communi_kate | book review: The Killing Moon, by NK Jemison

There are two sorts of SF/F books: books about people and books about ideas, but the really good ones are about both.

A lot of classic SF (as opposed to space opera) seems to be about the ideas. Fantasy is generally more about the characters-although fantasy's most famous authors, Tolkien, used his stories as a way to develop his ideas about linguistics. The best authors do both well, although there's usually a skew in one direction or another.

The Killing Moon is heavy on character-building, but it has a lot of good ideas as well. And yes, it's another fantasy with a non-western setting from an author that made her name on the Escape Artists podcasts that I'm so fond of (anybody who's interested should check out L'Alchimista and Cloud Dragon Skies). The main characters are both Gatherers, an interesting mix of priests and assassins, although that they themselves would probably describe it differently. As a vet who's heavily involved with ending suffering, I liked this idea and found the ethical issues discussed in the book very interesting. It made for a few interesting reactions to the characters, that's for sure. And I detected more than a hint of Assassin's Creed, which I'm sure Jemison's mentioned on her blog before. It's interesting to see how gaming-both platform and tabletop-is influencing a lot of the new fantasy authors.

So I'll definitely be picking up the sequel, and hope that the main characters of the Killing Moon will feature (although based on Jemison's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I doubt they'll be the protagonists). The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy was one of the more interesting fantasy series of the last few years, and I'm really interested to see what Jemison does next.