Lucas Blogs About the Fifth Season

Oops! I left in the bookmark.

You may have heard of N.K. Jemisin because she's been a bit of a big deal in the speculative fiction scene lately. And there's a good reason for that: each entry in her Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. That's three consecutive Hugo wins (obviously), and it's also the first time every entry in a series has won. Which is why I picked up this book and decided to give it a shot.

The Fifth Season is the first of the Broken Earth books, and it begins with the end of the world, sort of. See, it takes place on a supercontinent known as the Stillness. This is a bit of a misnomer as there is a colossal fault running along its east-west axis which is subject to extraordinary seismic activity, These earthquakes and volcanic flare-ups are referred to as seasons, and when they're bad enough to cause something akin to a nuclear winter, they're referred to as fifth seasons. But we're just getting started on the world building. Some of the people in the stillness are able to harness and direct kinetic and potential energy in order to control seismic forces, these people are referred to as orogenes or, derogatively, roggas. Orogenes are feared partly because of their differences but also because without training they can be extremely dangerous, which is why the Sanzed Empire essentially enslaves them by collecting and training them at a facility called the Fulcrum. Wow, I've been dropping a lot of exposition and I haven't even gotten to the plot of the novel yet.

So, the novel is told from three different perspectives. It starts with a mysterious figure who triggers a massive seismic shift which will undoubtedly trigger a fifth season, then moves to Essun, who comes home to discover that her husband has brutally murdered their son upon discovering that the boy was an orogene (as is his mother). However, her husband has also fled with their daughter, so Essun decides to brave the dangers of the road during a fifth season in order to get revenge. Decades earlier, we meet a four-ringed orogene at the Fulcrum named Syenite as she receives her newest assignment: she's to go to a provincial seaside town and clear out an obstruction in the harbor. Meanwhile, she's also been assigned a new "mentor" named Alabaster, but really her job is to get pregnant so that the Empire can have more orogenes. Alabaster has ten rings and seems to have little, if any respect for the order he works to maintain. Meanwhile, even earlier we meet up with Damaya, a young girl who is sent to the Fulcrum to train after her orogenic powers are discovered. No points for guessing (highlight for SPOILERS) that Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are, in fact, the same person at different stages in her life.

Anyway, there's more to it than that, of course, that's just the jumping off point. Jemisin uses these premises to explore themes of prejudice, privilege, imperialism, exploitation, revenge, redemption, you know, the kinds of things that you'd expect a sci-fi, fantasy novel to explore in the late 2010s (or any time really). Sometimes this is a little too on-the-nose, like the attempts by Alabaster and other orogenes to reclaim the slur "rogga," but more often than not they land. For example, the depiction of the ways in which the Empire treats orogenes as human chattel is explored both implicitly in the ways in which they are treated by their Guardians (that's a whole other thing to get into) and explicitly in the dialogue between Syenite and Alabaster as they discuss their lot in life. Or in little world-building details like the fact that everyone's name will include their given name, their caste, and their community (for example Binof Leadership Yumenes).

This is another way in which Jemisin's skill as a writer shows through, Essun, Syenite, and Damaya are all wonderfully realized characters and serve as compelling protagonists throughout the book. Essun as she struggles to survive with a strange boy and a scientist that she meets on the road, Syenite as she tries to reckon with a seeming conspiracy within the Fulcrum's power structure, and Damaya as she navigates the politics of training at the Fulcrum (and the secrets of the facility itself). Even in light of the SPOILERS above, these characters are all well-sketched and rounded over the course of the novel.

Which brings up the matter of the novel's structure. There isn't anything as rigid as a chapter rotation for viewpoint characters, sometimes Jemisin will follow Essun or Syenite or Damaya for multiple chapters, sometimes just one, but Essun's chapters are easily identifiable because they're narrated in the second person. This takes a little bit of time to get used to (although, after The Raven Tower I find myself more receptive to second person povs), but the reason why is clarified somewhat at the end. In any case, all three characters' exploits are written in the present tense which does make the action feel a bit more immediate.

All of this seems like a bit too much unalloyed praise for one of my Hypothetical-Reader-less blogs. It's not that I really have a lot of negative things to say about The Fifth Season, just that it's sort of like Blade Runner in that I find that I admire it more on an intellectual level than I engage with it on an emotional level. I wouldn't be surprised to find myself picking up the rest of the trilogy, but I can't say that I feel a burning need to find out what happens next right now! Which is maybe an unfair bar to hold a book to. But there it is. Jemisin has written an excellent book that I would recommend to people who like sci-fi and fantasy that isn't afraid to engage with relevant issues, but that for whatever reason just didn't quite manage to hook me. Anyway, it's a good book, and I hope this last paragraph doesn't come across as overly dismissive because Jemisin has clearly accomplished something impressive here.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, Orbit Books trade paperback edition, August 2015, 449 pages (465 with appendices), pairs well with a glass of safe and the sudden knowledge that your traveling companion is a long-lost acquaintance

Links:

Here's the author's website, if you're into that kinda thing.

Yes, reading a book with a prominent character named "Alabaster" did remind me of this King of the Hill episode, why do you ask?

P.S. Hope you're all doing well and staying healthy!