Apatt's Reviews > The Fifth Season

“Here is a land. It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness. It is a land of quiet and bitter irony.”

The above is an extract from the prologue. A lot of the settings and characters are explained in somewhat conversational tone here. I was not paying very close attention to it when I first read it and found the first chapter that follows it a little confusing. So do try to be attentive when you read it!

I first heard of N.K. Jemisin in an article entitled “ Octavia's Daughters: Meet the New Queens of Spec Fic”, the article is about natural successors to the late great Octavia Butler. I imagine it is something of a backhanded compliment to be viewed as a successor to someone instead of a new, original artist, especially if it is because of the skin colour. Can a white female author be the new Octavia Butler? The article also led me to expect a writing style similar to Ms. Butler’s accessible, unpretentious yet beautiful and resonant style. Ms. Jemisin is more poetic and experimental. Initially, I found the prose style a little too fanciful for my taste, but once I settled into the narrative I became more appreciative. The Fifth Season is the 2015 Hugo Award winner for best novel, and the first book of The Broken Earth trilogy.

The plot is difficult to summarise briefly because it is tied to the complex world building of the novel. The Fifth Season is set in a far future Earth where cataclysmic, civilization ending natural disasters occur every few centuries. There is only one gigantic continent left on this future Earth called The Stillness. There are people called “orogenes” who have the ability to stop or trigger earthquakes by using their innate ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to direct seismic events. They are able to shift tectonic plates, raise columns of rock from under the sea and cause a sudden massive drop in temperature to a freezing point.

Though they are needed the orogenes are viewed with dislike and distrust by most ordinary people (called “stills”). The Fifth Season tells the story of three female orogenes of different ages Essun, Damaya and Syenite. Essun’s husband killed her orogene son for unknown reasons then took her daughter and did a runner. The Essun plotline, narrated in the second person, depicts her journey through the Stillness to find her daughter and probably puts her husband six feet under. Damaya is an imperial orogene in training at the Fulcrum, a sort of mean-spirited Hogwarts. Syenite is a trained orogene on a seemingly straightforward mission to clear some coral out of a harbor in a small town. For this mission, she is mentored by an eccentric enigmatic senior orogene called Alabaster. While carrying out their mission they unintentionally unearth an ancient artifact and suddenly the fulcrum wants them dead for this indiscretion.

There are so many plots and elaborate world building that this review would have to be three times the length it is to cover the main points or features. The characters are very well written with just enough complexity and foibles to make them seem real. The concept of this future Earth is quite original, I don't think I have come across geology-based science fantasy before. That rare SF/F commodity “sense of wonder” is strongly felt here. If you are looking for escapism this book is just the thing.

As mentioned earlier Ms. Jemisin’s prose style seems too fanciful for my taste to begin with. I had no idea why the Essun plotline written in the second person. I suspected it is to convey Essun’s distance from herself; a form of self-hatred perhaps, or an inability to identify with herself. In this interview she partly explains it as a kind of dissociative state, so I was not far off. There is more to this second person business which, according to Ms. Jemisin, will be revealed in subsequent volumes. To be honest, I am not comfortable with second person POV narrative, you this and you that just seems awkward to me. However, the story here is so compelling that I soon ignored this little narrative quirk. Having said that, I am glad the other two plotlines are told in the conventional third person.

If you are going to read The Fifth Season you have to be patient and just let the story unfold as the author intended, the neologisms, strange settings, culture, and characters will clarify themselves before too long. How the three plot strands come to intertwine is quite clever and surprising. This book becomes very accessible – and even riveting, once you settle into it. It is even rewarding to go back to read the first chapter after you finish the book and you would have a much better appreciation of the book’s beginning.

The Fifth Season is the first book of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, the second book has also won a Hugo, and the third will probably do the same next time they hand out the award. Another series for me to follow and a great new author to come back to. Yay! 😊


Notes:
• N. K. Jemisin was formerly a counseling psychologist before taking up writing full time. This novel does frequently delve into the characters' psychology.

• Tricking readers into acceptance, how Jemisin develops The Fifth Season's protagonists, and more about writing in the second person.

• Her blog is well worth perusing.

• I did back out of reading it after the first chapter because I could not take all that second person business but out of curiosity, I decided to give it a shot anyway. I am glad I did. It is not hard to follow this book, it clicks after a while, all you have to do is keep reading it!

• The Fifth Season to be developed as TV Series at TNT

Quotes:
“Orogeny is a strange equation. Take movement and warmth and life from your surroundings, amplify it by some indefinable process of concentration or catalysis or semi-predictable chance, push movement and warmth and death from the earth. Power in, power out.”

“No one speaks of celestial objects, though the skies are as crowded and busy here as anywhere else in the universe. This is largely because so much of the people’s attention is directed toward the ground, not the sky.”

“They can’t stand sex with each other directly, but vicariously it’s amazing. And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron. (And, well, maybe it’s love.)”