The Broken Earth Trilogy

Jemisin, N.K. The Broken Earth Trilogy (also, The Fifth Season Trilogy). Omnibus. New York City: Orbit US, 2018. London, UK: Orbit, 2019. Omnibus.[1]

The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015. For all the books in the trilogy, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database for translations, awards and reviews (at links).[2]

The Obelisk Gate. Orbit, 2016.[3]

The Stone Sky. Orbit, 2017.[4]

Afrofuturist SF/F novels. Reviewed extensively and covered in Wikipedia. [5][6] Our source here for content is Amandine Faucheux's review of The Stone Sky (with references to the earlier novels) in SFRA Review #324 (Spring 2018): pp. 20-21.[7] Of immediate interest for the wiki (if arguably a spoiler):

Both The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate use clever plot twists to reveal that what the reader assumed to be a commonly primitive, far-in-the-past fantasy setting actually exists so far in the future as to contain unfathomably advanced technology (that translates as “magic” to us). In this volume [i.e., Stone Sky], we finally discover the backstory of Hoa, Essun’s Stone Eater ally and narrator of all three volumes. Forty thousand years ago, Hoa was conceived as a “machine” by the futuristic city of Syl Anagist, in order to use the Earth’s power to fuel their technology. [* * *]

Jemisin’s elaborate metaphor for the enslavement of African-Americans and its aftermath resonates in her narrative with current issues. [...] In The Obelisk Gate, Essun is forced to murder her own infant son to protect him from becoming a node-maintainer (a physically restrained, alive but unconscious machine) in a in a scene reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1979).[8] (Faucheux p. 20)

RDE, finishing, 12Oct21