The Obelisk Gate
Softcover edition
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| Author | N. K. Jemisin |
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| Language | English |
| Series | The Broken Earth trilogy |
| Genre | Science fantasy |
| Publisher | Orbit |
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Publication date
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August 16, 2016 |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 433 pp. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 932174108 |
| Preceded by | The Fifth Season |
The Obelisk Gate is a 2016 science fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin and the second volume in the Broken Earth series (following The Fifth Season). The Obelisk Gate was released to strong reviews and, like its predecessor in the series, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
The Obelisk Gate takes place on a single supercontinent, the Stillness, which suffers from catastrophic climate change every few centuries (the so-called "Fifth Season"). The book continues forward from an especially bad Fifth Season, one that may become an apocalypse. It follows two main characters: a mother and daughter, both of whom are magically talented ("orogenes"), who were separated just before the most recent Fifth Season. The plot revolves around their journey to find each other once again, and their efforts to discover why Fifth Seasons exist.
The Obelisk Gate was anticipated on its debut, and reviews were highly positive. Writing for NPR, poet Amal El-Mohtar said that "Not only could I not put it down—I couldn't come up for air long enough to comment on it while forsaking sleep and food in order to finish it", continuing on to say that "It pole vaults over the expectations I had for what epic fantasy should be and stands in magnificent testimony to what it could be." It later appeared on The Verge's list of the best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2016, where they wrote that the book "is an incredibly ambitious and important novel" that "continues to build on its predecessor's brilliance", as well as Wired's, who believed that it was better than The Fifth Season. A common belief was that The Obelisk Gate was able to escape what one reviewer called "middle volume syndrome"—where the second book of a trilogy is used primarily for "stalling, filling in backstories, developing peripheral characters, and all the other less-than-riveting busy work necessary to unleash a successfully climatic [sic] final act".
The Obelisk Gate won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017. It was the second award for Jemisin's Broken Earth series (after The Fifth Season in 2016), making Jemisin the first author in over two decades to win the Best Novel Hugo in two consecutive years. Moreover, The Obelisk Gate's victory came as part of a women-heavy slate of winners at the 2017 Hugos, which included best novel, novella, novelette, and short story.
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