The Stone Sky

What Hacker News says

1. krzykJan 2021
   I read just the first book in the "Book of the New Sun" and found it quite boring.

   And my books are quite similar to yours with few exceptions:

   - Martian Chronicles - interesting concept but eventually it goes into some ecological + anarchist sci-fi which I'm not a fun of

   - Earthsea - good, but it is mostly for teens, young adults (I read it as a teen and loved it, reread it years later and it was so so)

   - Dune - the whole series, each book is unique in its own way

   - Kurt Vonnegut - never read anything by that author

   - Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can be

   And books I really liked that are not on your list:

   - Cixin Liu - Three Body Problem and the rest in the series - I loved it, never read anything like it

   - Anything by Naomi Novik (so just two books right now)

   - Vernon - A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep

   - N.K. Jemis - Stone Sky and the other two in the series

   - Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (but only this, the other book was worse)

   - (Almost) Anything by Philip K. Dick

   That's from my recent reads (so few last years).

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2. nlJul 2020
   It's worth noting that all three of her Broken Earth trilogy won Hugo awards.

   It's not uncommon for series to win like that (getting a Hugo award for the first book means people will start the series, and since the awards are popular voting having people read your book is half the struggle).

   I think the first two books (The Fifth Season and the Stone Sky) were great, but I didn't love the final book. I think Ann Leckie's Provenance should have won that year - it's in the (Hugo award winning!) Ancillary Justice universe, and deals with lots of issues around AI that I think many at HN would enjoy.

   And as for the dead comments complaining that her winning is some kind of conspiracy because it's not hard SF: Fantasy has long won Hugo awards.

   Also: (a) go read it - it's got a system of magic that is as hard as any magical faster than light technology in a space opera, and (b) Gaiman won with American Gods and The Graveyard Book. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won in 2008. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won.

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3. drmpegJan 2018
   Although I very much like hard sci-fi, my favorite this year was the "Broken Earth" trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky) from N.K. Jemisin.
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4. autarchJul 2026
   Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?

   I really like that the Hugos added a Best Series category in 2017 to hopefully avoid this sort of thing. It seems like a great series is a different beast than a great single novel.

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5. brownsound202Oct 2025
   The Stone Sky series by NK Jemisin referenced the use of genetically modified fungi as self-assembling construction material. Really cool to see how pervasive mushrooms are in sci-fi and how there's lots more potential to unlock.
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6. MattSteelbladeJan 2024
   The Stone Sky, the third book, is a joint Hugo and Nebula winner.
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