A question that may become mute once the third book hits, but that nevertheless provides a sense of sublime uncertainty once the story really kicks off. However, Obelisk’s best moments are purely character-driven. While this book is certainly short on new characters, the ones already established in Fifth are elevated to new levels of complexity. And it provides plenty of room for its flatter characters to become just as interesting as the main protagonists. For a book that involves floating obelisks and living, ten-thousand year old statues, Jemisin’s most insightful sections are profoundly, universally human.
This book isn’t without its faults. The plot does occasionally feel rushed and the setting is often detrimentally left to the reader to fill in the details, but more so is this an equally brilliant sequel to Jemisin’s Hugo award winning 2015 novel, and is yet another example of how fantasy is a genre all too often overlooked.