Review: The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin

[Russ Allbery]

The Fifth Season
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Broken Earth #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: 2015
ISBN:      0-316-22930-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     497

The world of The Fifth Season is one of near-constant seismic activity.
Volcanoes, massive earthquakes, and all the catastrophes that follow
them are a constant threat. Civilization barely survives the turmoil,
and only because of two things: strict cultural rules about how to
handle a "fifth season" of heavy seismic activity and its aftermath
(called stonelore), and the orogenes.

Orogenes are humans (well, there is some debate about that) who have an
organ that others don't, a biological ability to manipulate the seismic
activity and the earth itself. They can protect others by damping down
activity, smoothing faults, and redirecting seismic shock waves, but
they can also destroy: pull earth out of shape, set off quakes, and
create paths for magma to surface. And, to gather the power to
manipulate the earth, they draw energy from everything around them,
including from other people, often fatally. Orogenes are feared and
hated by the typical person.

The Stillness, the ironically-named continent on which this book is
set, is very old and has had numerous civilizations destroyed by some
seismic catastrophe. The landscape is scattered with useless or
dangerous remnants of previous forgotten civilizations; the history,
likewise, with only the stonelore and some muddled mythology available
to most people. The current rulers have kept their empire for a
surprising length of time, however, due mostly to the stable ground
beneath their centrally-located capital. That stability comes from
Fulcrum-trained orogenes, who are taken from their family as children
and trained harshly to serve their society by suppressing or fixing
dangerous seismic events. Fulcrum orogenes don't have an awful life
(well, most of them; for some, it is pure torture), but they're
effectively slaves, kept under the watchful eye of Guardians who have
mysterious powers of their own.

Against this background, The Fifth Season tells three interwoven
stories. Essun lives in a small village (comm) at the start of the
book, leading a quiet life, until one of her children is beaten to
death by her husband following a seismic event that he thinks the child
stopped. He's taken their other child and left. Essun, severely
traumatized, heads after him to attempt a rescue, or at least revenge.
Damaya is a child from another comm who is sold to the Guardians by her
parents when she demonstrates orogenic ability, and who goes through
Fulcrum training. And Syenite is a Fulcrum orogene, assigned to a field
mission with a difficult but very senior orogene named Alabaster.

All of these stories eventually interweave, and eventually reveal where
they fit in the somewhat unobvious chronology of the story, but it
takes some time to get there. It also takes some time for the primary
characters to have much in the way of agency. Essun starts with the
most, once she recovers her senses enough to start her hunt for
revenge. Syenite is ambitious but junior, and Damaya is a child, trying
to navigate an unknown world of student politics and strict rules. And
all three of the main characters are orogenes, rogga when one is being
insulting, and this world does not like orogenes. At all.

The Fifth Season starts with an unusual narrative style: a
conversational narrator who begin with some of the world background and
some mysterious scenes that didn't make sense until much later in the
book (late enough that I didn't remember them or make sense of them
until I re-read them for this review). The book then focuses on Essun,
whose scenes are written in second person present. Normally I think
second person feels weirdly intrusive and off-putting, but once I got
used to it here, I think it works as well as I've seen it work
anywhere. I also see why Jemisin did it: Essun starts the story so
traumatized that she's partly disassociating. First person wouldn't
have worked, and the second-person voice gives that trauma some
immediacy and emotional heft that would have been hard to achieve in
third person.

The story starts slowly, and builds slowly, as the world is introduced
and Jemisin lays down the texture and history of the world. The
world-building is ambitious in tracing down the ramifications of the
seismic chaos and the implications of orogene ability (although it's
best to think of it as pure magic, despite the minor science fiction
trappings). But through that world-building, what this story is
building is a deep, powerful, frustrated rage. The Fifth Season is an
angry book. It's a book about outcasts, about slaves. About people who,
even if they're succeeding within the parameters they're given, are
channeled and stymied and controlled. It's a story about smiling, kind
paternalism hiding lies, control, and abuse, about how hard it is to
find enough space from the smothering destructiveness of a totalitarian
culture to let yourself relax. It's a story about the horrible things
people are willing to do to those they don't consider fully human, and
all the ways in which safety, expediency, tradition, culture, and
established social roles conspire to keep people within the box where
they belong. And it's a story about how being constantly on edge,
constantly dreading the next abuse, breaking under it, and being left
wanting to burn the whole world to the ground.

I struggled at the start of this book, but it grew on me, and by about
halfway through it had me hooked completely. At first, Syenite's part
of the story (the most traditionally told) was my favorite, but the
coming-of-age stories of her and Damaya were overtaken by Essun's far
more complex, cautious, and battle-weary tale. And I loved Jemisin's
world-building. There's a lot of depth here, a lot of things going on
that are unexplained by clearly important, and a restraint and maturity
in how the world is revealed that makes it feel older and more layered
than Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

The major drawback of this book is that it is very much the first book
of a series, and it doesn't so much have an ending as a hard stop. It's
not quite a cliff-hanger, but it's nearly as unsatisfying as one. Most
of the major questions of the book — who the stone eaters are and what
they want, and the fate of Essun's husband and child, just to name two
— are still unresolved at the end of the story. There is a bit of
emotional closure, but not a true moment of catharsis for all of the
rage. Hopefully that will be coming in a future book.

This is a very unusual story, mixing fantasy and a sort of magic
(orogeny) with some science fiction elements and a deep history. It's
gritty, textured, emotional, and furious, and very much worth reading.
I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.

Followed by The Obelisk Gate.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-07-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>