The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin

It's tricky to review a book like this, because I don't want to ruin the plot or worldbuilding, but I do want to tell you details that explain why it's so good.

Before getting into it, let me point out that reading this book is a return to form of why I originally got back into reading sci-fi a couple of years ago: to explore work by people, especially women of color, who have been underrepresented in sci-fi and fantasy. I sometimes struggle to read non-fiction, history, or fantasy with the same voracity that I absorb sci-fi. Consequently, I started looking for sci-fi by underrepresented authors to put myself in others' shoes through a perspective that would fully engross me without making me feel sad, unlike reading the news or history books. What a privilege, to pick and choose where I get my dose of culture! However, if you look at the previous posts, I quickly ended up reading books mostly by white men. I will be better going forward.

Now for the book! Yes, this book is good. Everyone agrees this book is good. The Fifth Season is the first book in The Broken Earth trilogy, each book of which won its own Hugo award. I started reading two days ago and ended up blasting through it because it is so good.

To explain the quality of this book with minimal spoilers, I'll draw a couple of comparisons to other quality works. The Fifth Season echoes the very best of them. In short, if you like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. LeGuin, you will like this book.

First, the magic in this book is akin to earthbending from Avatar: the Last Airbender, but more fleshed out and rigorous (insofar as supernatural powers can be), as opposed to just rock magic. The characters' abilities echo Guru Pathik's advice to Aang: in the Avatar universe, the four elements are not actually separate. In The Broken Earth universe, all "bending" is thermodynamic, and what one can bend is down to one's training and control.

Second, the book echoes Octavia Butler's Seed to Harvest collection. Most notably, the book's brutal, horrifying, and enthralling world is very much like that in Mind of my Mind. In The Broken Earth, a whole society is built around breeding "orogenes" (those with an affinity for earth magic) and maintained via coercion and rape. This sets the stage for character development and an exploration of morality in trying times.

Third, the worldbuilding and plot recall the stories and style of Ursula K. LeGuin's Hainish Cycle. Jemisin's story takes place tens of thousands of years in the future of Earth (or an Earth-like planet), and running across ancient relics of "deadcivs" is a common (and often dangerous) occurrence. Just as in LeGuin's work, each characters' appearance is described to facilitate worldbuilding without making diversity and inclusion feel forced or extraneous. People suffer and thrive because of what they are and how they look; orogenes are treated particularly brutally, enabling powerful analogies to the horror of slavery. As in The Left Hand of Darkness (my favorite LeGuin work), The Fifth Season explores a variety of sexualities and gender identities as part of the plot. Finally, as in The Dispossessed, Jemisin builds a society of people struggling to get by on a world that is always trying to kill them; both books caution about the dehumanizing aspects of rigid, hierarchical society, and are optimistic about anarchy built out of compassion.

Spoiler Warning: From here on, I'll provide more details of the story, but please do not read any further if you want no spoilers at all. I'm writing the following to remind myself of the story when I come back to read this post in a couple of years. I encourage you to stop here and just go read the book.

First, I'll point out that one should just treat the entire trilogy as a single book. The Fifth Season ends on a cliffhanger that I would have been incensed by if I hadn't bought the trilogy as a set.

The book starts out with three storylines, all on a continent called The Stillness. One storyline follows a mother whose baby has been murdered by its father, leading her to hunt him down; one follows a young orogene whose family has just found out about her, and she is whisked away to be trained before she can be murdered; and one follows a budding orogene who is assigned a dead-end assignment, but gets paired with a super-powerful mentor that leads her to many uncomfortable truths. As these storylines evolve, we learn about these characters' powers and weaknesses, which enables Jemisin to slowly divulge more and more details of the world's history and mechanics.

Driving the plot and worldbuilding is The Stillness' ironic name: the entire continent is subject to frequent seismic activity. Since it's a notoriously inhospitable environment, people form communities and strict castes per the dictates of ancient "Stonelore" that describes how to stay alive. This creates a perfect breeding ground for tension between orogenes and non-orogenes. The orogenes can use orogeny (i.e., rock magic) to quell earthquakes and keep everyone safe; but, at the same time, their powers are feared, because they tend to bubble up in unexpected and uncontrolled ways when untrained orogenes experience strong emotions. Every once in a while, nobody is able to stop a seismic catastrophe, leading to ash occluding the atmosphere in a prolonged, sunless winter, or "Fifth Season." Society is built around prepping for such Seasons, and communities are judged as resilient depending on how many Seasons they have weathered.

To mitigate the danger of orogenes, they are either killed if too uncontrolled, or else learn self-control through an organization called the Fulcrum. Unfortunately, the Fulcrum treats them not as human, but  as weapons, and rents them out across The Stillness. It's unclear who is actually in charge of The Fulcrum. However, Guardians, rare people able to negate orogeny, keep the orogenes in line (by killing them). The Guardians end up being the most unnervingly uncomfortable characters in the plot, oscillating between love and abuse in the blink of an eye; orogenes are taught to love their Guardians, and saying no is not an option.

The New York Times stated that the book is "intricate and extraordinary," and I agree. The intricacy is really what I enjoy. It's not the Malazan Book of the Fallen, but the author goes to great lengths to build a rich, detailed, and logical world. Indeed, the logic, detail, and scientific nature of the worldbuilding is what makes it both fantasy and sci-fi. This really harkens back to LeGuin, whose work straddles both genres. I'll also point out that nothing in the plot is wasted. If something shows up early on, it is guaranteed to show up again later, typically in an unexpected and immensely satisfying way, much like the intricacy of Altered Carbon. The whole book is artfully crafted.

To conclude, I'll point out one of the best parts of the book. It sets up a giant world, with horrible institutions and people, and then introduces loving, un-horrible groups of people as a foil. We find communities where orogenes are not hated, but rather revered. We find hope in the darkness and turmoil. The message of the book, then, is that, even if you are oppressed because of who you are, things can and will get better.

Update (with spoilers): I finished the whole trilogy about two months ago, but have finally gotten around to writing this little update. Basically, the first book is the best in the series, but the whole thing is very satisfying.

My main complaint is that the worldbuilding keeps ramping up, but after a point it feels that Jemisin muddled things a bit. She introduces magic that is separate from orogeny, but, since she slowly teases details of the universe, it just gets really confusing. Some characters can use magic sometimes, and it hurts some of them while leaving others alone.

The best way to explain this series is by direct comparison with the Imperial Radch series. Both feel like a single book split into a trilogy. For both, I loved the first book, thought the second book was a good in-between, and got a decent sense of closure (and a good, long cry) from the third book. Diversity and inclusion is naturally woven into both series, with a broad and exciting universe of characters that the authors clearly spent time and effort crafting. Furthermore, each character gets space to play their part, and many of the storylines are woven from the very beginning of the first book through the very end of the last book. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that, when you finish one of these series, you can bury your grief that it's over by reading the other one.