N.K. Jemisin will adapt her Broken Earth trilogy for Sony

The fantasy arms race continues as Sony buys the rights to N.K. Jemisin’s wonderful Broken Earth trilogy, with the author herself writing the scripts!

Amazon has The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. Netflix has The Witcher and Shadow and Bond. HBO has House of the Dragon. In the years after Game of Thrones, everybody’s got some kind of big fantasy project on the books, and Sony isn’t about to be left out. Deadline reports that the Sony-owned TriStar Pictures has acquired the screen rights to The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin in a seven-figure deal.

The Broken Earth trilogy consists of The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, which came out once a year between 2015 and 2017. The story is set on a massive continent called the Stillness that gets periodically ravaged by cataclysmic climate events, with the people hiding and then reemerging to rebuild.

Society is rigidly broken up by caste, ethnicity and species. People known as orogenes are able to draw magical power from the Earth and are crucial to holding the world together, but they’re reviled and treated very badly by members of the warrior class known as the Guardians. The first book follows three female orogenes from different time periods as they go on their journeys across the Stillness.

All three of The Broken Earth books won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, an unprecedented feat. If the adaptations of the books are anywhere near as good as the books themselves (and with Jemisin doing that adaptation, the odds are good), we could be in for something very special.

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