N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdom’s is the second of five books I won in a Con or Bust charity auction. Con or Bust is an effort to assist fans of color in attending science fiction conventions, primarily WisCon. At the time, I hadn’t read anything by Jemisin, but between then and now I read her short story Non-Zero Probabilities
which I loved. She’s getting a lot of buzz.
Yeine is the ennu of a small kingdom in the north. I believe that means she’s the queen, in fantasy parlance, but it’s a little complicated in this world. She only assumed that position recently after her mother died, and she’s relatively young. The ruler of the world, her grandfather, summons her to the capitol so that he can name her as heir, one of three possible successors to his rule.
The Arameri (or Amn, I’m not quite sure which version of the name to use in which circumstances) rule all the other kingdoms remotely. In the God’s War centuries past, the god Itempas defeated his siblings and their children. His worshippers were the Arameri. Because he won, the other gods were enslaved to the Arameri. Because the gods are nearly omnipotent and the Arameri control them, they can control the world.
Back to Yeine. Her mother took up with the king of a backwater nation, Darre, and was disinherited and exiled for it. Her grandfather Dekarta is aging and needs someone to take over for him. He has a nephew and a niece (Relad and Scimina) who have already been named heirs, but the deadlock between them as to which one actually succeeds Dekarta can’t be broken. So, a third heir is needed to break the deadlock. Theoretically, Relad and Scimina could both name Yeine the successor, but practically speaking Yeine is expected to choose between one or the other of her cousins. To make things more complicated, it’s expected that superfluous heirs will be killed after the ceremony (can’t have any claimants to the throne sticking around, you know).
So, which one will Yeine choose? Most of the book is palace intrigue of the political contest between the three heirs. My first reaction on arriving would be to start building alliances and gathering supporters, much as Relad and Scimina already have done. But Yeine spends most of her time digging up the ghosts of her mother’s time life when she lived in the capital. Luckily for Yeine, this is not a problem. Early on, she runs into the enslaved gods themselves, and starts building an alliance with them. That’s a tricky thing though, since they are both powerful and enslaved.
I had some difficulty whenever the narrative turned toward the myth of the gods. In other words, their back story. Before the incarnation of the universe, when things were formless and the gods were immaterial and they fought and blah blah blah. That’s really just me though. I can’t read the myths of Norse gods or Greek gods or native American spirits without zoning out. Some day I’ll be able to put my finger on it, but I don’t currently know why this is.
However, I do think the gods and their focus and limitations in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is pretty cool. Sieh is immeasurably old, but takes the form of a child physically and in essence. Nahadoth is an incarnation of dread. He appears dark and brooding and barely restrained by magic from killing everything conceivable.
I particularly thought that Jemisin did a really good job of creating a world of interaction between gods and man. I’ve previously written that I thought stories written about immortals are hard to get into, because there’s no danger to them. Some other conflict has to be created, and that is hard to do because of the power imbalance between them and mortals. This book’s vision of chained and struggling gods makes for great reading. They hate their jailers but can do little about it despite having great power. That makes for awesome conflict to describe.
And by the second half of the book, most of the mythical background taken care of and then it switched to full on scheming and this was more interesting. Some for future stakes. Some for revenge. Some for family and tribe. By this point, I knew who the players were and what they were like.
Mostly I enjoyed it. Mostly.
A few other personal reviews blogged around the internet:
- Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews
- Janicu’s Book Blog
- A Dribble of Ink
- Lingua Fantastika
- Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
- Winterfox at Fantasy With Bite
- Alex Dally Macfarlane
Title: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Author: N. K. Jemisin
Cover creator: Lauren Panepinto (designer) / Cliff Nielsen (artist)
Series: The Inheritance Trilogy; 1
Imprint / publisher: Orbit Books / Hachette Livre
Format: Paperback
Length: 398 p.
Publication date: February 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-04391-5
I must admit – I’m still sort of iffy on the inheritance rules for the Arameri family. I don’t think I quite understood why Yeine was supposed to choose who inherited. Since Yeine was in the dark for much of the book, so too are the readers I suppose.
Thanks for the linkage by the way. :)