The Book That Broke the World

Several characters in The Book That Broke the World depict history’s progress as a series of civilizations that rise and fall, each destroyed and rebuilt by whichever group succeeds the previous. Mayland describes this cycle as “[e]ach city built on the dust and ruin of the last. A world that’s little more than a cinder, subjected to repeated flashfires as one species burns itself down to make room for the next to have a try” (219). An ongoing cycle of violence underpins this evolution, a self-perpetuating system of revenge and tragedy. The novel examines the inherent destruction of these cycles, the reasons behind their perpetuation, and their consequences on the survivors.

The novel examines how discrimination between species feeds these ongoing cycles. Through Celcha and Hellet’s storyline, it illustrates how these cycles of violence are perpetuated. The narrative introduces the inherent violence of the ganars’ enslavement, which is rationalized by the beliefs of their enslavers. Myles Carstar, who runs the camp where Celcha and Hellet live, “maintained a fiction that the slaves were not only a different species but were morally, functionally, and spiritually no different to any other animal in service to [them]” (3).