Link to the Goodreads page here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19161852-the-fifth-season
N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy has made history over the last couple of years. Not only has it landed Jemisin a spot in history as the first black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, but she blew expectations out of the water by being the first writer in history to win that same award three years in a row, each for a book in that trilogy. Nearly everyone who has read the series has praised it for being unique and innovative for the fantasy genre.
I finally got around to reading The Fifth Season in February 2022, which is fairly late considering how much praise it got in 2016. It had been on my radar since then, but something always stopped me from reading it. Looking back, I’m actually glad I read it when I did. The novel hits differently after the events of 2020 as we see the hauntingly familiar scenes with characters traveling the world wearing face coverings and keeping their distance from other people. It is eerie, and honestly made the experience more frightening to me than it would have if I had read it a few years ago. The events of 2020 also brought to light several deep-rooted social issues that I had only been vaguely aware of until then, and I did my part to better understand them by doing plenty of research about how much people suffer daily from prejudice, especially people of color. Looking back, I likely wouldn’t have had as much of an appreciation for how Jemisin tackles these issues in her writing as I do now. And this is the biggest thing I want to focus on in this review.
The novel is based on a central idea that this world endures devastating, life-altering natural disasters on a regular basis that are incredibly difficult to survive. Jemisin looks at the concept of the world “ending” and tries to define it not as the world actually ending, but as the world as a current society knows is ending when so many people die and so much destruction has occurred that society has to pick up the shattered pieces and start over. This concept of expecting disaster at any moment and trying to brace oneself for it is what the society Jemisin created is built off of, and it is where her genius comes in.
The way that Jemisin writes about the oppression that the orogenes, (people born with the ability to manipulate the earth), face reflects on the oppression that real people face in our world and amplifies it to an extreme. In a world that is so focused on survival, a person’s worth is measured by how useful they are to the survival of their society, which makes orogenes a gamble. If they can’t be used to protect and serve the empire, they are seen as a threat that must be destroyed. This is a massive strength to this book: through this world where disaster lurks around every corner, Jemisin explores how humanity would react, what lengths they would go to survive, and how fear and misunderstanding can lead one group of people to oppress another. The central idea of this is that humanity as a whole is cruel, stepping on and ignoring the weak and embracing their own “superiority,” then becoming afraid of losing that superiority when another group challenges it. She raises the question, where is the line drawn between survival of the fittest and pure selfishness?
She explores this question in interesting ways. Obviously there are the orogenes, who are either hunted down and slaughtered or sent through a school that essentially trains them to be slaves to the nation. But she also explores how this world would affect the kinds of oppression we already see. For example, citizens are literally bred to try and make children who will most likely survive, which leads to eugenicist-like attitudes toward other people. People who live in the Arctics or along the coasts are said to have unfavorable physical traits because of the long histories of people in those regions struggling to survive Fifth Seasons, while people who live in the Equatorials, or center of the continent, are said to have the most favorable traits, when the reality is that the physical traits of those people are not what makes them struggle to survive, it is the location of their homes. And those same people are aware that they are not in a favorable location for their survival, but they cannot move to the safer locations because they either do not have the wealth and resources, or the other communities will just refuse to let them in, leaving them stuck in danger and poverty while the people in power crop it up to their physical traits and genetics, figuring that it is just their nature that they would be weaker. It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
There are even accounts of previous Fifth Seasons that debate whether they should be considered an actual Fifth Season because it only affected those on the coasts or Arctics, but not the Equatorials. It’s scary how accurate it all is, especially when it is revealed later in the book that the histories and stonelore, (a series of stories, accounts, and guides on how to survive a Fifth Season that was passed down over centuries), has been altered to villainize orogenes or cover up terrible things that the people in power did to others in order to not only survive, but live in luxury while others suffered. There are also implications that the first of the Fifth Seasons was caused by the damage mankind did to the Earth, but stonelore was altered to blame it on the orogenes. Again, it is all chillingly familiar.
Jemisin writes this heavy material focusing on current and historical issues, highlighting the problems with forgetting or altering history, and it is all still relevant, (if not more relevant considering current movements such as the one pushing to ban Critical Race Theory in schools). But the true genius of this work is how she does it while still being entertaining. The main character is hesitant to recognize these deeper issues in the society because she is more focused on her current goals and survival, and we watch as she is forced to acknowledge them and defy the order because it isn’t right. She spent her whole life hiding who she was and keeping quiet to avoid attention, but once she learns about how deep the corruption goes and how she had been playing into it, readers can’t help but cheer when she finally takes a stand to protect herself and those she cares about. The message is clear, but never feels preachy. There is no moment of “And the moral of the story is…” Jemisin doesn’t hold your hand when discussing these issues, but she doesn’t shove you into the deep end, either. She just states the facts and lets you decide what to do with them.
Potential readers should not feel intimidated by its fantasy and science-fiction aspects, either. The world the story takes place in is highly complex and very different from our world, but Jemisin does a good job of introducing readers to it without letting them get lost or taking precious time to explain every detail before they dive into the plot. It helps that there are two appendices in the back of the book that readers can refer to along the way, which I personally really enjoyed, (though I would understand if other readers did not like that as much).
Another massive strength of this novel is the magic system. Jemisin blends the fantasy and science fiction genres by making the magic system heavily science-based, but not too much. I could tell when I was reading this that she spent a lot of time researching seismic activity just so she could have her characters understand what was happening in the world and what exactly they were doing as they were manipulating the earth and causing said seismic activity. She does a good job of explaining what things are possible in this world and how orogenes can bend the rules of physics using their supernatural abilities but does so in such a concrete way that it just makes sense. It almost felt like I could do it if I tried hard enough, or if someone taught me. The scientific background helps with this, too. This genre-blending also bends genre rules, meaning a new reader doesn’t have to be deeply familiar with common fantasy or science-fiction tropes to appreciate this book. These elements all seem to be used as tools to make the themes of the novel more tangible, (and for Jemisin to flex some of the research she did while writing this, both in science and psychology).
All of these elements add up to what is undoubtedly a fantastic fantasy novel, and one that can easily work as an introduction to the genre for people who aren’t as familiar with it, particularly readers who enjoy literary fiction for the way it raises awareness to issues but have been too intimidated by how complex fantasy can be. Jemisin’s novel is dark, scary, and eerily similar to our world despite the fact that it is fantasy, but it is not too difficult to enter. I highly recommend it.
Katie Writes 