2016 read #1: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
413 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 3
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The year is off to a solid start with this one. I suppose this counts as something of a partial reread: In February 2011, a certain Midwestern university paid for me to fly out for a grad student interview, and this was the book I brought with me on the plane. I remember getting hooked straightaway, and devouring half of it on the flight out. But then -- and this is, I suppose, a substantial spoiler, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you're wary of such things -- I reached the part where we learn our plucky but doomed narrator had been implanted with the soul of a partially dead goddess, and the whole dynamic of the narrative (it seemed at the time) had shifted. Underdog stories are as cliche as they come, especially in fantasy narratives centered on decadent nobility meeting its match in an underestimated farmboy/barbarian/heroic thief, yet I still dig them way more than stories about underdogs who turn out to have been gods all along. At the time, anyway, this contrivance seemed one silliness too many, pulling me out of my investment in a book which already featured an irresistibly seductive god of night and chaos kept chained as a BDSM pet by the aforementioned decadent nobility. My interest crashed almost immediately. I made no effort to read at all on the flight home, and I never did finish the book all through the ensuing years. (Nor, for that matter, did I get into the grad program: my prospective advisor, in an all too common bit of academic nepotism, had already picked out the kid she wanted to accept that year, long before any other applicants had materialized; the university-comped flights and interviews were a boondoggle formality.)

In the last few years I started hearing good things about a certain N. K. Jemisin. Looking up her bibliography, I was surprised to find she had been the author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, that initially promising book I had half-read so many years ago. I wavered for a while, but honestly I'm not sure what I intend to say with this prolonged introduction; obviously, in the end, I did settle in to reread it from the beginning, and here we are.

Aspects of the plot are, without a doubt, corny and cliched. There's the sensuous but violent and unpredictable god of night, kept in servitude after a defeated rebellion against the god of light and order, so sexfully seductive that our hero is never free of thoughts of him. There's the palace politicking amongst the mortal factions. There's the sadistic and malevolent heir apparent, merely the worst example of a systemic rot and decadence in the center of power. There's the mystery of a noble parent's death motivating our hero, the basically decent and rustic outsider summoned to the ruling city, who wins hearts and minds among the defeated and enslaved magical beings upon whom the power structure depends. And of course there's the spoiler up there in my first paragraph (if you skipped it, I won't give it away here). Yet, for all that, I found much that was fresh and interesting about this novel. The worldbuilding is excellent, particularly the slowly-revealed creation narrative and its fallout. The narrator is sharp and clever and vulnerable, and the narration is vigorous and occasionally all out of sequence, something rarely handled so well in genre fiction even today. I didn't find the romantic/erotic subplots as corny this time as I did in 2011: I enjoyed them this time, as opposed to merely tolerating them, though it's anyone's guess as to why that would be.

It's a shame that matters get resolved as well as they do at the end of Kingdoms -- that disconnected, occasionally confused narration was one of the book's main highlights, and the plot driving that particular narrative device has been resolved, so I can't expect more in the ensuing volumes. But Kingdoms more than overcame my years of half-read skepticism, and I'm optimistic that Jemisin will provide plenty to like in the sequels.