The Fifth Season
★★★★★
Scattered relics of dead civilisations litter Earth’s geologically violent landscape, evidencing a cycle of extinction-level events called Seasons. Orogenes can harness environmental energy and stabilise the geology, but in the wrong hands, this power can be catastrophic. Consequently, they are ostracised from society, treated as sub-human, tightly controlled, and abused by institutions.
The story follows three Orogenes: Damaya, a child taken to be trained at the Fulcrum. Syenite, a young woman on her first field trip with one of the most powerful Orogenes. And Essun, hiding in society until her son is brutally murdered by his fearful father.
The first hundred pages were a slog as characters and backstory were established, the complex worldbuilding emerging through context with little exposition. Jemisin writes in the present tense and one character in the second person, which is unusual enough to be challenging. It also took me a while to realise the narratives weren’t contemporaneous, which I felt was unnecessarily obtuse. Jemisin does this to set up a reveal that brings the three threads tightly together, emphasising a personal cycle of stability and sudden destruction that mirrors the Seasons, but frankly, I don’t think it was worth the incoherence it created. For me, it would have been a more enjoyable book without the clever literary structures.
Jemisin delivers a deeply character-focused story following the journeys of the three women in a harsh world that brutally oppresses their kind. It’s tempered by unlikeable protagonists, particularly Essun whose humanity is largely eroded by the compounded trauma. Damaya’s ‘magic-school’ trope had little new to offer, but I enjoyed discovering how the world works alongside Syenite, and the found families of secondary characters were vividly realised. The finale brings together the threads, albeit slightly anticlimactically, setting up the next book and the world-defining meta mystery. By the end, the worldbuilding has paid off, delivering a complex society and history with interesting mysteries remaining to be explored.
