The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Fiction, 2017

But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

The closing tome in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy is dense and intricate. Remarkably, it also moves with a headlong energy, charging towards a conclusion that feels appropriately fraught. Jemisin has done such an effective job of building a world and shaping cultures that the danger she plunges all the characters into has a bruising tension. The social commentary that’s been present throughout adds to its already razor-wire intensity. If her points are sometimes made more bluntly than before, it’s a directness she has fully earned with astonishing storytelling skill. In The Stone Sky, Jemisin brings an emotional resonance that can be elusive in science fiction this complex and inventive. The novel often rouses the mind and delivers a roundhouse to the heart in the same deft paragraph. The first two books in trilogy — The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate — were formidable, and Jemisin doesn’t relent. Taken together, the trilogy is a towering achievement.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Nonfiction, 2020

It is a clever, self-perpetuating tool of the caste system to keep those at the bottom in a manufactured fight to avoid last place. This has led to occasional friction between people descended from Africans who arrived in America at different points in our history. Some immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, like their predecessors from other parts of the world, may show a wariness of African-Americans, warn their children not to “act like African-Americans” or not to bring one home to date or marry, In so doing, they may fall into the trap of trying to prove, not that the stereotype is false, but that they do not fit the lie.

In this challenging work of sociological commentary, Isabel Wilkerson examines the historic and continuing systemic racism in the United States through the lens of arbitrarily dictated tiers of human worthiness that are most often associated with the nation of India. It’s a bold thesis that she back ups with convincing determination, smartly mixing anecdotal evidence, personal experience, and careful academic study. There are times when the structure of the book is maybe a little too loose, with entire chapters feeling like asides. It’s hard to deny the cumulative power of all the information Wilkerson offers across these pages, though. Caste provides a honest reckoning with the longstanding, ongoing injustice rendered against the huge swaths of the U.S. citizenry and provides a new way of understanding the fundamentals of that injustice. In that, it is an invaluable book.