The Unchanging Nature of Godhood: A Review of The Inheritance Trilogy

As was previously mentioned in my review of Mass Effect: Initiation, I have resolved to read the works of N.K. Jemisin this year. The entire works, no exceptions. Over the last week, I have made my way through The Inheritance Trilogy, which is kind of the trilogy that set off this entire resolution, because I purchased the omnibus on sale in 2016 and then just sat on it for two years.

A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010)
The Broken Kingdoms (2010)
The Kingdom of Gods (2011)
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Pages: 1453 (omnibus Kindle edition)
Series: The Inheritance Trilogy
Publisher: Orbit

Premise:

In this omnibus edition of N.K. Jemisin’s brilliantly original award-winning fantasy series, a young woman becomes entangled in a power struggle of mythic proportions.

A REALM OF GODS AND MORTALS.

Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle.

The Inheritance Trilogy omnibus includes the novels: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods, and a brand new novella set in the same world: The Awakened Kingdom.

There are no spoilers for the books in the discussion below.

Background:

I’ve written the beginning of a sentence to start this discussion roughly ten times and can’t truly decide how to begin. These books have wrecked me as a person. I cried so hard reading the last few chapters of the third one that I took a selfie of how wrecked my face was and I’m never sharing it with another soul. You know how you read books but sometimes you’re not just reading them, you’re making them part of you? And I’ve heard that these aren’t even her best books, so I guess I’m in for a LOT this year.

The most natural place to start seems to be with what they’re about, so we’ll do that, though explaining too much about the plot of the second and third books would give away a lot of the plot development as it goes along. If you’ve already read them, feel free to skip to the discussion section.

Suffice to say these books are about a kingdom. There’s the Maelstrom, which was in the beginning before the creation of their realm, and the Maelstrom created a god, Nahadoth, and then another god, Itempas, and after Nahadoth and Itempas had been together for a time, the Maelstrom created a third god, Enefa. Nahadoth is the god of night, chaos, and change, so much so that even his gender is fluid, though he appears most often as a man in these books. Itempas is the god of light, order, and rules, he is unchanging and fixed. Enefa is the god of dawn, twilight, life, and death. She is the one who created life, who first bore a godling, and who created mortals.

And then the world was created. And because the world and also mortals were created with the Three and by the Three, nothing could happen to the Three without affecting all of this creation. The Three had children with each other that were called godlings and the godlings could have children with each other, also referred to as godlings.

Before the beginning of the first book, in a fit of jealous rage over the way Nahadoth and Enefa seemed to prefer each others company over his, Itempas killed Enefa and began the God Wars, during which Nahadoth and Itempas squared off against each other, forcing the godlings to take sides, both sides condemning those godlings that refused to do so. It isn’t common knowledge why existence didn’t end when Enefa was killed.

Itempas won the battle and in doing so, shackled and enslaved Nahadoth and those godlings that had fought at his side. He granted these enslaved godlings to the Arameri family, which basically gave them the ruling of the world. And it’s to this family that Yeine, the main character of the first book, is born almost 2000 years after Enefa’s death.

Discussion:

I’ve always found books about gods and goddesses and systems of belief to be pretty fascinating (which lead to me majoring in religious studies in college and then doing nothing but appreciating books about gods and goddesses but in like a more studious manner). Unlike the Terry Pratchett gods that I’ve been reading about recently, the power of Jemisin’s gods and godlings is not dependent on the strength of their followers’ beliefs. They existed before mortals, they’ll exist after mortals, and the devotion of mortals is fun but not necessary for their existence. Instead, their strength is dependent on how true they are to their own natures.

For example, Sieh (oldest of the godlings) is the trickster god of childhood. Anything having to do with being a responsible adult will weaken him. (This is, in fact, the entire plot of the third book.) Taking responsibility for things, apologizing, taking the high road instead of pulling a prank or making a useful observation instead of a joke are all against his nature. It won’t kill them, but they’re always stronger when they’re playing to their own strengths.

I had no idea what he was talking about. He saw that in my face and tried again. “Imagine you’re older than this planet, yet you have to act like a child. Could you do it?”

Impossible to even imagine. “I… don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Madding nodded. “Sieh does it. He does it every day, all day; he never stops. That makes him strong.” (Loc 5394)

This is all window dressing on the world building, which was phenomenal. Jemisin spent a lot of time on the hierarchy of the gods, godlings, mortals, and demons. Demons, by the way, are the children of gods or godlings and humans. They are mortal but can have god powers, and their blood is poisonous to gods. So much thought was given to how gods would relate with each other versus how they would relate with the godlings and how both of these groups would relate to the humans and demons. Everything was considered and given weight, and it’s so clear in how they are all shown to interact. I didn’t necessarily have a clear picture on how the world government worked, but I trusted that Jemisin did, and would tell me when it mattered.

So there was love, once. More than love. And now there is more than hate. Mortals have no words for what we gods feel. (Loc 1631)

But it never felt like the gods didn’t care what happened to the mortals, as sometimes happens with immortal beings. Mortals were also recognized as children of the gods and ultimately the Maelstrom. And they were at times respected for being, in some ways, stronger than gods, more accepting of death, grief, and pain.

“Love can level the ground between mortals and gods, Yeine. It’s something we’ve learned to respect.” (Loc 3748)

Gods, bound to their natures as they are, aren’t able to grow and embrace change the way that humans can. For all that they live forever, their weakness is their stagnance, their inability to be anything other than exactly what they’ve always been. And that is such a fascinating place to take this story.

“Change happens,” I said through the yawn. “We all have to accept it.”

“No,” he replied. “We don’t. I never have. That is what I am, Oree — the steady light that keeps the roiling darkness at bay. The unmoving stone around which the river must flow. You may not like it. You don’t like me. But without my influence, this realm would be cacophony, anarchy. A hell beyond mortal imagination.” (Loc 7877)

These books were everything that I wanted them to be when I began them, and there isn’t a single thing about them that I would change. They’re painful in the way that good things are painful, where there isn’t a nice bow to wrap things up in but you end up smiling through your tears.

In conclusion: This is my favorite resolution that I’ve ever made.