Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones who walk away from Omelas” is rightly regarded as a classic of the sf genre. The short story, devoid of plot or narrative structure, gently persuades the reader to create their own version of a utopian idyll, a city blessed with whatever wonders and beauty the reader can conjure. It then delivers a hammer blow to the creation, revealing the utter misery inflicted on one single child as the price for the idyll. In its structure, then, the reader is forced to reckon with the dilemma: could you live amidst all this beauty, or would you be, as the title suggests, among the ones who walk away, unable to suspend your awareness of true evil lying st the heart of the tale?

I’ve loved the story since I first read it, many years and miles away, but there has always been a nagging dissatisfaction in my reading: That’s it? They just walk away? What do they do then? What could that child do, given so much power?

In her Broken Earth trilogy, NK Jemisin delivers a superb answer to this quandary. I admit that when I wrote about the first book that I had no idea that the series would provide such a stirring rebuke to the Pragmatism of Omelas, but as I read this final book, the sense that this was in every way the conclusion to that story I always wanted grew greater.

That first book, The Fifth Season, was essentially the story of Essun. The second instalment, The Obelisk Gate, brought her daughter, Nassun, into the narrative, adding depth and complexity to the world so wonderfully constructed by Jemisin. This third book introduces yet another viewpoint, that of Hoa, the Stone Eater from The Fifth Season, previously revealed as the narrator of Essun’s tale. It is in Hoa’s (or Houwha’s) sections of this book that the Omelas similarities arise, and it is from Houwha that we learn of the Breaking of the World and the Omelas-like bargain that humanity had made which lead to the Shattering.

Not that Essun and Nassun are forgotten, it is in their chapters that the heart of this book resides, the struggles by a mother to bring safety to the world for the sake of her child, the struggles of a young child to find value in just one person so she can make them safe. All the time, all around them, the world continues to die, the Fifth Season darkens and the majesty and mystery of the ruined world are revealed in breathtaking manner.

There was never a point at which I stopped caring about these women, with their flaws and their failures, and there was never a point at which I felt that their story would have a happy joyous ending. That ending, when it came, wrenched at me, ripped out my heart and served it to me whole. The final epic confrontation between them is orders of magnitude greater than the one which occurred at the end of The Obelisk Gate, I raced through pages, thoroughly ensnared in the web created of these books’ myriad plotlines as they meshed and clashed and tore at each other. In the end, both women deserved nothing less than my tears and they, and their struggles, will live in me for a long time.

If they are the heart, then the head of the story, the intellectual rigour, is with Houwha. In his chapters we learn of Syl Anagist, the world-spanning Omelas which birthed the Obelisks. From Houwha we learn of the Neiss, the race from which the earth-magic arose, a race for which in Syl Anagist:

"It became easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae were fundamentally different, somehow—more sensitive, more active, less controlled, less civilized—and that this was he source of their magical peculiarity. This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all."

That is the bargain Syl Anagist made, and it is a bargain revealed to us from the eyes and words of Houwha, gradually, inexorably and shockingly. The response of Hwua and his fellows to this revelation is, to me, perfectly sane and understandable; I wish I could reach out to myself, reach down through the years to the me sitting in a library with tears on my face and say “Wait! Their time will come. And their wrath shall be unbounded, and it shall be glorious!”

I’ve not said much about the plot, in truth to do so would be a pale pastiche of how I feel about this book. Even the little things are done well, like the little snippets which finish each of Nassun & Essun’s chapters - the research of Yaetr Innovator Dibars - are an entire creation all of their own, reflecting the choices made by the Sanzed Empire which have led to this point.

There are stories, and there are stories, and this falls into that latter category. If you haven’t read these books, then you really should. I wrote of the Fifth Season that the Broken Earth is our Lord of the Rings, our Sword of Shannara; having finished the series, that praise barely suffices. N.K. Jemisin has written a series of unparalleled brilliance, the Hugo Awards and plaudits she has gained are but a small deserved reward.