Cooperative Apocalypse:

Hostile Geological Forces in N. K. Jemisin’s The

Broken Earth Trilogy

Master’s Thesis

Author: Felicia Stenberg

Supervisor: Johan Höglund

Examiner: Niklas Salmose

Term: Spring Semester 2020

Subject: English Literature

Level: Advanced, 30 credits

Course code: 5EN01E

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to

the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy

depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into

three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and

examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in

posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency

and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative

fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an

agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates

both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings,

and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and

human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a

future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the

incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.

Key words

The Broken Earth trilogy, N. K. Jemisin, Bruno Latour, Agency, ANT, Geostory, Donna

Haraway, Chthulucene, Sympoeisis, Become-with, Response-Ability, Anthropocene,

Anthropocentrism, Posthumanism, Climate Fiction, Collectivism, Gaia Theory, Amitav

Ghosh.

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1

2.State of the Art: The Broken Earth Trilogy ............................................................................... 4

3. Posthuman Theory in The Anthropocene ................................................................................. 9

3.1 Gaia Theory According to Margulis and Lovelock ......................................................... 10

3.2 Latourian Moderns and (Non)humans, Divided.............................................................. 11

3.3 Agency of the Nonhuman and Geostories ....................................................................... 13

3.4 (De)Animation ............................................................................................................... 14

3.5 Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene ..................................................................................... 16

3.6 What Stories Tell Stories—The Potential of Speculative Literature ................................. 19

4. “Let’s Start with the End of The World”—an Introduction to The Broken Earth................ 21

4.1 Nonhuman Agents—Earth as a Broken Synergistic Network in Need .............................. 26

4.2 Embracing The Subhuman—Orogenes in Need of Sympoiesis in The Anthropocene ....... 34

4.3 Failed Posthumans—Stone Eaters and Orogenes in Relation to Each Other................... 46

4.4 The Issue With Living and Temporarily Dying on a Broken Earth .................................. 51

5.Reanimation—What Speculative Literature Can Do .............................................................. 56

6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 60

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 64

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1. Introduction

The times we live in now are, as they say, interesting. Whether it is viruses that threaten the

lives of millions while politicians worry about economic collapse or the constant threat of the

destruction of an environment that humans are both part of and dependent on, it is clear that

the world and its inhabitants are in a constant state of vulnerability. Humanity’s role as the

centre of importance in the world is now more than ever put into question, as the

anthropocentric worldview that has reigned for centuries has been shown as harmful in the

current epoch, today sometimes referred to by scholars as the Anthropocene. Thus, change is

of the essence, and time is clearly running out.

People have always turned to stories to make sense of the present moment, while

literature often reflect that present in turn.1Today, this includes climate change, and the view

of humanity as a geological force. Consequently, the instability of our place on this planet is

something that permeates much of recent speculative fiction. In this thesis, I analyse one such

work, The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin, which comprises; The Fifth Season (TFS),

published in 2015; The Obelisk Gate (TOG), published in 2016; and The Stone Sky (TSS),

published in 2017. All three instalments won the Hugo Award for best novel the year after

their publication, making it not only the first trilogy in which all parts have received this

honour, but also made author N. K. Jemisin the first African American woman to win in that

category.

The Broken Earth trilogy begins with the Earth literally breaking apart, via an

earthquake that splits the continent known as the Stillness in half. Taking place thousands of

1An interesting historical example to note here is that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the Summer of what is

known as The Year Without Summer, allegedly caused by a volcanic eruption filling the atmosphere with ash in

1816 (“1816, The Year Without a Summer”). Whether this truly was the inspiration for Shelley remains in

doubt, however, but the way history has put the two together is nevertheless of significance here.

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years into the future, the Earth in the trilogy—referred to as “Father Earth”—is one constantly

plagued with earthquakes that cause “Fifth Seasons,” extended “winters” in which ash fills the

atmosphere. These Seasons often last hundreds of years, nearly eradicating humanity every

time they occur. Furthermore, it is revealed that the Earth has sentience, and is hellbent on

vengeance against humanity. Therefore, the dystopian world presented in the novels exists in

a constant state of environmental crisis, and perpetual peri-apocalypse.

The metaphorical and allegorical parallels that can be drawn to our current

environmental crisis are evident. A current example is that during the lockdown surrounding

the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, pollution levels quickly decreased, clearly

illustrating the correlation between humanity and the climate crisis. However, despite these

measures, reduction of worldwide emission of greenhouse gases might not reach the goal

scientists say is needed to stop global temperatures from rising too much, painting a dark

picture of just how much we affect the Earth (Storrow). Interestingly, and of importance to

this thesis, is that in April 2020 it was reported that due to the lockdown, so-called ambient

seismic activity has decreased, showing that humanity is affecting the Earth’s vibration as

well (Kaur). The thought of humanity literally affecting the Earth’s movement, then, is not as

farfetched as previously believed.

This concept of humanity as a geological force that is affecting the Earth is brought to

the extreme in The Broken Earth trilogy. In the novels, humanity has through millennia been

separated into three species with different abilities, who all live in a contentious and unstable

state in relation to one another. Besides stills—the closest to humans as we know them

today—there are those known as orogenes, people that can both cause and stop earthquakes.

The third subspecies, the elusive stone eaters, look like stone statues and can travel through

the Earth. Thus, the trilogy introduces people who are connected to the Earth in several

different ways, both metaphorical and literal.

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The story in the trilogy is a complex one, and as such it is difficult to define with

regards to genre. Jemisin’s works have, for instance, been labelled as both fantasy and science

fiction as the trilogy moves freely and unapologetically between both genres. Additionally,

The Broken Earth trilogy has also been labelled as both climate fiction—that is, fiction that in

some way deal with climate change—and as belonging to the Afrofuturist tradition. In

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha Womack argues that at

its core, Afrofuturism is about the power of imagination to envision possible futures “through

a black cultural lens” (loc 140) and “to reinvigorate culture and transcend social limitations”

(loc 350). Womack writes that “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical

fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western

beliefs” (loc 140). Accordingly, Jemisin writes within a tradition that lays claim to the

possibility of literature to transcend obstacles and create change. Of note, however, is that in

the trilogy, while the protagonists are people of colour, it is in a futuristic form, with features

that often have no equivalent in our reality. Jemisin therefore complicates the notion of race

by both highlighting and subverting it in the narrative. 2

The Broken Earth trilogy shows an Earth that has taken back its agency and is actively

considering humankind to be its adversary. In this thesis I use a combination of different

scholars’ works to examine how the narrative can force us to face the incomprehensible that is

the climate crisis. Basing my research in posthumanism and Gaia theory, I employ Bruno

Latour, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh to explore humanity’s role and place in the

occurrence of being on the continuous brink of ecological extinction. My thesis explores the

effect of this forcible decentring of humanity’s importance and what happens when the Earth

seeks vengeance in a world where apocalypse has become quotidian. The concept of Fifth

2 It is further important to note here that Jemisin is outspoken about the fact that The Broken Earth trilogy was

inspired by responses to oppression such as the Ferguson Riots in 2014 and the Black Lives Matter Movement

(Hanifin). She emphasises, however, that she does not write about movements as such, but about individuals first

and foremost (Hurley).

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Seasons becomes an allegory for humanity’s powerlessness in the face of what James

Lovelock described in The Revenge of Gaia as a vengeful Earth that is now fighting back. I

argue that on this Earth, by this Earth, the absurdity inherent in the belief that humanity has

ever truly been in charge of anything is made evident, thus illustrating the fallibility of an

anthropocentric and individualistic worldview, as humanity cannot be and has never been

separate from nature. Consequently, Jemisin’s trilogy depicts not only the folly of an

essentialist mindset in a world where what constitutes humanity is constantly in flux, but that

in doing so, questions the very notion of humanity as a category in itself. I further contend

that by giving the Earth sentience, the trilogy reanimates the deanimated Earth, and by

literally blurring the lines between what is Earth and what is life shows the inseparability of

human and nature.

The structure of this thesis is as follows: First, I account for the previous scholarship

on The Broken Earth trilogy. Then, I present my theoretical framework, focused on the

agency of the nonhuman, and humanity’s place in existence. This is followed by the analysis,

which is initially divided into four sections, all focusing on the Earth to different extents.

Diverting slightly, the fifth and final analysis section discusses not the narrative of The

Broken Earth trilogy, but its function as a device in restoring symbiosis with the Earth, and

the importance of these types of stories.

2. State of the Art: The Broken Earth Trilogy

Since the trilogy is recently published, the scholarly work is not plentiful. The trilogy is filled

with such diversity that study has been done in areas including, but not limited to: race,

gender, and class, often through an ecocritical lens. To situate my own claims, what follows in

this section therefore accounts for the most important scholarship on the trilogy to date.

In “‘Ourworld’: A Feminist Approach to Global Constitutionalism,” Ruth Houghton

and Aoife O’Donoghue use Jemisin’s trilogy among other works to problematize the notion of

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global constitutionalism, that is, “the process of constitutionalising international law and

governance” (2). By asking who it would benefit—as global constitutionalism is “inherently

gendered” (3)—Houghton and O’Donoghue argue that feminist science fiction can help

reimagine what global constitutionalism could be, as it “provides feminists with a testing

ground” akin to Thomas More’s fictional island Utopia (3). They state that the trilogy

demonstrates that before any sort of solution can be possible “intersectional questions of race,

of social status, of economic power, of religion, of abuse all must be tackled, to be fought”

(10). They also raise the issue of how Jemisin complicates the idea of motherhood, something

that can arguably be extended, as I will show in this thesis, to parenthood overall in the

trilogy, both in the literal and metaphorical sense.

MaryKate Eileen Messimer, in her doctoral dissertation “Gender in Apocalyptic

California: The Ecological Frontier,” argues instead that Jemisin’s work depicts and moves

beyond the gender binaries that often plague ecofeminism even while purportedly criticizing

them. Messimer writes that binary categories are “central to upholding individualism” (13), a

belief which permeates this analysis as well. She claims that with the power of orogeneity, the

trilogy expands “human empathy into nonliving matter” as Jemisin imagines “extreme

empathy as a solution to the American isolationism that has caused social inequality and

environmental destruction” (20). I will expand on this idea of upending binaries in the trilogy,

while incorporating symbiosis and agency.

Moving away from foregrounding gender in analysing Jemisin’s work, Misha Grifka-

Wander and Kathleen Murphey both highlight Jemisin’s depiction of oppression as an

allegory to slavery, but in different ways. In “Moving Forward: Gender, Genre, and Why

There’s No Hard Fantasy,” Grifka-Wander uses Jemisin’s works, among others’, to argue

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against Darko Suvin’s now famous dismissal of fantasy literature in favour of science fiction.3

She contends that both “hard science fiction” and “high fantasy” have a gendered bias, as

scholarly work has historically associated these genres with masculinity: science fiction with

forward gazing and progress on the one hand; fantasy with a conservative and traditionalist

outlook on the other, missing the diverse possibilities of fantasy as a genre in the process (65).

Grifka-Wander therefore proposes a new definition, “forward fantasy.” To Grifka-Wander,

“forward fantasy” avoids the backwards gaze common to the genre in “high fantasy” and

therefore achieves the same “rigorous realism, the political relevance” (65) that is usually

attributed to science fiction alone, albeit not in the same way. The way “forward fantasy”

achieves this contemporary relevance—and this is of utmost importance to this thesis—is

through rigorous worldbuilding, as such worldbuilding “must reflect the real world enough

to make the linkages clear, while also changing the world enough to estrange it” (76). Realism

itself having an air of instability and what this means for literature is something that is

explicated on in the final part of the theory section.

Grifka-Wander acknowledges the climate change parallels evident in the trilogy, but

focuses her argument on the orogenes and shows how the trilogy draws parallels between the

treatment of orogenes and historical American slavery. She states that Jemisin complicates the

issue of enslavement and “troubles the readers’ conception of freedom,” as the orogenes are

capable of lethal force (78). According to Grifka-Wander, The Broken Earth “directly

responds to the contemporary moment . . . A simple metaphor is no longer sufficiently

estranging or radical, and so Jemisin pushes farther, providing new subjectivities (that of the

orogenes and their oppressors) for the reader to inhabit and learn from” (78). Grifka-Wander’s

3 In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, published in 1979, Darko Suvin famously argued that science fiction as a

genre is a cognitive exercise that often causes its readers to engage and draw parallels to their real life, while

fantasy is mere wish fulfilment and escapism.

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analysis heavily informs this thesis, and will be built upon and expanded to climate change in

this analysis.

Kathleen Murphey takes a different approach in her analysis of how Jemisin depicts

slavery in “Science Fiction/Fantasy Takes on Slavery: NK Jemisin and Tomi Adeyemi," as

she claims that slavery in the trilogy is not based on race. She writes that “[l]ight and dark

skinned people are enslavers and enslaved, so racism falls away from the dynamic or rationale

for the enslavers [sic] treatment of the enslaved, highlighting its inhumanity even further”

(110). That is to say, Jemisin shows the elaborate machinery at work to deem some humans as

lesser than others. This is part of the fabric of the trilogy’s worldbuilding and will be analysed

thoroughly in this thesis.

Homing in on research that is more clearly aligned with this thesis’ own, scholars such

as Marvin John Walter, Alastair Iles and Moritz Ingwersen all focus on issues relating to

anthropocentrism and the environment in the trilogy. Walter argues in “The Human and its

Others: A Posthumanist Reading of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone and N.K.

Jemisin’s The Fifth Season,” that the first instalment in the trilogy “manages partly to break

with anthropocentrism by de-centring the human from its allocated place of uniqueness” (3).

Interestingly, he also discusses binaries to press the instability of humanity, something that I

will return to in the analysis and expand to the rest of the trilogy.

In “Repairing the Broken Earth: NK Jemisin on Race and Environment in

Transitions,” Alastair Iles uses Jemisin’s work as a foundation and draws on several ideas

mentioned above to question the role that racial and social subordination play in destroying

the environment. Just as this thesis, Iles uses the term Anthropocene and focuses on the Earth

as an agent. While he claims that “Earth must be an equal partner” he does so while stating

that “Earth can be unbroken” (19). My argument, however, hinges on the assertion that the

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idea of an unbroken Earth as it relates to the real Earth is too generous a view of our present

moment.

Continuing with previous research done with regards to issues relating to the

Anthropocene, one final example is Moritz Ingwersen’s article “Geological Insurrections:

Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin,” in which he discusses

the New Weird and how closely it relates to the Anthropocene.4 He argues that in The Broken

Earth trilogy, “Jemisin’s metabolization of the Anthropocene” resonates because it

foregrounds the history of imperialism as having been ending worlds since its conception, and

that therefore, “these histories are inextricably interwoven with the onset of resource

capitalism” (75). He makes use of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and writes that the trilogy

literalizes her concept of becoming-with, something this thesis will delve deeper into and

build on.

This survey shows the many lenses that the trilogy can be viewed through. The

scholarship reviewed all have an anti-individualistic approach when analysing the source

material. Important to mention, however, is that a majority of these articles analyse The

Broken Earth as only one example among others. Therefore, in this thesis I will both draw

from them and add to the field. While many previous studies focus on topics that are very

relevant to my own research, they do not look into the role of the Earth as an actor and its

relationship with life in the trilogy to any great extent, which this thesis has as its main focal

point. The concepts of gender and slavery have been broached and problematized thoroughly

with regards to the trilogy already, and in this thesis, I therefore focus more on the

human/nonhuman divide not elaborated on so far in the previous scholarship.

4 In The New Weird, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer define this genre as works that subvert the romanticized ideas

about fantasy, often mixing science fiction with fantasy, while trying to unsettle the reader as opposed to genres

such as horror.

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3. Posthuman Theory in The Anthropocene

This section delineates the theoretical framework used in my analysis. To situate my thesis, I

begin with a discussion of the concepts the Anthropocene and posthuman theory. To that

foundation, I add first Gaia theory as defined by Lovelock and Margulis, and then Bruno

Latour’s work on agency, nonhumanity and deanimation. As supplement, Donna Haraway’s

Chthulucene is explored, which includes her ideas of becoming-with, sympoiesis, and

response-ability. I conclude the theory section by tying all these theorists’ concepts together

in a discussion of what speculative fiction can do, further informed by Adam Trexler and

Amitav Ghosh.

In an Anthropocentric worldview, simply put, humans are at the centre, and thus the

most important creature in existence. Anthropocentrism is the belief that humans are superior

in value to everything else, and therefore everything that exists, exists to be used by

humankind. This belief permeates much of historical thought, whether it is scientific or

religious. Many scholars believe, and in ecocriticism especially, that this view of humanity is

one of the main causes to the climate issues now raging the globe. The theorists employed in

this analysis are all opposed to this mindset of the human at the centre of importance, and all

go beyond merely rejecting it. Of the essence, therefore, are definitions of two concepts that

are part of the groundwork on which the theoretical framework builds, namely, the

Anthropocene and critical posthumanism.

In a 2000 newsletter, Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer introduced the term

Anthropocene as a new name for the epoch in which we currently live, as climate research

now shows that humanity’s use and abuse of the Earth are having clear ecological

consequences (17). They proclaim that without any outside forces such as a major ecological

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event or a pandemic,5 “mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia,

maybe millions of years, to come” (18). It is on this notion, I argue, that The Broken Earth

trilogy builds.

The introduction of humanity as a geological force shows the necessity of rethinking

the human as a fixed category, at the centre of importance. According to Pramod K. Nayar,

critical posthumanism “is the radical decentering of the traditional sovereign” (2). In other

words, humanity as the central subject is forced into the side-lines. Critical posthumanism,

therefore, posits that there is no such thing as an inherent human essence, and that what makes

up humans is a jumbled mixture which have always co-evolved with other species (8). Hence,

posthumanism—for the purpose of this thesis—is defined as refusing any sort of essentialism

with regards to the human, and by extension, any sort of higher value than any other entity.

To add to these concepts, below I outline Gaia theory, that is, the view of the Earth as a

symbiotic system.

3.1 Gaia Theory According to Margulis and Lovelock

Gaia theory, or the Gaia Hypothesis, was developed in the 1970s by James E. Lovelock and

Lynn Margulis. Named after the goddess and personification of Earth in Greek mythology,

Gaia is the mother of all life. In Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis explains Gaia theory as a

concept that “postulates that the Earth is alive” (3). The Gaia hypothesis is defined as a

process in which the planet and the life on it (and in it) co-evolve (Lovelock 29). Margulis

describes Gaia as, “the physiologically regulated Earth” (142), while simultaneously rejecting

the oft-repeated claim that the Gaia hypothesis states that the Earth is a single organism. Gaia

transcends the notion of a single organism as it emerges from a multitude of living species

that makes up the system which “form[s] its incessantly active body” (149). Put differently,

5 I note the timely irony of their usage of this word, in the spring of 2020, but presume that they were thinking of

a scenario in which the death toll would include a greater part of humanity. As of this writing, this has

fortunately not yet come to pass.

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Gaia is not a single organism because it is a system created by interaction among a multitude

of organisms and species. Hence, what defines Gaia is “a physiology that we recognize as

environmental regulation,” as Gaia is not an organism among many, but a sum of all the parts

on and in it (149). This is a crucial thought that permeates this thesis, and, I argue, the trilogy

as well.

Margulis further speaks of the ridiculous idea that humanity has any power, or any

say, with regards to the Earth. She writes that “the human move to take responsibility for the

living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of

it” (143). This arguably has certain sinister connotations, in the current climate—both literally

and metaphorically in this case—and especially when read with Jemisin’s trilogy in mind.

Both Margulis and Lovelock argue that there is a sense of self-regulating when it comes to the

Earth (Lovelock 29; Margulis 147). Through the Gaia Hypothesis, the biosphere is viewed “as

an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis” (Lovelock 29).

That is, the Earth keeps itself stable. This stability, however, is referred to as “‘metastable,’

stable in its reactive instability” (Margulis 153). In other words, all that is living on the planet

affect the planet just as the planet affects all that is living on it, meaning that Gaia is not only

a synergistic network, but also that it should be regarded as alive. With this foundational

scientific perspective of symbiosis and inherent blurred binaries in mind, I now move on to

discuss Bruno Latour’s work regarding nonhumans and agency.

3.2 Latourian Moderns and (Non)humans, Divided

In his seminal work We Have Never Been Modern, Latour speaks of a false dichotomy

between society and nature that modernity created.6 This dualism between Nature/Society, or

what Latour calls Nature/Culture, assumes that humanity is not an inherent part of nature, but

6 Bruno Latour does not use the term Anthropocene in this work, as it was published in 1991, 9 years before it

was proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer, and our timeline is unfortunately linear in this regard.

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separated because of certain qualities that defines humans as apart from nonhumans.

Therefore, one of his central concepts is that of “moderns,” as a word for how we view

ourselves in the current era. According to Latour, this designates a perspective that alters how

we see history, because “[w]hen the word ‘modern’, ‘modernization’, or ‘modernity’ appears,

we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past” (Modern loc 254). With modernity,

then, came the categorization of what constitutes a person, and any being on the wrong side

was automatically—and scientifically—considered lesser than human. As modernity defined

itself in relation to the nonmodern, it overlooked this creation of what Latour calls

“nonhumanity.” Nonhumanity is defined as “things, or objects, or beasts” (Modern loc 303).

Ergo, inherent in defining something as modern is creating a power balance between what is

human and what (is considered) not. For the moderns, only humankind can have agency, and

be free agents (Modern loc 341).

Latour therefore sees the human/nonhuman dichotomy as a parallel to the

Nature/Culture divide. He explains this by exemplifying two thoughts that cannot, and should

not, be considered separately, as that makes them both incomprehensible: that on the one

hand, Nature has always existed; and on the other, human beings are the only beings that

construct society (Modern loc 649). Latour argues that “[i]f Nature is not made by or for

human beings, then it remains foreign, forever remote and hostile. Nature’s very

transcendence overwhelms us, or renders it inaccessible.” By the same token, society, if

considered symmetrically, “is made only by and for humans . . . Its very immanence destroys

it at once in the war of every man against every man” (Modern loc 660). In other words, it is

only humanity that divides Nature and (human) Society into separate opposing concepts, as to

other lifeforms on Earth, Society and Nature already exists in symbiosis. Therefore, the two

must be considered complementary to each other as they “were created together. They

reinforce each other” otherwise, “the first assure[s] the nonhumanity of Nature and the second

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the humanity of the social sphere” (Modern loc 660). In short: humans and society are not

separate from nature, nor have they ever been. To further explicate what this means and how

it relates to this thesis, Latour’s examination of nonhuman agency and his concept of geostory

will now be explored and defined.

3.3 Agency of the Nonhuman and Geostories

It is important here to note that Latour is one of the founding scholars on Actor Network

Theory (ANT). Simplified, ANT is a theory which is against determinism and which proposes

that actions and agency are not limited to inter-human relations but include nonhuman actants

as well. While humans act on objects, objects also act on humans in return and ANT treats the

acts as equal. All actants—human or nonhuman alike—are simultaneously a part of a

network, that is, a sum total of all actants in a specific “thing,” while simultaneously being

networks within themselves (Law 5). This reflects the concept of Gaia as a synergistic system

and permeates all of Latour’s thought.

In his later work “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Latour argues that the

Earth is now being recognized as an actant in the Anthropocene, and refers to it is an agent of

history, or what he calls geostory (“Agency” 3). Geostories, to Latour, literally means stories

of the Earth, and that history needs to include all of the planet. He claims that “the Earth has

now taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor” (“Agency” 3). This, in turn,

leads to the only hope left being an attempt to protect us against the Lovelockian concept of

“‘the revenge of Gaia’” as truce is no longer an option (5). In other words, that the planet is

now fighting back against humanity is something we have to make peace with. Latour writes

that “Gaia is another subject altogether—maybe also a different sovereign” (6). This arguably

brings the posthumanist notion which decentres the human as the natural sovereign of Earth to

its apex, by inverting it completely. In other words, the thought that the Earth is not

inanimate, inactive, or nonacting, and may therefore have power that has gone

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unacknowledged, which in the context of this thesis is highly relevant, as the Earth in the

trilogy is life giver, or taker, and deity, simultaneously. Latour quotes Michel Serres as

proclaiming that the Earth now, “depends so much on us that it is shaking and that we too are

worried by this deviation from expected equilibria. We are disturbing the Earth and making it

quake! Now it has a subject once again. (Serres qtd. in “Agency” 4). That is, by considering

the Earth as something stable and without agency, and in doing so removing humanity from

the equation, humanity as a geological force in the Anthropocene went undetected. Latour

writes that this bifurcation between subject and object is incongruous in a reality where the

Earth cannot remain an inanimate object as “it cannot be . . . emptied of all Its humans” (5).

This reflects Margulis’ concept of Gaia as a system made up by the interactive organisms

within it, which combined with Latour shows how symbiotic all actants in the network that is

Gaia truly are. The intertwining of life is ever-present, and the lines between

human/nonhuman as well as Nature/Culture is not only already blurred, but needs to be

blurred. To explain how this came about, I now turn to Latour’s concept of deanimation.

3.4 (De)Animation

Latour further complicates the notion of “moderns” refusing to see the agency inherent in

Nature by exploring how the Earth has been what he terms “deanimated” by humanity. In

modernity, the world sans humans was considered to offer “a solid ground for a sort of

undisputed jus naturalism—if not for religion and morality, at least for science and law”

(“Agency” 5). Simply put, the incorrect belief that the foundation on which both science and

law based their reasoning was stable led to false conclusions. According to Latour, this belief

in the stability of the foundation from which science and law emerge only reaches its

“objective” conclusions because of all the subjective work that has taken place “behind the

force” of scientific fact (“Agency” 7). As mentioned, people have always turned to stories,

beliefs and myths to make sense of their present reality, and according to Latour, science is

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not exempt from this practice. The praxis, then, of first animating the world with its inherent

narrativity, that is, the immanent existence of stories in nature, or geostory, to only deanimate

it when the desired results have been achieved, shows the flaws in the logic of assumed

stability in viewing the Earth and other nonhuman actants as lacking agency in themselves

Latour writes that:

animation is the essential phenomenon; deanimation a superficial, ancillary,

polemical, and more often than not vindicatory one. One of the main puzzles of

Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism,’ but the

rather naive belief that many still have in a deanimated world of mere stuff; just at the

moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply

entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems

difficult to understand (“Agency” 7).

In other words, it is because of humanity’s deanimation of the Earth into an object that we fail

to see the effects we have had upon it, and the agency it is reclaiming now. An inanimate

object has no agency, but a deanimated object has falsely had its agency removed, or

bypassed. By essentially ignoring the animation and agency within actants that is inherent

within Nature, the whole story, as it were, does not get told.

Latour later expands on this concept of deanimation in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures

on the New Climate Regime, in which he argues that “the idea of a deanimated world is only a

way of linking animations as if nothing were happening there. But agency is always there,

whatever we may do” (Facing Gaia 68). This means that deanimating an actant does not

mean its agency is removed, only wrongfully concealed. Therefore, the idea of having clear

distinctions between Nature/Culture or human/nonhuman “is nothing like a great

philosophical concept, a profound ontology; it is a secondary stylistic effect” used to simplify

the notion of agency by prescribing some beings as animate and others as inanimate. This

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divide, however, succeeds only in deanimating certain subjects into objects “called ‘material,’

by depriving them of their activity, and in overanimating certain others, called ‘human,’ by

crediting them with admirable capacities for action – freedom, consciousness, reflexivity, a

moral sense, and so on” (68). Humanity’s practice of under- and overanimating things, and in

doing so reducing actants to mere matter, is of utmost importance to this thesis, as the nature

of the narrative also extends this to certain types of humans as well.

Latour argues that the point of living in the Anthropocene is to not fall back on the old

ways of doing things and of viewing the world and its agents: “[f]ar from trying to ‘reconcile’

or ‘combine’ nature and society, the task . . . is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and

in as differentiated a way as possible—until, that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation

between those two concepts of object and subject” (“Agency” 15). In other words, the

solution between the Nature/Society divide is not to attempt to combine the two, but to realize

that all actants have agency, and that to view them through the archaic lens of object and

subject is impossible. The concept of blurred binaries is present here as well. Ergo, it is

crucial not to deanimate the Earth, but instead to reanimate it and realize that humanity is only

one actor among many.

3.5 Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene

Donna Haraway builds on Latour’s thought in many ways, but takes issue with the term

Anthropocene, preferring her own coined Chthulucene. In Staying with the Trouble: Making

Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway claims the Anthropocene lends itself too easily “to

cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions” (56). For Haraway, an

alternative to the Anthropocene is the Chthulucene, an interwoven symbiotic mode of living

together with all species—human and nonhuman alike. Haraway suggests that “the

Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in

times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky

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has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other … The order is reknitted: human beings are

with and of the earth” (55). Put differently, we are entangled with the Earth, no matter how

we look at it, and its future is therefore also ours. The Chthulucene is thus in many ways a

remedy from the individualistic thought process that is suggested by a term such as the

Anthropocene. In Haraway’s Chthulucene, then, mankind is not the pro and/or antagonist of

the Earth, but simply one of the players among many others, which relates to Latour’s

argument that all entities are actants with their own agency. This thinking with regards to

existence is paramount when analysing both Earth and humanity in the trilogy.

An important note here is that both Latour and Haraway are considered posthumanist

scholars and important names within New Materialism. As it rejects dualism, New

Materialism is inherently posthumanist and postanthropocentric (Fox & Alldred 2). It is a

term used to describe many different fields’ “theoretical and practical ‘turn to matter’. This

turn emphasizes the materiality of the world and everything – social and natural – within it”

(1). This ties in further with Latour’s ANT, as well. However, in a 2006 interview, Haraway

distanced herself from the term posthumanism, as she thought that it was too easily

appropriated by those who seek techno enhancement often associated with transhumanism,

and she considers posthumanism as “way too restrictive” (Gane 140). Haraway, instead,

humorously points out that in the Chthulucene “we are all compost, not posthuman” because

of the symbiotic nature of existence in and with Nature (Haraway 55). Hence, death is simply

a process of becoming-with for Haraway.

“Becoming-with” is central to Haraway’s argument. In the Chtuhulucene, the focus is

not on the cause to the current crisis, but instead on how to exist in symbiosis and “become-

with” because “[o]ntologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in

relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist

their intertwined worldings” (12-13). In other words, no human is an island, nor is any other

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actor, and everything has agency. This echoes ANT as well, in that if nothing pre-exists its

entanglement with other actants, then everything is part of a whole, and in that whole,

everything acts on everything else.

Haraway further references Isabelle Stengers’ work on an updated version of the Gaia

hypothesis. Haraway writes that “Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be

exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a

person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet” (43). Consequently,

the agency of the Earth is made clear, and the need for symbiosis is evident. For Haraway,

then, humanity needs to “stay with the trouble,” by which she means, “living and dying in

response-ability on a damaged earth” (2). Response-ability, to Haraway, “is about both

absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives

and who dies” (28). She expands on her definition in an interview, saying that response-

ability is “that cultivation through which we render each other capable, that cultivation of the

capacity to respond . . . response-ability [is] irreducibly collective and to-be-made. In some

really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making-

with” (Kenney 256-57). In other words, response-ability is not solely about taking

responsibility, but about bettering humanity’s capacity of seeing our place in the system, and

not the leaders of it.

Sympoiesis, for Haraway, further signifies this notion of togetherness. As opposed to

autopoesis—self-making—sympoiesis shows that the world humanity creates is not one they

create alone. Just as humans become-with the rest of the Earth, sympoiesis signifies that we

are also made-with the Earth. Haraway argues that if the concept of independent organisms in

environments is no longer supported by either biology or philosophy, “then sympoiesis is the

name of the game in spades. Bounded (or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis is

not good enough figurally or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths” (33). After all,

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to be any living thing is to be made-with and “to become-with bacteria” (65). This idea of

nonindependent organisms ring true in the trilogy for both humanity and Earth alike.

3.6 What Stories Tell Stories—The Potential of Speculative Literature

To situate this theoretical framework and tie all concepts presented here together, I press on

the importance of literature as a tool, and will now discuss what fiction can be capable of.

Latour argues that one way of understanding the incomprehensible situation we now face, is

through literature. He writes that “[g]reat novels disseminate the sources of actions in a way

that the official philosophy available at their time is unable to follow” (“Agency” 8). This is

because the “moderns” are blinded by the need to attribute objectivity or subjectivity in a

reality in which this categorization is not so simple, as traits of both are often intertwined.

Latour proclaims that “existence and meaning are synonymous. As long as they act, agents

have meaning” (“Agency” 12). In other words, acting in itself means that agents have

meaning. This meaning can also evolve and change, which means that “[s]torytelling is not

just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a

world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (13). Put differently, if we admit that the

planet is animate and has agency, the “geostory” that can be told will not run the risk of

deanimating Earth.

What literature can do, then—and I argue not only “great” novels—is to deal with this

complexity, this simultaneity, by presenting a fictional reality that mirrors our own while

being safely “distant.” This allows for problematizing the present, and reanimate what has

been deanimated. As the moderns by Latour’s definition are unable to handle or face the

threats they have themselves caused, fiction can bridge this gap, and help make sense of the

incomprehensible—in this case, the threat of human extinction in an allegory for climate

change.

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In Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Adam Trexler

examines how things such as climate change and the Anthropocene age alter and affect the

possibilities of art and our cultural narrative. He claims that “[t]he Anthropocene challenges

science fiction’s technological optimism, general antipathy toward life sciences, and patriotic

individualism” (14). Climate fiction novels, he argues, have a diverse ability within their

narratives, which makes them “a privileged form to explore what it means to live in the

Anthropocene moment” (27). In other words, climate fiction can interrogate our present

moment through its intrinsic worldbuilding.

Furthermore, Amitav Ghosh points out in The Great Derangement: Climate Change

and the Unthinkable, that climate change as a subject has rarely been broached in so-called

serious literature, instead relegated to genres such as science fiction and fantasy. Ghosh writes

that “[i]t is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to

extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (loc 79). That is, including the concept of climate

change in a work of fiction would instantly relegate the work to the “lower” genres such as

science fiction, fantasy and horror that make up speculative fiction. It could be argued, then,

that speculative fiction is now the place where the reality of climate change is explored and

highlighted, and becomes in a circumvent way the most realist of fictions.

Ghosh claims that this has occurred because climate change has an air of the uncanny,

but not the uncanny of old. The uncanny of climate change is instead that of “non-human

forces and beings” (loc 438). This leads to literature having a troubled relationship to what

constitutes Nature, as it is now “too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too

accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein.” Instead, climate

change events “are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non-

human” (loc 447). Ghosh argues that one of the uncanny effects of climate change is that of

inanimate things suddenly coming alive, and writes that this shows “renewed awareness of the

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elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even

perhaps the planet itself” (loc 888; emphasis added). Consequently, what speculative fiction

can do, and what I contend in this thesis that The Broken Earth trilogy does, is reanimate what

has been deanimated.

Of further relevance here is that Haraway uses the acronym SF to emphasise the

notion of inseparability. For her, SF means “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string

figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far,” concurrently and inseparably (2). What is

one, goes into the others, and so on. She further argues that at heart of the myriad but

symbiotic definitions of SF, is sympoiesis, making-with. Hence, Haraway stakes her claim on

the need for symbiotic thinking with regards to matters of almost everything. As I will show,

Jemisin’s trilogy takes the concepts detailed above to the extreme both by giving the Earth

itself personhood, awareness and goals, and personifying this geological force in the

subspecies of humans that can control and manipulate the Earth’s energy.

4. “Let’s Start with the End of The World”—an Introduction to The Broken Earth

In the introduction to this thesis I mentioned that The Broken Earth trilogy arguably falls

within the definition of climate fiction. In Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New

Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene, Gregers Andersen narrowly defines cli-fi as fiction

that “use[s] the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their world-making”

(5). This criterion certainly fit the trilogy, as it heavily relies on allegories to our present time,

and puts a lot of emphasis on the vulnerable state that the Earth and life on it is in.

Of consequence to note, therefore, is that geological aspects permeate the narrative,

and are used literally, metaphorically and allegorically throughout. The trilogy itself is

therefore deeply connected to matters of the geological Earth. A lot of information regarding

the worldbuilding is told through several small pieces of writing. These range from

stonelore—archaic rules about how to live on the Stillness, a continent where earthquakes are

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commonplace—to scientific historical reports regarding everything from orogenes and stone

eaters, to obelisks, which are large stone pillars that are sources of tremendous energy which

hover and drift high up in the sky.

As stated, the trilogy introduces different subspecies of humans on the Stillness. The

first, stills, humans without extraordinary powers, are officially in charge. The second,

orogenes, are closely connected to the Earth and can manipulate the Earth’s energy to various

effects. They are feared and officially considered nonhuman, and are enslaved in every way

but name. The third, mythical creatures known as stone eaters, look and act like statues, that

is, they “are slow aboveground, except when they aren’t” (TFS loc 78). They are immortal,

and equally a part of the Earth and apart from it.

The trilogy also introduces a sentient, vengeful Earth, able to communicate with

orogenes and stone eaters. It is revealed that all the myths that permeate the novels

surrounding “Father Earth” being alive are not only true, but extremely literal. Legend has it

that he did not originally hate life, but that his hate was born when the orogenes destroyed his

only child. This child, as it turns out, is the moon, which was flung out of orbit thousands of

years ago, by the ancestors to the orogenes. As punishment, they were turned into the stone

eaters by the Earth. Thus, humanity became the Earth’s “little enemies,” in the Earth’s own

words (TSS loc 4337). Acting in hubris, the humanity of old was attempting to enslave the

Earth—and using slaves to do it, no less—by tapping into its core as an energy source. This

energy is known as “magic” and “silver” interchangeably in the trilogy, and it permeates

everything on the planet. In large enough amounts the magic causes sentient life to occur.

The narrative structure of The Broken Earth breaks from traditional storytelling in how

it is structured. The narrative is complex and layered, containing first, second, and third

person narration, as well as the mentioned historical excerpts ranging from semi-religious

doctrine to scientific reports. The prologue introduces a yet unnamed narrator speaking in the

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second person directly to one of the protagonists, Essun, a middle-aged woman and orogene.

This has the effect, according to Walter, of making Essun be perceived as the reader’s own

self, leading to categorizing “Essun, and subsequently all orogenes, as human” (13). At the

close of the first novel, it is revealed that the narrator is a stone eater named Hoa. As

Ingwersen notes, the narrative is “a type of frame tale through which Hoa recounts the

world’s events to Essun” (86). As such, the trilogy is actively mythmaking while

simultaneously telling the myths of this Earth.

The trilogy also plays fast and loose with the timeline, as The Fifth Season introduces

two other protagonists who are orogenes as well. Both, however, are actually Essun at earlier

points in her life, thus telling Essun’s backstory in a slightly unconventional way, as they are

told in third person, but not in the past tense. The first is Damaya, Essun as a young girl.

Damaya is shunned by her family after her orogeneity is revealed. In the blink of an eye,

Damaya becomes something subhuman forced to live in a shed without shelter awaiting a

pick-up from a Guardian, the people in charge of orogenes. Guardians have the power to

negate orogeneity, as they get a corestone implanted at the base of their skulls in their

childhood. A corestone is a piece of iron, that is, a literal piece of the Earth, which in turn

means that Guardians are themselves of the Earth, at least mentally, as they do its bidding.

Damaya is taken to the Fulcrum, which is school, home, prison, and ghetto to the orogenes—

by her Guardian Schaffa.7 He points out that Guardians are often too late, as “by the time a

Guardian arrives a mob has carried the child off and beaten her to death” (TFS loc 463).

Schaffa tells her to not be angry with her family, as they did the right thing in reporting her, as

she is dangerous. Damaya remains furious, nevertheless.

The second is Syenite, Essun as a “successful” orogene in her twenties, still filled with

rage but living in and working for the Fulcrum. She is instructed to breed with another

7 In an interview Jemisin describes the Fulcrum as “a kind of evil Hogwarts” because the orogenes “can't leave

until they're fully trained and then they are let out only to do quick missions” (Paulson).

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orogene, Alabaster, that she has never met, with the caveat that she will not have to raise or

have anything to do with the eventual spawn. Syenite and Alabaster eventually manage to

escape their servitude for a few years into an island comm (the name for community in the

trilogy). Once Alabaster and Syenite are physically removed from the Stillness, the unnatural

state of their previous lives is juxtaposed with that of the people on the Island Meov, where

orogenes are in charge and appreciated for their powers. They are eventually caught with

disastrous results. Syenite kills their son in an attempt to save him from a life of servitude not

worth living, and Alabaster is kidnapped and dragged through the Earth by a stone eater.

13 years later, Alabaster harnesses the energy in the obelisks and causes the largest

and final Fifth Season, killing millions in a first step to bring the moon back into Earth’s orbit,

get the Stillness to stabilize, and to find a truce between humanity and the Earth. Meanwhile,

as the earthquake rips the Stillness in two, Essun has just found her young son murdered by

her husband in a racially motivated act after he found out that the boy was an orogene. She

sets out to find her husband as he also kidnapped their daughter and kill him before the

apocalypse gets a chance to. On her travels she encounters Hoa, in the shape of a strange

looking human boy seemingly being born out of the Earth itself. Essun and Hoa eventually

comes to join a comm during the Season, which openly accepts orogenes.

In addition, the first two instalments include several interludes that interrupt the

narrative in which Hoa appear to speak directly to the reader. For instance, in the first

interlude, Hoa says that “[t]here are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are

missing, and conspicuous by their absence” (TFS loc 1922). This is followed by examples of

the characters’ behaviour that the reader, but not Essun, would find odd. The narrative, then,

plays with storytelling conventions by not adhering to any straightforward way of telling it,

while also highlighting that this is what the novels are doing. This self-reflexivity makes the

story have a distinct postmodern slant to it.

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In the second instalment, The Obelisk Gate, Essun’s preteen daughter Nassun is added

to the roster of protagonists. Nassun becomes more and more isolated from society, as her

powers grow. The parallels between Nassun and Essun’s own childhood are heighten and

exacerbated when Nassun meet Schaffa, the Guardian who also guarded Essun as a child.

Essun, meanwhile, is reunited with a dying Alabaster, and starts to re-learn how to be a part of

something larger in a community and what it means to belong and fight for something greater

than yourself, and how futile rage is when it has no outlet. Nassun’s rage festers and grows in

her relative solitude, as she only has Schaffa to rely on.

In the third instalment, The Stone Sky, Hoa tells Essun his backstory, and how he was

the one who threw the moon out of orbit as an act of resistance. Alabaster dies, and it falls to

Essun to complete the mission of returning the moon to its orbit. Meanwhile, Nassun decides

to use the same power in the obelisks to turn every type of human into stone eaters, to save

Schaffa’s life, despite knowing that this will kill her and most of the life on Earth. In the end,

Essun sacrifices herself by giving up the fight in order to save her daughter, and in doing so,

Nassun realises that truce is the only alternative, and restores the moon. In the trilogy’s coda,

Essun awakes as a stone eater, determined to make the world better.

The analysis is divided into five sections, informed by the theoretical framework of

Latour and Haraway, as well as Margulis and Ghosh. In the first section, I analyse the Earth

as a network and all that that entails applying the Gaia Hypothesis, ANT, and sympoiesis. In

the second, I analyse the orogenes and their displacement in society, as officially nonhuman,

and their relationship with the Earth through Haraway’s becoming-with. In the third, I

examine the stone eaters, and their mythic existence and what being human means. In the

fourth, I problematize the trilogy’s depiction of living and dying on and with a broken Earth.

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4.1 Nonhuman Agents—Earth as a Broken Synergistic Network in Need

In the trilogy, the line between what is life and what is Earth, or Nature, is constantly

blurred and put into question. As many of the lifeforms have capabilities that lets them

manipulate and alter the fabric of the Earth, the interconnectedness of actants is heightened in

the narrative. As mentioned, according to Lovelock’s and Margulis’ the Gaia Hypothesis, the

Earth is a synergistic network, and should be regarded as alive. In the trilogy, there is no

question of the latter, but the former is in flux. Latour, in turn, argues that the Earth cannot be

seen as apart from humanity, and according to ANT that all actants act on each other. As the

Earth is a network, nothing in that network can be viewed as an isolated object, as everything

is irrevocably entangled. In this section, therefore, I examine the Earth as a shattered network,

further complicated by the sentience and agency made explicit in the trilogy. The Broken

Earth trilogy shows the Earth as a network in which all actants are refusing to agree to be part

of that network despite the impossibility of existing outside of it.

The trilogy introduces not only a sentient Earth, but one capable of communication,

and thus, interrogation. Margulis notes that Gaia, or Earth, is a system created by the

interaction within it (149). In the trilogy, this is shown in a literal form in the trilogy, as

sentience is achieved when something has enough of Earth’s energy, also known as magic,

within it. For instance, at one point a Guardian becomes seemingly possessed and starts

speaking in another voice. There are multiple references to “It,” and the Guardian warns that:

It’s angry … Angry and… afraid. I hear both gathering, growing, the anger and the

fear. Readying, for the time of return … It did what it had to do, last time … It seeped

through the walls and tainted their pure creation, exploited them before they could

exploit it. When the arcane connections were made, it changed those who would

control it. Chained them, fate to fate … It made them a part of it … It hoped for

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communion. Compromise. Instead, the battle… escalated … It speaks only to warn,

now … There will be no compromise next time— (TFS loc 4194)

What is actually speaking here is the Guardian’s corestone. It alludes in its speech to not only

the Earth’s wrath and the creation of the stone eaters, but also to the notion that the Earth is

now seeking retribution, where there was once a chance to find a middle ground, so to speak.

Introduced and literalized here is the epitome of what Lovelock and Latour call a vengeful

Gaia, and it shows the dissonance and divide between the necessity of sympoiesis and the

reluctance to adhere to it.

It is necessary to note here, however, that this communicative, vengeful Earth is not

introduced until almost halfway through the trilogy. In this display, humanity being Earth’s

“little enemies” is illustrated for the first time. When Essun attempts to remove a corestone

that has burrowed into a person’s flesh, Essun accidentally speaks to the Earth. Interestingly,

it answers as if it just noticed she is listening to it, and Essun quickly realizes her mistake:

Oh

No

there is hate and

we all do what we have to do

there is anger and

ah; hello, little enemy (TOG loc 2986)

By being Earth’s designated little enemies, all of humanity is in a perpetual battle with the

Earth, who has a perverse sense of enjoyment in its own suffering and the suffering it can

cause in return. Ergo, humanity and Earth are forces to be reckoned with, fighting not for

unknown glory, but mutual destruction. The Earth knows, then, that humanity can hear it, and

is listening.

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It is through rigorous worldbuilding via the introduction of magic in the narrative that

the concept of the Earth as a network is made explicit. As the orogenes connect and align

themselves more and more to the Earth, it is revealed that all things in the trilogy are

sympoietic, as magic, or silver, courses through everything, animate or not: “you suddenly

begin to see in silver. Insects, leaf litter, a spiderweb, even the rocks—all of it now flickers in

wild, veined patterns, their cells and particulates etched out by the lattice that connects them”

(TSS loc 1517; emphasis added). Haraway’s notion of the Earth as “sympoietic,” as opposed

to “autopoietic,” that is, the idea that the Earth does “not make [itself]” (33), is therefore of

high relevance here. As Haraway points out, a sympoietic existence entails that nothing is

made on its own. In short, there are no such things as independent organisms in the narrative.

Moreover, the network that is Earth is, just like the planet itself, broken. Many of the

actants within the network are actively refusing to be part of and rejecting the idea of

symbiosis, and this includes the sentient Earth. Alabaster begs not to be buried underground

when he dies, as he knows that the Earth hoards souls at its core, thus rejecting the natural

state of letting organisms fully die. As a form of reparation for the abuse and theft of its

resources, the Earth “has dragged a million human remnants into its heart . . . and there within

itself, the Earth eats everything they were. This is only fair, it reasons—coldly, with an anger

that still shudders up from the depths to crack the world’s skin and touch off Season after

Season.” (TSS loc 3195). The Earth then, punishes humanity in death by becoming a literal

hell in itself. In doing so, the Earth rejects the sympoiesis, to its very core.

The notion of the Earth as one network, however, has been both ignored and forgotten

by humanity, and in the process, the Earth has been deanimated, in Latour’s sense of the

word. As such, humanity is not aware of the consciousness of the unfathomable enemy they

face. As they depend on the Earth for survival, it also means that it is impossible to fight it.

Part of the reason for this is shown throughout the trilogy in that Fulcrum trained orogenes are

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hampered by their schooling, as they are taught incorrectly how to use their power. This is

exemplified by Essun’s daughter Nassun, when she gains the ability to see in silver much

earlier. As a non-Fulcrum trained orogene, Nassun has not been under-animated in Latourian

terms in her capability as an orogene. As Alabaster explains to Essun, “[t]he Fulcrum’s

methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away

from magic . . . that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny,

never up” (TOG loc 2637). Hence, while O’Donoghue and Houghton broach the topic that

Essun must unlearn, they do so in the context of unlearning only what she believes about

herself and society (28). The need for unlearning and relearning, however, can be extended to

all actants and the view of the Earth, including the Earth itself. When Essun realizes that

magic courses through all things, she is in awe: “what you suddenly understand is this: Magic

derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many

ages ago that it has turned into something else” (TOG loc 4655). Thus, imperative for truce is

remembering and relearning the symbiotic nature of existence.

The forgotten aspect of all actants being part of one network is further illustrated in

how humanity speaks of the Earth. Throughout the trilogy, geological terms are used as

curses, and the Earth is referred to as “evil.” This inherently shows that humanity considers

the Earth as separate from them, while subconsciously using language that makes the Earth

pervasive in all of life. Characters generally uses such phrases as “rusting Earth,” “fire-under-

Earth,” “Earth damn it,” “uncaring Earth” in an offhand way. Hence, in having considered

“Father Earth” as only lore and myth, humanity has been ignoring the truth that has been

staring them in the face all along, and in doing so, rejecting sympoiesis in turn.

Important to note, however, is that it is mostly humans that are in discord with Earth.

Quietly, almost in the background throughout the trilogy, the nonhuman animals are shown to

easily adapt to the Fifth Season. Animals known as khirkusas immediately go from habitual

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domesticated pets to feral killing machines, while animals called boilbugs multiply

exuberantly. Hence, it is only humanity that worries about extinction. In their hubris, mankind

was so reluctant to naturally evolve that they instead took charge of their own progress by

splitting into different subspecies in an effort to master the Earth, subspecies which must now

evolve as best they can. Illustrated here, moreover, is also the connectedness to the Earth that

permeates the narrative, as these animals are truly becoming-with the Earth, adapting joyfully

to its new violent nature.

Additionally, the network of Earth is unstable by necessity, whether or not it is broken

or repaired. Millennia ago, when Hoa flung the moon away and caused what is called the

Shattering, he did it as punishment for those who had enslaved him and were going to “put a

leash on the rusting planet” (TSS loc 4032). He did not, however, actually destroy the world,

even by his own admission. He simply changed it. Hoa points out that when “we say that ‘the

world has ended,’ remember—it is usually a lie. The planet is just fine” (TSS loc 74), which is

an interesting word choice. Fine, in this instance, is relative. The Earth, as its inhabitants,

survive, but neither it nor life on it is in a good state. Fine, then, is an overstatement of epic

proportions, as the Earth is anything but. A Fifth Season is simultaneously something

unnatural on Earth—signified by the very name of them as additional to an established

ecosystem, yet they are made by natural means by both Earth and people. The Shattering is

not a destruction of the Earth, but a massive earthquake. Yet it is an earthquake, something

natural, nevertheless. As Hoa puts it, ending the Seasons “does not mean complete stability.

Plate tectonics will be plate tectonics” (TSS loc 5088). This emphasises the entangled network

that is the Earth, as well as the sympoietic nature of it. The instability of existence is

necessary if it is to exist at all, as the “ongoingness” Haraway highlights needs to include

becoming-with in its continual process. Literalized here, then, is the epitome of Lovelock’s

metastable Gaia, stable in its intrinsic instability.

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Of importance to discuss, therefore, is the recurring motif of parasites in the narrative,

as humanity and Earth alike are referred to as parasites throughout the narrative. This is a

paradoxical state that few characters appear to realize in the trilogy, as no two beings can be

mutually parasitic. Humanity is neither a parasite on the Earth, nor is the Earth a parasite to

humans. Instead, the realization that the relationship is not commensal, but symbiotic, is a fact

neither side can handle very well. While the Earth sees humanity as the enemy and wishes to

kill them, it would also kill any chance of regaining the moon to its orbit in the process.

Interdependence is not something that comes naturally for humanity, or Earth, but it is the

situation that life finds itself in in the novels, no matter how it is viewed. As an allegory to our

present time, this thought is chilling, as our Earth does not seem to have an issue with

interdependence yet. But, as previously mentioned, time is running out.

This notion of refused interdependence is depicted clearly in the trilogy. There exists a

sort of mutualism that is continuously sabotaged, destroyed or ignored by all sides in the war.

The question then becomes not which side is the parasite, but how the sides will come to

realize and admit that the situation has moved far beyond a state where any actant can claim

superiority over any other, for better or worse. The Earth cannot get the moon back by

himself, after all. The cooperation in the trilogy does not only extend to between the human

subspecies, but to between Earth and life on it. the Earth is “fine,” as Hoa puts it, but it is not

happy or content. At the close, happiness would be an overstatement, but perhaps satisfaction

would apply.

Furthermore, it is shown through the geostory that permeates the narrative that there

was once a people living in symbiosis with the planet, but their wisdom was ignored in the

name of profit. Inverted here, is the concept of Latour’s moderns, as the trilogy takes place far

into the future the moderns are a thing of the past. they are the ones who tried to enslave the

Earth and its energy and in doing so created the stone eaters in their conceit. Their abuse of

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the Earth is described as “parasitic” in their pursuit of harvesting magic (TSS loc 4313).

Depicted in the trilogy, then, is the aftermath of what the moderns have wrought. It becomes a

sombre allegory to what will be left if the Anthropocene is not challenged, or re-thought, as in

the case of Haraway’s Chthulucene. Thus, Latour’s notion that the moderns are incapable of

grasping this threat is brought to its extreme in the trilogy, as they committed suicide by

hubris. The mankind in the trilogy’s present day is not afforded the luxury of ignoring the

issue because they cannot grasp it, as the inevitability of their own demise is fast approaching.

It becomes, therefore, imperative that they realize the symbiosis necessary, and reach some

form of truce. This functions as an allegory to our present, in a very sinister sense.

That is to say, that when Iles argues for repairing the Earth, and that the we can

unbreak it (Iles 19), this is antithetical to what I claim the trilogy sets out to do. This idea of

unbreaking the planet or repairing it, ignores the fundamental symbiosis at the heart of

existence. In the trilogy, however, this does come to pass. This unbreaking is exemplified by

humankind getting the moon back to appease the Earth and stop the Seasons. Although

noticeably donut-shaped, the moon is returned, and balance is nonetheless restored. Ergo,

when Iles correlates the fictional “Father Earth” of the trilogy with its real counterpart and

claims that our Earth can be unbroken as well, I contend that this is a too hopeful message to

take away from the trilogy.

As life on Earth has always co-evolved with the Earth itself, and everything is part of

one network, the Earth cannot be unbroken, it can simply continue to change and evolve. To

unbreak something—to heal something—intrinsically gives more agency to certain actants

over others. Moving forward must involve looking forward as well. Consequently, it cannot

be a matter of undoing anything, as that very concept of reversing a broken Earth continues to

put humankind in the centre of responsibility and agency, and in doing so advocating

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anthropocentrism, instead of finding a way to stay with the trouble, as Haraway puts it, and

cultivate response-ability.

Therefore, while The Broken Earth trilogy clearly heals the Earth, this is not a hopeful

message in itself, as it actually becomes an ominous message to our contemporary era. As it is

established that orogenes are the only creatures on Earth with the power of restoring the

moon, the Earth in the trilogy needs humanity. Orogeneity is seemingly a latent gene in

humans, and not strictly hereditary from parent to child. However, in its haste to win and gain

retribution, the Earth incorrectly saw humanity as a homogeneous mass, and named it enemy.

As Hoa explains, “[h]ere is some enemy psychology: The Earth sees no difference between

any of us . . . to it, humanity is humanity” (TSS loc 4326). Thus, where humanity has

deanimated the Earth, the Earth has in its blind rage created a false dichotomy between it and

humanity. It becomes imperative to remember, then, as Hoa is quick to point out “that the

Earth does not fully understand us” (TSS loc 4400). Haraway writes that the Anthropocene

could be viewed as an epoch that “is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for

people and other critters” (100). She points out that “[t]he edge of extinction is not just a

metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species” (Haraway 102).

The threat is not an outside source, like an alien invasion, but part of what is necessary for all

life, the planet. The threat is so sinister, so vast that it is impossible to grasp, yet at the same

time it is completely entangled in survival and potential prosperity.

The trilogy, then, shows a planet were Earth is actually dependant in certain ways on

humanity, while our real world counterpart is very much not, as we arguably do not really

have anything to offer Gaia at this point, except more destruction. The Broken Earth trilogy,

instead acts as a warning call, letting us know that we are dependants on a system that can

survive without us, and not vice versa. All this is to say, that Iles’ reading of the trilogy as an

allegory to the potential healing power if only people work together is missing the point. The

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best we can hope for is to stay with the trouble, and try not to make things worse. The Earth

as a network with all its inhabitants are in a constant state of becoming-with, and thus one that

will never be complete, both in the trilogy and in our time. On the subject of becoming-with, I

now turn to analyse the orogenes and their relationship to the Earth and themselves.

4.2 Embracing The Subhuman—Orogenes in Need of Sympoiesis in The Anthropocene

As established in the summary, the abuse and the separation between human and what society

officially considers nonhuman permeates the orogenes’ lives from the moment their

orogeneity manifests. The official belief is that orogenes are not human, but subhuman,

according to the “Declaration on the Rights of the Orogenically Afflicted” (TFS loc 2995).

This shows the discrepancy of the view of different people and how that works against a

symbiotic existence. This notion of their inferiority in value, together with their power, have

displaced them in the eyes of society, and as a result made them closer to Nature. This,

however, causes a dissonance within them and the network that is Earth that cannot be

resolved if it is not faced. All this is to say that in this section I apply Haraway’s becoming-

with to explore the orogenes in The Broken Earth trilogy, and their peculiar and singular

relationship to the Earth.

As mentioned, geology permeates the narrative, which has the effect of the Earth, and

geostory, always being entangled clearly with the narrative, and this is shown clearly in the

orogenes. Not only are orogene children born with the capacity to still earthquakes

instinctively, but orogeneity is described continuously as mentally “going into the earth” (TFS

loc 1025; 1621; 2367; TOG loc 1518; TSS loc 2083). Orogenes do this when threatened, in

self-defence, or simply to calm themselves. They are therefore inherently tied to the Earth,

intrinsically entwined with it, continually in a state of becoming-with it. Furthermore, as

mentioned, Guardians have the capability of “neutralizing” this power, and when it is done, it

hurts orogenes and makes them feel less than themselves, as Syenite muses, “[i]s this what it’s

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like for stills? Is this all they feel? She has envied their normalcy her whole life, until now”

(TFS loc 3332). The orogenes are in a more symbiotic relationship with the Earth than

society, which has shunned them for the very ability that they abuse in them.

Consequently, in their connection with the Earth, orogenes are physically and

supernaturally tied to its stories. Ingwersen notes that “[t]he Anthropocene is a story, a

convenient narrative that comes with its own preconceptions, focalizations, and intertexts”

(79). This is also one of the main contentions that Haraway has against using the term to

“think with,” as it propagates a myth that “is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the

point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story

with such a bad actor” (Haraway 49). Actor here, of course, also refers to actant. She further

argues that species Man does not make History, and that the concept of History “must give

way to geostories, to Gaia stories” (49). Living and dying in sympoiesis with the planet is

more geostory, then, in Latour’s and Haraway’s meaning of the term, than History. Ergo, we

are all a part of the geostory, and the trilogy shows this metaphorically through the orogenes.

As an allegory for our present time, the motifs of shelter and the inability to hide from

the consequences permeate the narrative. In the trilogy, when Alabaster sets the largest Fifth

Season in motion, the little refuge that humanity has gets wiped out completely. This again

mirrors Haraway’s point in the previous section about how humanity is destroying its own

refuge in the Anthropocene. Humanity in the trilogy has lived for millennia knowing that

nothing is constant, as they live in and with impermanence, which means that they do not

build for longevity, but for the short-term. The comms on the Stillness all know that they can

be wiped out at any moment, and what little refuge their buildings offer is tenuous, yet it is

refuge all the same.

This notion of complete despair and lack of shelter that permeates life on the Stillness

is difficult to grasp, and there is a risk of falling back on traditional storytelling morals. In his

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article, Iles claims that it is those who actively go against stonelore and do not focus on

guarding the gates in the trilogy who survives, writing that “humans can only strive to survive

fifth seasons through comm-building, rather than by competition and exploitation. Most of the

people who live are the ones who can adapt the most flexibly and who cooperate with each

other. They do not erect strong walls against each other” (7). This interpretation, however, is

not only overly generous, as the opposite, in fact, frequently occur in the narrative, but

erroneous, as stonelore never actually says anything about strong walls. Instead, what is

depicted in the trilogy is a fierce competitiveness for survival, where there are no villains

among people, only desperation. When Essun and Hoa joins a fairly secure comm that is

underground, a neighbouring comm try to take it over, as death aboveground is imminent.

Essun and other orogenes annihilate most of the people, in often very inhumane ways. Thus, I

argue, that Iles is looking for a moral in the story that is not to be found, as the

incomprehensibility of existence in an apocalypse cannot lend itself to a simple good/bad

dichotomy. What the trilogy does instead here, is why Grifka-Wander calls it forward fantasy.

As the trilogy refuses to offer any simple answers, rooting for the protagonists when the

antagonist has such just cause problematizes our place in the system. The actions of characters

acting in desperation shows the dissonance to and directly rejects what Haraway writes about

living and dying well in the Chthulucene, namely “to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to

make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and

recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses” (Haraway 101). As

Haraway is speaking of interspecies relations, and therefore against anthropocentrism,

illustrated in the actions of orogenes is an ingrained anthropocentric worldview. Loss and

grief, however, rings true as it permeates the trilogy.

Grief intensifies the shattered existence that ties the orogenes even further to Earth.

The oft-repeated idiom of how “everything changes during a Season” (TFS loc 2365) in the

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trilogy signals the mental state of humanity and Earth, as the Earth is not the only thing

broken in the trilogy. As life on it is an intrinsic part of Earth, the state of humanity and their

interrelationships with all other actants are as well. Interestingly, Haraway notes that just as

becoming-with involves living and dying, it is also necessary to grieve-with. She writes that

grief, “is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must

grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance,

we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think” (Haraway 39). Essun and the Earth

are both in mourning. They are both in a long-outdrawn period of grief and despair. Not

knowing what to do, but knowing that something must be done. Loss of children is paralleled

in the Earth and the main character of Essun, who has lost three children, two to death, and

one to circumstance. Essun must attempt to hide her children’s orogeneity to keep them safe,

as the risk of discovery is shown when her firstborn child—bred on order, but born in

freedom—is found and she kills him rather than let him be put into servitude, in doing so, she

does the more compassionate thing by killing her son. In killing him, she grants him the status

of person, and not tool to be abused.8 This, I contend, is echoed in the Earth and the moon, as

well as the relationship between Earth and all life that live upon it. However, Earth and Essun

are both going about dealing with grief the wrong way, by focusing on retribution, rather than

reconciliation. What Essun should be focusing on is not to exact vengeance on her husband,

but save and regain her daughter. Messimer points out that in the midst of all this death and

killing, “rather than simply giving in to the death that surrounds her in her own family as

everywhere in the Stillness, Essun must keep moving to find her daughter” (155). In other

words, Essun, and by extension orogenes in general and the Earth must persevere.

8 This is of course a reference both to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the character Sethe kills her daughter

rather than let her be a slave. Beloved was in turn inspired by the real historical event where Margaret Garner

killed her child in 1856 for the same reason.

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Grief is constant in all orogenes’ lives in the narrative, and highlights their plight as

well as the need for hope. Alabaster, too has experienced unfathomable loss, and is even

losing himself in sacrificing everything to restore the planet to a habitable place. When Essun

argues with him if humanity is worth saving, she says that the comm they lived in many years

ago “‘would’ve turned on us, too, one day. You know they would have.’” He replies by

simply half-heartedly agreeing but the adding, “‘[t]here was a chance they wouldn’t … Any

chance was worth trying’” (TOG loc 4120). This illustrates that hope is crucial for life to be

worth living, and that an imperative for any sort of peaceful resolution is therefore the return

of hope, both for orogenes and the Earth.

Grief in the trilogy, then, works as a unifier between actants, and hope is a key part of

that in a step towards Haraway’s sympoiesis. At one point, Essun is discussing if there was

any way they could have healed together after Essun killed their son, and Alabaster refuses

her. This causes her to muse that “[t]here is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been

taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and

you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid

attachments altogether, than lose one more thing” (TOG loc 1374). Essun is therefore in the

same state of mind as the Earth itself, that is, hellbent on revenge, for most of the first half of

the trilogy.

Much of the orogenes’ powers are tied to destruction. When Essun leaves her comm to

find her daughter, she does not go quietly. She tries, but is confronted because the comm

members have realised that she is an orogene. She kills many of the guards, including those

that she could have spared. The narrator says then that “[y]ou just can’t help acknowledging

the irony of the whole thing. Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right. Stupid,

stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you” (TFS loc 764). As Nature is volatile and

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destructive for humanity during the Seasons, the orogenes calamitous capabilities are a sign of

their connection to the Earth, for better or worse.

Destruction is, therefore, an intrinsic part of orogenes, and parallels them to the Earth

as makers and destroyers. This is exemplified clearly when the Earth notices Nassun, and she

notices it right back: “Earth wants to kill her. But remember, too: Nassun wants it just as

dead” (TSS loc 3166). Vengeance as a strategy is not feasible, however, as it is not productive

in the narrative. As orogenes are part of the network, vengeance becomes synonymous with

self-destruction. Nassun is driven by an individualistic need for someone or something to pay

for the pain she has been through. Hence, despite being more connected and aware of the

network she is a part of, she cannot bring herself to admit the need for sympoiesis, much like

the Earth itself. This devastating parallel between orogenes and Earth is further shown in

stonelore. An arctic proverb reads, “Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and

master of all” (TFS loc 1920). That is, the cataclysm that is the Fifth Seasons is paralleled in

the power of the orogenes. As the narrative progresses and the inconsistency of stonelore is

revealed, however, this gets upended.

While the orogenes’ subhuman status is established officially, the degree of inhumane

treatment they are subjected to is kept from them. During the start of their mission, Alabaster

shows Syenite what the Fulcrum is capable of. He shows her the truth of the node

maintainers, which are orogenes that are stationed at certain intervals to keep areas stable. In

actuality, though, node maintainers are “lobotomized” children distilled only to their orogene

instinct, strapped to wire chairs for their entire lives, while their bodies atrophies and they live

in agony. This shows how the Stillness views orogenes, and the reason they are not all treated

this way is only because, as Alabaster puts it, “we’re more versatile, more useful, if we

control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a

bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga” (TFS loc 1836).

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Murphey points out that “it is the elaborate dehumanization of the enslaved by the enslavers”

that causes slavery to not only succeed, but exist in the first place (110). This elaborate

dehumanisation is also shown in Syenite’s reaction to the idea of essentially becoming a

broodmare for the Fulcrum. She convinces herself that it is worth it, as “this is what it means

to be civilized—doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all. And it’s

not like she gains no benefit from this . . . Better missions, longer leave, more say in her own

life. That’s worth it. Earthfire yes, it’s worth it” (TFS loc 971). Thus, the subhumanity of the

orogenes is both internalized and not, as it is justified as an act of survival.

Furthermore, for orogenes love is often tied together with abuse. Essun as a child

learns to love her abuser, Schaffa, something her daughter Nassun does too. While Schaffa

appears kind and loving, one of the first things he does is break Damaya’s hand. The abuse

she experiences at the hands of Schaffa creates conflict in her, as he is the only one alive who

loves her, despite her monstrosity: “[i]t isn’t right that she loves him, but many things in the

world are not right” (TFS loc 4268). This emphasises the unstable position of orogenes that

permeates their entire lives, as well as their nonhuman status in society. It is also eventually

revealed that Essun also abused Nassun, by doing to her what Schaffa did to Essun as a

child—break her hand. Thus, the cycle of abuse and the repetitiveness of it that chronicles

humankind's relationship with the Earth, is also present in inter-human relations. Nothing is

certain in the instability of life in the Stillness, as love as something positive is in part a luxury

not afforded when survival is constantly threatened, and all love is not something inherently

good, in the trilogy. This is shown when Schaffa makes clear that while he does love both

Essun and Nassun, he still hurts them. His reaction to watching Essun kill her own child

rather than let him be enslaved, for example, shows that love can be toxic and deranged, as he

references the child’s fate as a node maintainer: “Schaffa saw her hand on the child’s face,

covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. Did she not know that Schaffa would

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love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair”

(TOG loc 502). As the Earth in its vengeance has literally infected the minds of the

Guardians, it has corrupted what love is in the trilogy, and in extension disrupted what is

considered human.

While the divide between human and nonhuman becomes more and more blurred as

the narrative progresses, it is important to note that it is already blurred at the start of the

story. Everything changes during a Season; everything also gets twisted during a Season. For

instance, when the Season hits, certain social faux pas are discarded as everyone knows that

resorting to cannibalism is only a matter of time, and that it is a necessity, and therefore not

taboo. Consequently, the line between human and food, that is, nonhuman, is already

obliterated by not giving flesh any irreverent value in death. Surviving on a planet hellbent on

destroying mankind shows the perseverance of humanity in the stills and orogenes, yet also its

obtuseness, as mere survival has become the only goal, leading to humanity not searching for

a solution to their current situation, but always trying to catch up. Latour argues that the

meaning of “global warming” is that “through a surprising inversion of background and

foreground, it is human history that has become frozen and natural history that is taking on a

frenetic pace” (“Agency” 12). That is, humanity has become stagnant where nature is now

anything but. In the trilogy, this can be seen to a heightened extent in the orogenes’ constant

state of being reactive as opposed to active, or proactive, at the start of the trilogy. Hence, as

humanity’s refusal to adapt as of yet shows in the history of the world in the trilogy, they are

decentred and forced out of their own subjectivity, becoming only metaphorical vermin in the

eyes of the Earth. By ignoring the agency of everything else, and how humanity is part of a

network from which they cannot be extracted, they are in a state of ceaseless collapse. The

instability constant in the trilogy extends to socially twisted need for survival by showing that

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only stories and memory have value, not flesh. While stonelore cautions, “[p]ut no price on

flesh” (TFS loc 4647), Essun knows that flesh becomes valuable during a Season.

It is also shown that stonelore is much more malleable than previously believed,

further showing the blurred instability of boundaries and rules in the trilogy. This instability

includes the past, as the recording of history has been corrupted. Stonelore is incomplete and

shrouded in mystery, controlled and manipulated by the Fulcrum. Because of the unstable

state in the trilogy, society ostensibly follows stonelore without hesitation. It is stonelore that

dictates the hierarchies of society, that literally sets in stone the belief that orogenes are evil.

Alabaster and Syenite have the following exchange about stonelore:

‘We could try letting orogenes run things.’

She almost laughs. ‘That would last for about ten minutes before every Guardian in

the Stillness shows up to lynch us, with half the continent in tow to watch and cheer.’

‘They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born

evil—some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.’

‘Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.’

‘Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.’ (TFS loc 1585)

Stonelore continually changes, and there are indications that it has been frequently altered to

fit whatever era and the beliefs of those in charge. Thus, the permutability of stone is present

in the stonelore tablets as well. This is, furthermore, something that previous scholars have

overlooked. O’Donoghue and Houghton, for instance, claim that the stonelore tablets and

therefore rules of society are “stratified, glorified, [and] calcified” (15), and that “the laws are

literally set in stone” (24). While this is certainly the belief at the outset of the narrative, the

fact that this turns out to be a lie is of utmost importance to understanding the power

structures in the trilogy. That something that is literally set in stone is not actually

unchangeable, shows the instability of the situation, and the uncertainty of what is true.

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Throughout the trilogy, then, it is established that most characters go against stonelore

almost subconsciously, which becomes a stronger and more important motif as the events

unfold. It signifies that they instinctively know that stonelore is wrong, yet they do not realize

this for themselves. This creates a paradox within all characters, as they follow rules and

hierarchies that they believe in, yet not. The orogenes know they are not human, yet know that

they are human simultaneously.

Moving on from the theme of rules but staying on the topic of destruction, an additional

motif is that of parenthood, and all its failings. In Jemisin’s trilogy, humanity is poignantly

motherless. Further, they are not the apple of creations eye, but a thorn in its side. As the

moon is the child of the Earth, in The Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is markedly not. Life

itself, in the trilogy was mere “happenstance,” that the Earth “was pleased and fascinated by”

(TFS loc 4892). O’Donoghue and Houghton also write that Jemisin problematizes the

idealization of motherhood, as in the trilogy, “motherhood is part of the dystopian narrative”

(31). This notion, I argue, can be extended not only to parenthood overall, but also to the

concept of Earth as maker and destroyer.

When Alabaster tells Essun that the Earth is alive shortly after they have first met,

Essun replies and ponders:

‘’you’re speaking as if it, the planet, is real. Alive, I mean. Aware. All that stuff about

Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world’ …

And the world is just shit. You understand this now, after two dead children and the

repeated destruction of your life. There’s no need to imagine the planet as some

malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to

be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion (TOG loc 2150)

This shows again the forced passivity that the orogenes have internalized as to not know that

they too are a force to be reckoned with, and the complacency in the belief that life is just

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suffering until it is over. It also shows the complicity of humanity in being taught to

deanimate the Earth without questioning it. This is referenced by O’Donoghue and Houghton

as well, as they state that Essun “must unlearn what she has been taught is inevitable about

herself and her society” (28). Thus, the agency and the reanimation that the Earth is regaining

is not clear from the start, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. In the Latourian sense then,

Earth is now a force to be reckoned with in a different way than previously believed.

The trilogy shows an inversion of Margulis’ notion that the Earth takes care of life on it,

as well as a confirmation to Stengers’ updated Gaia Hypothesis by making it literal that the

Earth is trying to kill humanity. In this, it shows that the rhetoric of parenthood is both

insufficient and paradoxical with a symbiotic lens in mind. This is, then, another binary set

that the trilogy disrupts. The parent/child relationship with which the relationship with the

planet is often viewed, is just another way of deferring blame, and responsibility, and is thus

anti-symbiotic. In Haraway’s response-ability and sympoiesis, all actants are wrapped up in

each other and together in a network. Response-ability is something that is cultivated and

inescapably collective. The Earth makes humanity, but humanity in turn also makes Earth. By

viewing Gaia as mother—or in this case the Earth as father—humanity ignores its own

agency and power, to detrimental results. Therefore, by being forcibly decentred by the life

giver that is Earth, humanity is faltering. Not only is it in an unstable state of survival, but it

lacks purpose and direction.

In the trilogy, orogenes are referred to as “tools,” “weapons,” and “monsters,”

signifying their subhuman status to most characters. If the characters are to remain agents of

their own lives, they need to find a way to simultaneously reject and embrace these notions, as

the lines are blurred. As Essun is turning bit by bit to stone, sacrificing more of herself, she

worries that she is beginning to feel less emotions and that this will lead to her “becoming

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nothing but the weapon everyone keeps trying to make of [her]” (TSS loc 2885). Essun

turning to stone limb by limb shows that she is truly and literally becoming-with the Earth.

Becoming-with in the trilogy has multiple levels, as it is at times literal, at times

emotional, and other times metaphorical. At the beginning of The Obelisk Gate, Hoa muses

that he is telling the story wrong, because “a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel

the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you” (TOG loc 15). He goes on to explain that

not only are we the other people we encounter, but also the places and events that shape us.

This is pointed out by Ingerwersen as a literalized version of Haraway’s becoming-with, and

thus “a celebration of oddkinship among monstrous outcasts . . . uncontainable by myths of

bounded personhood” (Ingwersen 83). Literalized in this version of subjectivity is also the

antidote to individualism, as the boundaries are blurred between not only Nature/Society and

Human/Nonhuman but also object/subject. Ingwersen, however, continues to argue that Essun

and Nassun “learn that survival is contingent on collaboration, trust, and reciprocal response-

abilities” (83). I claim, instead, that for Essun, it is actually the opposite that she learns, as it is

not survival that is the ultimate becoming-with for her, but her decision to sacrifice herself for

her daughter, and in extension for something greater than herself.

It is therefore imperative for both orogenes and Earth to embrace that which makes

them apart and reviled by society, and come to some form of armistice. Agency is near

impossible, if all it means is to allow yourself to be used. This is what both Essun and Father

Earth has come to realise. An agent cannot be passive by its very definition. Thus, it is not a

question of allowing anything, but one of choosing to act. By embracing her own status as

nonhuman, Essun gains her own agency. To be apart from what categorizes the oppressors is

not something negative. The Earth is evil in the eyes of humanity, but this opinion goes both

ways, and it is evil for a good reason. In embracing its own power, the Earth is also great. By

showing the life that lives upon its surface its true power, it regained that power, and became

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a force to be reckoned with. Thus, truce is central to progress in the narrative. The war,

Alabaster explains, has three sides. The first wants people dead, the second wants people

neutralized, that is, made into stone eaters. The third option, however, is to:

Give Father Earth back his lost child and perhaps his wrath will be appeased. That’s

the third faction, then: those who want a truce, people and Father Earth agreeing to

tolerate one another, even if it means creating the Rift and killing millions in the

process. Peaceful coexistence by any means necessary. (TOG loc 4335)

It is this notion of coexistence that becomes imperative, yet as noted by Essun, peace does not

mean there will be an end to suffering, nor that suffering is not an intrinsic aspect of peace in

the Stillness. Truce does not mean camaraderie, only the discontinuing of war. On the topic of

endless suffering and necessary coexistence, I now turn to analyse the stone eaters, and their

relationship to existence itself.

4.3 Failed Posthumans—Stone Eaters and Orogenes in Relation to Each Other

When it comes to the stone eaters, much of the references to geology that is metaphorical

even within the narrative becomes abruptly literal. For instance, where orogenes mentally “go

into the Earth,” for instance, stone eaters do so physically—and they can take people with

them, thus blurring the lines of what constitutes flesh. The permutability of stone mentioned

with regards to stonelore becomes physically manifested here as well. The stone eaters

therefore work as an extreme metaphor for showing the absurdity of binary boundaries

already introduced through the orogenes. Ingwersen notes that “[t]he permeability of this

boundary is indicative of the modes of kinship and transcorporeality that ultimately serve to

heal Jemisin’s wounded subjectivities. Characters are not stable but—like the planet— evolve

in a process of perpetual transformation” (83). Ingwersen’s point here is that the mere

existence of stone eaters in the trilogy shows the instability and uncertainty of the divide

between humanity and nature, as their flesh is permutable, that is, transcorporeal. By creating

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the stone eaters, the Earth forced them to become-with the Earth itself. It is in this integral

instability that orogenes and stone eaters find not only strength, but a middle ground, as they

begin to see the symbiosis of a sympoietic existence with each other. Accordingly, in this

section I implement Latour’s work on agency and actant, as well as Haraway’s concepts that

form her Chthulucene to examine the stone eaters, in their relationship to both orogenes and

the Earth, and argue that they function as a metaphor for co-evolving while simultaneously

illustrating the how ingrained anthropocentrism is in the narrative.

The possibility in a more collective existence is shown clearly but subtly in all more-

than-human actants’ respective relationship between each other and to the other subspecies.

At the start of the trilogy, Alabaster feels a clear disgust at the sight of the stone eater

Antimony’s movement, as he “has grown used to it, but even so, he does not look at her. He

does not want revulsion to spoil the moment” (TFS loc 80). However, to cause the Season, he

has to align himself with the magic that permeates Earth. He has to become-with the Earth,

and the steep price for mixing orogeneity and magic is that he begins to turn to stone limb by

limb, stone which Antimony eats. Alabaster is slowly dying while being eaten alive. This,

paradoxically, alters his relationship Antimony for the better. In realising what they can do for

each other, and what they can gain from each other, Alabaster eventually finds solace in their

relationship, as she sings to him, and supports him both emotionally and physically:

“Antimony has moved fully into the nest with him these days, and you rarely see her in any

pose other than “living chair” for him—kneeling, legs spread, her hands braced on her thighs.

Alabaster rests against her” (TOG loc 4110). I claim that this shows that interspecies

sympoietic existence, if embraced, can lead to belonging of a new sort.

Compare, for instance, Essun’s evolving relationship with a stone eater, Hoa. While

she has had much less time to grow used to stone eaters than Alabaster has, she is quick to not

only accept the oddness of their existence, but also never shows revulsion towards them.

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Alabaster has a contentious relationship Antimony based on her acts towards him, while

Essun has a compassionate one because of Hoa’s approach to her. When Hoa is in the shape

of a young boy, Essun notices that there is something off about him, as he does not breathe or

eat, but Essun has “a lot of experience with children who are secretly monsters” (TFS loc

2425). When Hoa returns to his actual form as an adult stone eater, Essun is unnerved by his

presence and the way he moves and looks, but quickly comes to terms with it because Hoa is

“watching you the way he always used to, all eyes and hope. Should it really matter that the

eyes are so strange now?” (TOG loc 3642). She also finds comfort with him, much like

Alabaster did with Antimony, even when the rest of the comm she is traveling with fear him

and he spends most of his time in the Earth:

It’s impossible not to notice the mountain lurking within the stone just behind you.

You don’t call him out because the other people of Castrima are leery of Hoa. He’s the

only stone eater still around, and they remember that stone eaters are not neutral,

harmless parties. You do reach back and pat the wall with your one hand, however.

The mountain stirs a little, and you feel something—a hard nudge—against the small

of your back. Message received and returned (TSS loc 3490)

Essun’s relationship with Hoa begins on a much more common ground than Alabaster’s and

Antimony’s does. Thus, Essun is in a much more promising position to both accept beings she

does not understand and show compassion towards them from the beginning. This shows

what Messimer calls “radical empathy” (154), and I argue that while Alabaster shows

empathy in spades, it does not have the time to reach the status of radical to the extent Essun’s

empathy does, as his relationship with stone eaters had a much more contentious beginning.

The different reactions to stone eaters that Essun and Alabaster has, and their feelings

towards them, highlights the fact that stone eaters are individuals just as orogenes are. When it

is revealed that there is a war waging with more than two sides, the heterogeneity of the stone

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eaters becomes clear. The commleader tries to lump them and their goals together, to which

Hoa replies, “‘[n]ot ‘stone eaters.’ Not all of us want the same thing. Some like things as they

are. Some even want to make the world better… though not all agree on what that means.’

Instantly his posture changes—hands out, palms up, shoulders lifted in a What can you do?

gesture. ‘We’re people’” (TOG loc 3774). This shows not only the need for cooperation

between subspecies, but also the complexity and agency within every actant involved.

When Hoa transforms to his real actual stone eater body, it further foregrounds how

unstable the definition of human is in the narrative. Stone eaters were human once, and

according to Alabaster it is not what their flesh is made of that sets them apart from people,

but that being alive for thousands of years messes with the mind: “‘I think it’s that no one can

live that long and not become something entirely alien’” (TOG loc 2176). Essun then ponders,

“you can think of Hoa in that moment. Being fascinated by soap. Curling against you to sleep.

His sorrow, when you stopped treating him like a human being. He’d been trying so hard.

Doing his best. Failing in the end” (TOG loc 2176). Earlier, when Essun realizes that Hoa is

protecting her, and has been for some time, her compassion also comes through: “[s]o few

have ever tried to protect you, in your life. It’s impulse that makes you lift a hand and stroke it

over his weird white hair. He blinks. Something comes into his eyes that is anything but

inhuman” (TOG loc 481). This illustrates both that the boundaries are already blurred to what

makes a human, and that the notion of humanity as a category to belong to in itself is

arbitrary, in a posthuman sense. When Hoa finally shows his true nature as not an odd-looking

child, but an adult stone eater—albeit “racially nonsensical” (TOG loc 3628)—he and Essun

has the following exchange:

‘Ah, yes. Alabaster said all of you were human. Once, anyway.’

There is a moment of silence. ‘Are you human?’

At this, you cannot help but laugh once. ‘Officially? No.’

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‘Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?’

‘Human.’

‘Then so am I.’

He stands steaming between the halves of a giant rock from which he just hatched.

‘Uh, not anymore.’

‘Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?’ (TOG loc

3639)

This conversation between the two highlights two seemingly unintentional paradoxical

notions. On the one hand, that the belief that humans are only human in the eye of the

beholder is oversimplifying the concept of humanity. Consequently, it is very important here

to note that Essun’s eventual reaction to all of this is to continue to treat Hoa as a person,

while not shying away from what makes him different: “[s]o you sigh and also let go of the

part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something

other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though

he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something

to you” (TOG loc 3652). This shows that Essun is capable of co-evolving and living

symbiotically in much the same way as Alabaster was, albeit through a different journey. The

weary showing of compassion even for beings she does not understand is one of the reasons

that Essun manages to see the sympoiesis between species.

One the other hand, however, the exchange between Essun and Hoa shows the

erroneous view they both have of worth as it relates to the concept of human. It is in this

desire to be considered, and to consider themselves human, that both orogenes and stone

eaters fail to consider why this matters. It shows that society in the Stillness still adhere to an

anthropocentric worldview, as all subspecies of humanity desperately wants to be human

above all else, never stopping to consider that that line of thinking is the very reason for the

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oppression in the first place. To truly change the status quo, orogenes and stone eaters should

instead embrace their nonhumanity, and look beyond such binary categories.

The transient properties of flesh that permeates the narrative is not just applicable to

life and death. When Essun begins to turn to stone whenever she uses her powers, she soon

accepts it, because her relationship with Hoa is not built on necessity, but mutual respect. The

reach across party lines and the collectivism that Essun learns to defend and fight for, is what

is necessary to succeed. This notion of the blurred lines between flesh and Earth act as another

steppingstone to the ultimate goal of embracing the sympoiesis of existence in the trilogy, of

being a part of a symbiotic system with Earth. Thus, it is through their shared more-than-

human yet not officially human status that they learn this, and through which they are capable

of seeing Earth as an equal actant, and by extension save humanity as a whole.

Highlighting the agency of all actants in the narrative further, Hoa confesses that he

was once one of the stone eaters seeking vengeance against the Earth for turning them into

stone eaters. He then explains, “but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist

without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and

destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times. That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted

to win” (TOG loc 1003). This shows the destructive status quo, and the incentive for a

peaceful resolution, as well as the need for a realization of the symbiotic nature in the

relationship between human and nonhuman. Furthermore, the thought that we cannot be

permitted to win is chilling when seen as an allegory to our current real situation. On that

cheerful note, I move to discuss the issues surrounding dying in the trilogy.

4.4 The Issue With Living and Temporarily Dying on a Broken Earth

Throughout the trilogy, there is a recurrent theme of mercy, and to which actants it pertains,

and to which it does not. It is illustrated that the notion of being granted mercy needs to widen

significantly, for any sort of peace to have an iota of chance to succeed. Essun’s belief about

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her nonhuman status is therefore deeply ingrained in her. When discussing what to do with

the node maintainers, abused in the name of keeping the Earth still, a person asks Essun if the

doctors watching them will mercy kill them, at which point Hoa points out that “[y]ou resist

the urge to say, Mercy is for people. That way of thinking needs to die, even if you’re thinking

it in bitterness” (TSS loc 3439). Essun is changing into a more cooperative person, but this

realization is hard-won.

In the end, by showing herself as an agent and actively surrendering, Essun embraces

the trouble of living and dying in and on a broken Earth. Furthermore, Essun does not die

reluctantly, but arguably the happiest she has ever been. Before she sets off on her final

journey, she even notes this herself: “[w]hen have you ever left a place this way—openly,

nonviolently, amid laughter? It feels … you don’t know how it feels. Good? You don’t know

what to do with that” (TSS loc 4492). This means that it is the strength of a community, of

realizing the need for working together and the strength and purpose this creates that is the

key for humanity’s survival. Essun’s strength is further illustrated when she travels through

the Earth on her way to restore the moon: “[y]ou keep [your eyes] open, though, as the world

goes dark and strange. You feel no fear. You are not alone” (TSS loc 4536). Hence, it is in

embracing the notion of collectivism that Essun is capable of seeing the bigger picture, of the

importance of not only living, but dying, in response-ability on Earth.

Therefore, when Essun realizes that the right choice is to stop fighting, in an effort to

save her daughter’s life, she also finally chooses death. She dies smiling, filled with love for

her daughter: “more than anything else, you want this last child of yours to live … and so you

make a choice. To keep fighting will kill you both. The only way to win, then, is not to fight

anymore.” (TSS loc 4984). Hence, when Essun accepts death, it is in a spirit of collectivism,

as she sacrifices herself in the hope that her daughter sees the bigger picture, and learns what

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it means to show mercy as an active choice. Essun becomes-with death as her final show of

power.

Unfortunately, however, in the final moments of the trilogy, Essun’s sacrifice to save

life on Earth gets oddly negated, in two ways. First, Essun is transformed into a stone eater by

Hoa. Not only does this remove and repudiate her sacrifice, but in becoming immortal she

does not actually die in response-ability, in Haraway’s meaning of the term. Secondly, Essun

awakes not only as a stone eater, but with all her memories and identity retained, even in

complete physical overhaul.

Hence, when Essun is transformed into a stone eater, she remains herself, despite the

fact that this goes against what is established with regards to what becoming a stone eater

entails in the narrative. It usually takes millennia for a new formed stone eater to remember

who they once were, if they remember at all. The creation of the stone eaters was a

punishment by the Earth, after all. As a stone eater explains, “‘[u]ntil the Earth dies, I live,

Nassun. That was its punishment for us: We became a part of it, chained fate to fate” (TSS loc

3984-85). Thus, becoming a stone eater is gaining immortality, but usually a death of a

subjectivity all the same. This is made explicit in the narrative as Alabaster has gone through

this transformation already. Messimer notes that “[h]umanity must live with and inside its

environment, made intimate and no longer separate from humans” (140). This is shown in an

allegorical way by both Essun and Alabaster becoming stone eaters in death, and how

differently they take to it. When Essun glimpses what Alabaster has become now, he is not

Alabaster any longer: “its eyes are black . . . they watch you with only faint recognition, with

a puzzled flicker of something that might be (but should not be) memory” (TOG loc 4860).

Hoa later confirms this by saying, “‘[t]he lattice doesn’t always form perfectly, Essun,’ he

says. The tone is gentle. ‘Even when it does, there is always … loss of data … we are fragile

at the beginning, like all new creatures. It takes centuries for us, the who of us, to … cool’

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(TSS loc 3639). Hence, Alabaster at least, it could be argued, is now reborn completely. That

is, he must rebuild himself from scratch, with no guarantee if he will ever truly remember

who he was. This lends some credence to the cost that the orogenes have symbolically had to

bear to unbreak the Earth, but the narrative does not offer Essun the same weight in her

journey, instead opting for a literal happily ever after.

Therefore, despite literally becoming of the Earth, Essun’s fate lacks sympoiesis.

While physically made-with, her fate metaphorically rejects the natural end needed to achieve

it fully. As Haraway states, “generative flourishing cannot grow from myths of immortality or

failure to become-with the dead and the extinct” (101). It does, however, erase the

human/nonhuman divide that society has already considered her to be a part of in her former

life as an orogene. When she finally dies, Hoa starts by saying that “YOU ARE DEAD. BUT

NOT you” (TSS loc 5012). Her body might have died, but flesh is transient and permutable, as

established by the very existence of stone eaters, who were once mortal but transformed, and

by the orogenes powers, which include turning people to crystals, as well as certain orogenes’

flesh turning to stone. Hoa realizes that Essun is still Essun when she proclaims that she wants

to make the world better: “I have never regretted more my inability to leap into the air and

whoop for joy …You look amused. It’s you. It’s truly you” (TSS loc 5138). What Hoa wants

in turn is only to be with Essun:

‘Because that is how one survives eternity,’ I say, ‘or even a few years. Friends.

Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.’

…

‘Friends, family,’ you say. ‘Which am I, to you?’

‘Both and more. We are beyond such things.’ (TSS loc 5138)

Essun’s ability to hold on to her former identity, illustrates that immortality is no longer a

punishment by the Earth, but an olive branch. For collectivism to work, it needs to not only

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include all of humanity, or humanity and all other living “nonhuman” creatures on the Earth,

but the Earth itself—signified by the fact that she and Hoa are now beyond such things. Being

beyond such things further signify that they are beyond boundaries and binaries, becoming-

with each other, literally in their permutable state as stone eaters, and metaphorically in that

Essun was made by Hoa. As such, they are both themselves, each other, and Earth,

concurrently and inseparably.

Arguably, however, Hoa is selfish in his decision to remake Essun, and this decision

reinforces an odd individualistic outlook in the narrative. When the moon is restored, the

Earth also releases the souls it has hoarded at its core. Hoa points out that he does not know

what happens to souls after death, but that it must be better than the alternative. On an epic

scale, then, the symbiosis of the network is restored, while on a personal one, it remains

shattered. The Earth releases the souls it has accumulated in the name of peace, thus accepting

sympoiesis. However, as mentioned, Hoa fails to accept this, as he in his selfishness remakes

Essun completely. Instead, Hoa has condemned Essun to share his fate.

On a more positive note, by becoming a stone eater, Essun accepts and includes the

Earth in the community, and the Earth itself accepts all life on it as no longer its enemies, but

its allies. The network that is Earth is restored to its natural unstable equilibrium, and since

the obelisks are thrown in as “a surety of good faith” (TSS loc 5065), the communal thought

process at the core of the truce is clear. To borrow Lovelock’s phrase, the Earth in the trilogy

regains its “metastable” state. Peace was not found peacefully, but by humanity, here

represented by Essun and Nassun, who changes course based on her mother’s sacrifice,

realizing that there is a need for symbiosis, and that showing humility is not an act of

weakness, but agency in itself.

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5. Reanimation—What Speculative Literature Can Do

I now return to the possibility inherent in literature as discussed in the theory section. The

“moderns,” by Latour’s definition, are not equipped to deal with events on such a vast scale as

climate change, as they lack the mental and emotional capacities needed to do so (“Agency”

1). Further, they separated humans from Nature to such an extent that it effectively

deanimated a planet into a mere object, when it is anything but. This separability affected all

part of society, and therefore naturally bled into literature as well. Thus, the Earth as

something inanimate became truth in fiction, and especially realist fiction, and the climate

crisis was deemed too incomprehensible to feature in it. Ghosh points out the irony of this

exclusion within realist fiction: “the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are

actually a concealment of the real” (loc 313). That is, if a realist novel would deal with

climate change, it would, “court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long

been in residence” (loc 324). As previously mentioned, geostory is tied to storytelling as a

consequence of the Earth being “fully articulated and active” (“Agency” 13). To situate these

notions in relation to the trilogy, I analyse the concept of myth and worldbuilding, and how

these work in synchronicity to elicit comparisons to our present day.

It is through worldbuilding that the trilogy achieves political relevance, as the motif of

myth in the narrative is inherently allegorical. It is therefore not an accident that Hoa’s fall

from the sky back to Earth, while being turned into stone—after committing the original sin,

no less—is reminiscent of many legendary tales, not only the biblical fall of Lucifer, but also,

for instance, Icarus of Greek mythology. This adds to the trilogy’s epic scale, which taken

together with Ghosh’s point of realism shows the relevance of myth in the story. Ghosh points

out that any sort of epic scale is not welcome in serious literature: “no one will speak of how

the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years:

connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the

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delimited horizon of a novel” (loc 858). We live in interesting times, yes, but that currently

also means that our present times are historical, and thus epic, in a sense. Climate change is

paradoxically concurrently quotidian and monumental. Consequently, the epic myths retold in

the narrative has allegorical connotations aplenty.

The emphasis of myth in the narrative shows the closeness of geostory in our present

day. As Grifka-Wander points out, myth was something inherently associated with fantasy to

Suvin, and therefore negative because in meant it was antithetical to progress. For Suvin,

myth, and by association fantasy, was “culturally meaningful, perhaps, but containing little

political content and almost no propulsion toward future change. It [was] mostly irrelevant

to real life” (Grifka-Wander 71). This is, however, a very “modern” outlook on the concept of

stories. Myths are an intrinsic part of worldmaking, both in this narrative, and in real life.

Myths are therefore both history, or geostory, and highly political, as the past always

informs the present and the future. As shown, in the trilogy characters go from disregarding

the myths of their world in a flippant manner, to realizing and acknowledging the truth that is

being told through these stories. For instance, Walter points out that it is myth as it relates to

“Father Earth” in the narrative that causes the Earth to be treated similarly to a god: “self-

conscious, motivated and planning; an active agent in the story with some human traits, but

distinctly categorised as not-human by means of other, non-human traits” (Walter 16). This

illustrates that myth in the narrative as well as in our present is inescapable, as myth informs

much of our own reality as well.

It is therefore in this worldbuilding in the trilogy that the need for interrogation of our

place in the network that is Earth is made clear. Haraway calls the Anthropocene a time “of

unprecedented looking away” (35). In other words, in our reluctance to face the

incomprehensible, we instead chose to ignore it, to our own detriment. She urges, as an

antidote, the need for thinking, as the opposite of thinking is thoughtlessness, and in

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thoughtlessness, nothing matters (36). Haraway points out that “it matters what stories we tell

to tell other stories with” (12). That is, it is not enough to simply state the facts, but the form

of delivery matters an equal amount. It becomes a matter of changing even the way we think

about things, as thinking is a factor, not just an element. This means that for sense making to

make sense of our current time, the medium in which the stories and issues are dealt with

matter. Thus, it is striking that genres such as cli-fi are continuing to grow. Of note here is

what Trexler claims: that climate fiction can interrogate what life entails in the Anthropocene

(27). As Ghosh’s argument makes clear, literature within the speculative genres is more adept

at confronting the absurd reality of the current climate crisis, and is therefore, in fact, more

realist than most so called realist novels today. He points to the notion of Nature now being

“too powerful” to not fear, and states that climate events are proof of the intrinsic and the

“uncanny intimacy” between human and nonhuman (loc 447).

It matters therefore, that Jemisin, through an allegory to real human oppression

manages to draw these parallels to the Earth and the treatment of it as well. Grifka-Wander

echoes this sentiment as well, when she writes that “fantasy stories are meaningful, and also

draw attention to how we make meaning” (76). This suitability is exemplified in both the

trilogy’s allegorical mode, and its speculative presentation. Because of the worldbuilding

inherent in the genre, thoughtlessness is impossible, while it simultaneously becomes possible

to face the inconceivable, as it is “fantasy,” first and foremost, in every sense of the word. It is

in thinking allegorically that thinking even becomes possible. Hence, I contend, that The

Broken Earth trilogy is exceptionally suited for telling these stories, both as it pertains to

genre, and subject matter.

Through using and adapting such well-trodden ground as the concept of “magic” and

basing it in the inherently natural, that is, energy, the trilogy shows not only that the Earth is

alive, but that it and all life on it is part of one system. When Grifka-Wander argues for

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“forward fantasy,” she emphasizes the need for complex worldbuilding as a tool to cause the

reader to critically engage with their contemporary moment. Fantasy worldbuilding, she

writes, “through social construction, explanation of the cultures, geography, resources, and so

on, assumes the truth-quality of a hard science fiction story” (Grifka-Wander 74). She writes

that by complicating the depictions of slavery and racism, Jemisin directly responds to today’s

society “where racist forms of oppression persist even while most Americans agree that

racism is unforgiveable” (78). To accomplish this, Jemisin pushes farther and provides “new

subjectivities” (78) in the subspecies for the reader to learn from by muddling the ordinary

simple metaphor of good versus bad as it is “no longer sufficiently estranging or radical” (78).

I claim that these new subjectivities extend to nonhuman agents as well in the Earth.

Furthermore, the trilogy does not simply give the Earth sentience, but drives home the

inherent agency by making it emotional, and thus, highly subjective. When Latour writes that

it is not simply a case of combining or reconciling nature with society but that the role of

distributing agency until “we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of

object and subject” (“Agency” 15), this is shown in the emotive Earth in the trilogy.

Interestingly, Jemisin uses the word “heart” when describing the Earth’s core, depicting it as

the “wonder that is the world’s unfettered heart, it already blazes before her: a silver sun

underground, so bright that she must squint” (TSS loc 3145). This signifies not only the

Earth’s subjectivity, but its agency in that it too is ruled not by rationality, but by emotion,

and that this is not a bad thing, but in actuality, the only way towards progress. As mentioned,

Latour uses the term “collective” to designate the associations between human and nonhuman

actants (Modern loc 144). “Father Earth” is an actant needing communion, longing for a

collective, but believing it too late for any sort of cooperation to occur. The Earth needs life to

sustain itself. For better or worse, much of that life is derived from humanity. Because what is

at the heart of Earth is energy that turns to magic which in turn animates everything on the

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planet, life is inescapable for “Father Earth.” He cannot abandon life, even if He wants to.

Life is thus intrinsically tied to the Earth’s purpose in the trilogy. Consequently, this is viewed

as a parasitic relationship from both sides, as mutual nemeses, needs to change, to be realized

as the symbiotic relationship it is, and act accordingly.

The Broken Earth trilogy, I proclaim, reanimates the Earth. Where realist literature can

be accused of deanimating Nature, as it sees Nature only as object, as backdrop to the

narrative, climate fiction does the opposite, by making Nature an actant in itself, and a force

to be reckoned with. The Broken Earth takes this to the extreme by fully giving the Earth

sentience, while still showing that it is not a single organism, but made up of all the life on—

and in—it. By introducing an alive Earth slowly through myth and stonelore, and by having

the main protagonists not believe in it, the trilogy shows the absurdity of ignoring the inherent

animism of the planet. The concept of “Father Earth” is present from the beginning of the

story, and grows from being a jarring sentiment for the reader—in that father has replaced

mother—to eventually being accepted as true within the narrative. By both calling attention to

this name for the Earth, and by using it to such an extent that it quickly becomes normalized,

the work of reanimating the Earth is done surreptitiously from the very start.

6. Conclusion

Through a close analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, my aim was to explore

how the Earth as a genuine communicative actor with sentience disrupts and questions

humanity’s place on the planet. With the events of the trilogy taking place during the

apocalypse, the vulnerable and unstable state of life is at the forefront of the narrative. This

means that everything is pushed to the extreme, as the choice to ignore what is occurring is

impossible for all involved. The trilogy and reality unfortunately differ, in this regard.

Grounding my analysis in posthumanism and Gaia theory, I utilized Bruno Latour’s

work on agency, nonhumanity and deanimation to examine displacement and vengeance in an

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impossible situation. I argue for reading the trilogy as an explicit allegory that connects with

our present in several different ways. First—and most obvious—is that the relationship

between Earth and humanity is disrupted, and in desperate need of change. Secondly—and

most chillingly—that humanity cannot be allowed to win this fight of superiority against

Nature. If we win, we will die. Simply put: The Broken Earth trilogy shows a fictional version

of the apocalypse that might await us. The abuse of the Earth must cease if we are to have any

sort of future on it.

I also employed Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, with its sympoietic becoming-with

and response-ability, to illustrate how the trilogy shows the necessity of realizing that

humanity is not apart from the Earth, and the need to show humility towards this fact. As

death is ever present, and certainty nowhere to be found, I contend that it is high time

humanity got used to the notion of our own mortality. As humans, we are all only future

mulch for the planet, and should act accordingly.

As an allegory for our present climate crisis, I contend that the trilogy shows Earth

concurrently as a system, and as actant seeking well deserved vengeance. In the first section, I

illustrated that the trilogy shows the Earth as a network and as a communicative agent of

geostory, literally becoming a manifestation of Lovelock’s vengeful Gaia. Furthermore, the

trilogy depicts the updated Gaia hypothesis of Earth as both maker and destroyer to an

unsettling degree. The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates not only the Earth as an agent, but that

this inherently includes its inhabitants as an agentive network, therefore showing that

humanity is not the protagonist of this geostory, but simply one actor—one actant—among

many. In showing the blurred lines between life and Nature, I contend that the trilogy

literalizes Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis. I further problematized viewing the healing of

the Earth that is present in the narrative as a hopeful allegory to what can be done in our

present, and emphasised the necessity of instability.

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In the second section, I discussed the orogenes and argued for the concept of

embracing the subhuman status as active choice, thus showing agency where historically there

was only passivity. Through analysing their destructive capacities, and the grief inherent in

their position in society, I declared that they are closer to nature and therefore more capable of

sympoiesis. Where Fifth Seasons are apocalypses for the average human in the narrative, the

orogenes live their life constantly on the brink of annihilation, and are therefore,

unfortunately, more suited for a life in refuge, and more prone to survive.

In the third section, I illustrated how burgeoning collectivism is a necessity for a

sympoietic existence. In an analysis of the stone eaters, I examined the literalization of

blurred lines between human and nonhuman. I also problematized how stone eaters and

orogenes are stuck in an anthropocentric mindset, while still claiming that it is in their

nonhumanity that they can see the Earth as an equal actant.

As the lines between flesh and dirt are already blurred, the characters’ corporeal forms

are able to change and be changed. In the fourth section, I questioned the questionable ending

of the trilogy, by arguing that in the end, it fails to be truly sympoietic, as immortality is

antithetical to living and dying. However, I proclaim that the trilogy does succeed in moving

beyond binary boundaries in accepting the Earth as part of the collective whole, and as an

agent unto itself. This continuous blurring of binaries throughout the narrative becomes

emblematic for the absurdity of not only an anthropocentric worldview, but fixed categories

overall. Hence, I claim that the trilogy illustrates that being seen as human is of lesser

importance than the idea of realizing that all actants in the network are equal, whether or not

the characters themselves realize this.

In the final subsection, I argued that The Broken Earth trilogy reanimates the Earth.

By underscoring the importance of myth and worldbuilding, I wrote that the trilogy shows the

folly of Latourian moderns, while making the case for the importance of fantasy with the help

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of Ghosh and Grifka-Wander. I therefore emphasised, by employing Haraway’s assertion of

the importance of what stories tell stories, that the allegorical qualities of the narrative have

more weight than what might be assumed. Thus, inherent in the power of literature of this

kind—and this trilogy specifically—is the realization and the growing conviction that the

Earth is so much more than mere object. Climate change in itself, as well as the current

corona virus pandemic, shows the agency of the nonhuman and the inseparability of all

actants. In so doing, the need for symbiosis and sympoiesis becomes evident.

Finally, by emphasising the importance of what literature can make possible, with a

focus on speculative fiction specifically, I contend that this genre—through climate fiction—

is a useful tool, as it changes how people view agency. I applied Ghosh work on the realism

of speculative fiction in conjunction with Latour’s concept of deanimation to analyse how The

Broken Earth trilogy shifts the relationship humanity has with Earth by reanimating it. In

making the Earth communicative, Jemisin’s trilogy depicts an attempt to reanimate the Earth,

and seeing its agency. In doing so, it restores a symbiotic relationship between Earth and life

itself. I argue that cooperation and peace always come with a price. The trilogy depicts a war

that has no winners. It is through sacrifice that humanity must admit that the relationship we

have with Earth is a sympoietic one, or we will die of extremely natural causes, caused by

ourselves, but deployed by nonhuman actants.

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