The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N, K, Jemisin

Fantasy writing often seems to get down and wrestle with some of the big questions, life, reality, why we are here.  Things normally left to priests, physicists and philosophers with their often radically different approaches.  I am always left wondering if it works.  A good example would be a writer I absolutely could not get enough of as a teenager, David Eddings.  Eddings wrote about the gods.  He wrote about the creation of the universe. He wrote about the reason for it all.  And quite frankly, to me now, it was a bit crap.

You see I think I am in some ways a bit jaded.  On a personal level, wrestling with life and beliefs I find it so incredibly hard to get away from the simple fact that we, the human race, are less than a pimple on the face of reality.  We are in fact so unimportant, negligible and unnoticeable that we would not make the rank of pimple, on a pimple on a pimple, on the face of reality; and I for one am OK with that.  So when fantasy frames gods and realities in historical superstitious terms I am ok with that.  I buy it.  When fantasy tries to talk about a reality like ours, when it posits the birth of stars, galaxies, quasars and super giant black holes with the same mass as ten million suns and then has that reality depend upon the actions of some sex obsessed human being, I kind of have a problem with it.

That is what Jemisin does quite well in this work.  It's about the gods.  It's about the creation of a whole universe much like ours.  The scope of our reality.  She then has it all depend upon political intrigue of people.  The nature of reality depends upon people.  Her writing was good.  It was a bit sexy at times.  The plot moved forward and characters developed.  Me?  I could not get beyond the fact that the main character was screwing the origin of the universe.  Should you read it?  Its fun.  Will I try other stuff by her?  yes, but from the library when inspiration fails.  Another beef, that is probably not her fault but the editors.  Probably one of the worst titles ever, no real connection to anything remotely important in the novel.