![]() When the Fifth Season begins – a period of violent climatic change brought about by catastrophic eruptions and earthquakes – Essun, an orogene who is trying to find her lost daughter, meets Hoa. ![]() In that excellent novel we also met stone-eaters, creatures who move through earth and rock, and eat stone, even stone that was once human. Because of their phenomenal destructive capabilities they are hated and feared by people without that power. ![]() Their job is to sense and work with the movements of the earth, to quell earthquakes, shape landscapes, create islands and bury cities. On completing their first phase of training orogenes name themselves for precious and ornamental stones: Alabaster, and Syenite. In N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015) there was a similar geological component in the storytelling that produces dignity rather than jokes. Pratchett continued to dignify his troll characters rather than just generating cheap laughs, because naming confers identity as well as personality: Bauxite, Beryl, Mica, Flint and the greatest of all, Mr Shine: him Diamond. ![]() It was curiously dignifying as well as amusingly paradoxical (how could a lump of rock have a name, ho ho ho). Jade was one of the first Pratchett trolls to have a name. ![]() When Terry Pratchett wanted to explore how trolls might name themselves, he used mineralogy. ![]()
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