N. K. Jemisin

The Fifth Season

At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times) This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.

Lauren

Anthony

As much as I enjoy fantasy, a lot of the books I've read have had similar underlying themes or ideas in them. They aren't always cookie cutter. But when they are, at least I enjoy cookies.

The Fifth Season didn't feel like that to me. The book has equal parts post apocalypse as it does fantasy. I'm sure there are other post apocalyptic fantasy novels but this was a first for me.

The characters felt very unique. Their perspectives were not ones I've typically come to expect from a fantasy. On top of that, the "magic" felt original as well. Some folks are connected to the Earth, so much so that they can control it. That often ends up causing chaos in the world.

My favourite part of the book was how the three storylines converged in the end. By the time it happened, you may have been expecting it, but it was still entertaining for me. I'm becoming more interested in the way people move through phases of their lives. Jemisin did a great job weaving that into her story. It's always entertaining when different threads are weaved together to make one coherent storyline.

If you like fantasy or post apocalypse (leaning more on fantasy), I'd recommend The Fifth Season!

Originally written for my blog: https://anthonymorris.dev/books/the-f...

Katherine Yang

QUICK LAST-MINUTE LOG RN FOR READING CHALLENGE BUT OH MAN IT'S SO GOOD

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Worldbuilding plot twists sharp writing queer people trans people polyamory complex relationships lots of mystery and suspense and tension cool fights and adventures!!! The amount of detail, I can't even imagine the planning and genius. Really sticks in your mind after the last page (and then the first few again shh!). Immediately on to the next one!

Gavin

** spoiler alert **
           Good for a YA book. Interesting lore, good structure, inconsistent worldbuilding, portentous/glib tone, painful slang. 

Lore: the Earth hates us, which is why there is so much suffering. Includes a (true) evolutionary gradient:

  Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so He used the Seasons to shape us out of animals: clever hands for making things and clever minds for solving problems and clever tongues for working together and clever sessapinae to warn us of danger. The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since.

She later ruins this interesting cosmogony by clubbing you over the head with a message (that the lethal climate shock Seasons started after people polluted the world too much).

The world is a blend of GoT survivalist folk religion and apocalyptically cyclical climate, X-Men despised chaos mages, Battlestar breeding body horror, Earthsea folk magic and wu wei, and superstitious racism. It mostly works.

Structure: Three quite different focal characters, later shown to be the same person over time. I didn't spot the first unification coming, and it was satisfying.

She leaves the big Soylent Green reveal until page 108; until then you're left wondering if all the grey objectification is justified by the terrible security risk. 

She's pretty glib about the two communities outside the Empire, full of earthquake witches who are shown regularly freezing or nuking things when even mildly irked. The utopian pirate community is also heavily rose-tinted - sure, they do kill people in order to take their stuff in a time of terrible scarcity... but hey they're really sexually liberated and not racist at all.

Inconsistent: High Fantasy (subsisting commune agrarians, feudalism, omnipotent wizards) which also boasts C20th science, somehow. An in-universe history book describes one catastrophe as:

  "aerosolizing sufficient steam and particulate matter to trigger acidic rain and sky occlusion over the Somidlats..."

They have penicillin without an industrial revolution, electric lights before steam. Ordinary C15th cannon are an experimental wunderweapon to them. 
More: most births have some risk (<1%) of being a giant nuclear volcano generator, but the Evil Empire does nothing to control reproduction, and has the parents administer very insecure self-regulation. 

Pretentious portentousness:

  There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be... not.

Of a character which until about 10 pages earlier had been a despised / tolerated frenemy:

  now your eyes are drawn away from the horror that remains of your mentor, your lover, your friend...

I forgive Ada Palmer this style. But 1) she's not that bad; 2) she's aping the sentimentalist C18th, and 3) she has far greater philosophical sense.

Glib: 

  it turns out that the comm is called Meov, and the man who has stepped forward is Harlas, their headman. 
Also they're pirates.


  Syenite mispronounces vulgar words, inadvertently making them more vulgar, and makes instant friends of half the crew by doing so.


"lol, applause!"

Bad slang: "rogga", "comm", "orogeny" (every time, I thought "erogenous?"), really bad interjections (' "Evil, eating Earth", you whisper'; 'for shit's sake, she stilled a rusting volcano made by a broken obelisk'). The occasional good bit of slang (like "grits" for the young rock mages) is smothered in exposition: that's what she is now, an unimportant bit of rock ready to be polished into usefulness.... Better writers (Atwood or Le Guin or Banks) leave it up to you. Everything is spelled out here.

The book gets roundly worse in the second half, with two chapters (16 and 17) full of hollow plot devices and applause lights (Damaya only explores the Main building so she can drive the plot forward when the hollow character Binof arrives, immediately afterwards). Also arguably Innon, there to be objectified and let Jemisin write 'good sex' scenes.

Lots of Representation: polyamory, transgenderism, a dozen skin colours. Of course, fantasy doesn't represent anything, so strictly speaking that's a misnomer. It doesn't matter what the ethnic demographics of your lava-world are, relative to ours; you can have as much or as little typical sexuality etc as you like, any colour can be a minority, as long as it makes sense in that world. Do the choices of identities fit Jemisin's world? Is Tonkee's transgenderism, among feudalism, a personal idiosyncrasy? A hormone thing? A magic thing? We're given no reason for any of the identities she introduces to celebrate. But it mostly doesn't get in the way.


Jemisin fumbles the "in a corrupt world, lawful complicity or violent revolution?" angle. At least in this instalment, there's little acknowledgment that killing an entire city because a handful of people in its government committed atrocities isn't on: 'He's not crazy at all, and he never has been' 
"what right do worlds built on oppression and genocide have to exist?", asks one reviewer. Well, 'worlds' (institutions) don't have rights, people do: and people have a right to not suffer harm, e.g. the harm of having a great big earthquake dropped on you.

Maya Johnson

Andrea Navarrete

Entertaining.
I want to give more stars, but the thing is that, although I liked the characters, I found them extremely hard to connect with /: 
The plot was interesting, but I figured out what was going to happen like 5 or 6 chapters i, which is a big downer for me.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel Book 1 in the record-breaking triple Hugo-Award-winning trilogy ***One of Time Magazine's top 100 fantasy books of all time*** ***Shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Kitschies, Audie and Locus Awards*** ***A New York Times Notable Book and the inaugural Wired.com book club pick *** THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS . . . FOR THE LAST TIME. IT STARTS WITH THE GREAT RED RIFT across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. IT STARTS WITH DEATH, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. IT STARTS WITH BETRAYAL, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. 'Astounding' NPR 'Amazing' Ann Leckie 'Breaks uncharted ground' Library Journal 'Powerful' io9 'Elegiac, complex, and intriguing' Publishers Weekly 'Intricate and extraordinary' New York Times 'Brilliant' Washington Post The Broken Earth trilogy is complete - beginning with The Fifth Season, continuing in The Obelisk Gate (Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel) and concluding with The Stone Sky (Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Nebula Award). Also by N. K. Jemisin: The Inheritance trilogy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms The Broken Kingdoms The Kingdom of Gods The Dreamblood Duology The Killing Moon The Shadowed Sun

The Broken Earth, Book 1, WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD

I liked the way the story was told from three perspectives of the same person but from three different points in time. As the story flowed, they left more and more hints as to what was to come and you get more understanding of who Essun is. I felt more compassion for her as Cyanite as her world is truly uprooted in many ways. I still have a lot of questions about the world/Lore but overall I really enjoyed this book and will probably continue the series. I enjoyed the fact that it wasn't the usual "elves, dwarves, dragons, etc" type of fantasy. The different classes of "people" intrigue me the most. A very enjoyable read.

Laura Newell

Jamieson

this book is spectacular. smart, clever, well crafted, well timed, full of great characters and great scenes. I love fantasy but it lets me down a lot. Sometimes I feel it's the same plot rehashed, over and over. The Fifth Season is unlike anything else I have ever read. No wonder it's so popular, and N.K Jemisin won not one, not two, but THREE Hugo awards for this trilogy. 


  But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.” 


At first this book is hard to get into. it throws you a whole bunch of terminology and plot with little explanation. On top of that, one of the perspectives is in second person point of view, which is not my favourite. But you've just gotta stick with it, because it'll be all worth it. The payoff in this book is unbelievably good and turned what I hated in the beginning to something I completely adored. 

So it takes a little bit to get moving, but when it hits it’s stride it is truly un-put-downable. N.K Jemisin throws us straight into the Stillness, a world that experiences semi-regular apocalyptic events. At the beginning of this book, the end of the world is starting, but this apocalypse is looking to be a lot worse then the previous ones.

From here we follow three main characters: Essun, a woman who’s son has been murdered by her husband, and is now trying to find him and her missing daughter. Damaya, an Orogene (magic user) taken by the Guardians to learn to control her abilities and Syenite, a level four Orogene who is sent on assignment with Alabaster, one of the most powerful Orogene’s alive. 

I really liked how N.K Jemisin interwove these characters stories and gave each their own unique development. At first I didn’t like Essun’s chapters, because they’re in second person, but they soon became really interesting and I didn’t even notice the tense.

Syenite was my favourite character, and her storyline with Alabaster was also my favourite. I loved that this book mostly followed strong women and also that there was a large focus on diversity within this world. Fantasy is notorious for being unrepresentative but N.K Jemisin’s world is very inclusive. 

N.K Jemisin does an amazing job at making you CARE about these characters. As the story continued I found myself more and more invested in their lives, and my heart BROKE when certain things happened to them. I also think these characters have a lot of depth and potential, and N.K Jemisin presents characters who subvert tropes and explores multiple sides of various characters.

Finally, I have to say there is a romance in here that KILLED ME. IT KILLED ME DEAD. This is a polyamorous relationship and oh my god ,, I loved it so much. It was truly WHAT I DESERVED. 


  “But human beings, too, are ephemeral things in the planetary scale. The number of things that they do not notice are literally astronomical.”


One thing I loved about the plot of this book was the subversion of the typical magic user trope. In this world, magic users are the oppressed class in society. This felt very different to typical fantasies, and I liked how N.K Jemisin was able to create a dichotomy between the power of these people, and the hopelessness of their situation. It was interesting how Jemisin constructed this power relationship and for me was one of the most intriguing parts of the plot/world.

I genuinely think N.K Jemisin has come up with such an innovative and unique plot line, and this made my appreciation for this book grow a lot. I think we all get tired of seeing certain plots reused but N.K Jemisin made everything fresh. There were so many "oh my god" moments in this book, because N.K Jemisin is clever. She understands how to play with your expectations and then totally undermine them. 

I am so glad I finally picked this book up at first I was so unsure, I even thought about dnf'ing it. I am so glad I stuck with it. It has become of the most intriguing, most unique, and most clever fantasies I have ever read. And I am literally embarrassed I haven't started the second book yet, because I just feel this is going to get better and better. 


  “For all those that have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.” 


This is the most iconic dedication, we are blessed

natalie

“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.”


I had a hard time rating this book because while it was enjoyable, I also found myself bored or confused many times. Some parts of the book made me want to rate it four stars, other parts made me want to rate it three stars. 

This book is confusing; to me at least. There were a lot of explanations for the world it takes place in, but a lot of other factors that fantasy novels have that made my head hurt; descriptions for example. Usually, a description is easy enough for me to at least make a solid picture of, even if it wasn't necessarily what the author had in mind, but for this book, I could barely form an image. Of course, I'm not blaming the author, it was just how my experience went. 

Despite all that, I think the world and the plot are great. Very creative in my opinion, as I haven't seen anything else like it. 

Hopefully, the rest of the series satisfies me more.

An amazing start to the series. There are some innovative concepts here that make for a really compelling read. Definitely not your standard fantasy/SF fare.

Kyle Sawatsky

Shona Tiger

Sade A

Alright i'm just going to say it. I'm torn on the rating for this book on the one hand i feel it's a comfortable 3.5 stars on the other hand it feels like an awesome 4 star rating.

So hear me out this book has a lot of really positive things going for it:

The writing was AMAZING. Jemisin weaves magic with her words like there's not much else i can add to that (Fun fact: i actually thought the writing was weird when i initially picked the book up about 2 years ago. pfft what do i know right?). Without too many clever words, Jemisin creates a world you'll want to go behind the curtains and experience.
PoV's: Jemisin's work employs more than one literary type of story telling. First person and not first person (lol i didn't pay that much attention in literature class, sorry) I'm always in awe of authors who can successfully carry readers along with a first person PoV. More often than not you come off feeling like a bystander in this story but in this case Jemisin immerses you completely in Essun's story. Right off the bat she wants you to feel a connection to Essun, she tells you:
"You are she. She is you. You are Essun" 
as you go on this journey with Essun, every "I" every "YOU" where the character Essun is concerned speaks to the reader as if you were sharing her struggles and pain. From the word go, Jemisin wants you to connect with this character and her writing doesn't disappoint in immersing you in this story.

Diverse Characters: You know i admit i've never really examined closely or been bothered a whole lot by the fact that most book characters tend to be a certain race, certain sexual orientation and all the other little things that come with having type cast characters. But whoa, this book was a Rainbow (hint hint) of diversity and it was beautiful and i absolutely loved it. Definitely going to make a more conscious effort to pick up more books like this.

Now that i've been through all the good parts i'm wondering why i was considering 3.5 star rating. What is wrong with me??.
I will say that because this is book 1 i suppose, this is an introduction of sorts, a feel your way into the world and while there isn't an over load of information, things do get mighty strange and somewhat confusing sometimes especially when there's all the geological talk going on. Not a lot mind you, so that's good.

P.S: If you get stuck on trying to imagine the powers i just tended to think of Orogeny as Earth Bending's crazy scientific relative.

All in all a truly beautiful book, you won't regret picking up.

Rachel Kanyid

Okay, at first I didn't care for this very much.. It flowed strangely and I wasn't following the story-line very well, but then the further I progressed the more it captivated me and things started to align and make sense. I will definitely be checking out the next book!

tina

3.5 
I'm so conflicted by this book because I really appreciate the unique concept, the interesting characters, and even the structure of the story even though that was something that I was bothered by in the first few chapters. But it took sooooo long for me to care about what was happening. I literally almost dnf'ed this book. However, once I did started caring, I flew through it and read like 200 pages in one day (which is a big deal to me). Idk but I think I am still interested enough to read the second book, especially since there were still so much left unanswered in this book, and mayhaps I'll like it more.

Becky A

I know I am basically the last person in the entire world to read this book but holy crap it's so good, and I'm glad I waited until the rest of the series is out because that's now my weekend plan. WOW.

Also, (view spoiler)[given the thing with the moon and the overall post-apocalyptic-ness, I feel like THIS book is giving me what I WANTED out of that crappy last 200 pages of Seveneves, tbh (hide spoiler)].

Ryan LaFerney

The Fifth Season is the start of a multi-award-winning fantasy series and it’s easy to see why. Groundbreaking in many ways, the book plots fully rounded characters in a fully grounded world. Its intricately constructed narrative will surprise you and leave you hanging out for more (although admittedly it is a bit of a challenging read). It was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016. It is the first volume in the Broken Earth series and is followed by The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky. 

 It's the tale of an alternate earth called the Stillness, which is plagued by constant seismic activity. This leads to frequent near-extinction events called "Fifth Seasons" that keep humans on their toes. The evidence of past civilizations litters the planet -- ruined cities, incomplete 'stonelore' handed down from earlier generations, and strange obelisks that float through the atmosphere like low-altitude satellites and serve no apparent purpose. The civilization that we meet in this book, the Sanze Empire, has survived for centuries by harnessing the power of orogenes -- people born with an innate ability to control their environment. The orogenes can stop earthquakes or start them. They can save cities, or draw power from living creatures and "ice" them. Their powers are terrifying yet essential, so the empire develops a caste of Guardians who have the power to neutralize the orogenes when necessary. The orogenes are held in contempt and called "roggas" by ordinary humans. Despite all their power, they cannot control their own lives. They are either hunted down and destroyed or sent to the Fulcrum to be trained and used by the empire.

“The Fifth Season” brings us to the end of the world in three different times, with three orogene women at different stages of life and loss. Throughout the book we follow the journeys of three women who are in different stages of life and who reside in different parts of the Stillness. We follow: Essun ( a middle-aged woman with two young children living in a small southern comm named Tirimo. Secretly, she is an orogene, a human with the ability to manipulate earth and stone by absorbing or redirecting heat and energy from elsewhere); Damaya ( a young girl in a northern comm, recently discovered by her parents to be an orogene); and Syenite ( a rising orogene star in the Fulcrum who is forcibly partnered with Alabaster, the most powerful living orogene, in order to conceive a child with him). The way Jemisin switches back and forth between these three characters, simultaneously weaving a story about the ending of their worlds and the social and political oppression they face, is genius. This plays into the novel’s structure, which I can’t say too much about, because it would lessen its impact. Let’s just say this novel unfolds in a way you never saw coming and is the equivalent of a slow building doom metal riff. The manner in which the narrative is constructed is bewildering at first, but it definitely rewards continued reading. Give the book and the story time to grip you, and you’ll become immersed. It’s a challenging read, make no mistake. This is not your dad’s escapist fantasy paperbacks.

Jemisin is fantastic for mythology and mythology building, but what is best about this book is the sense of long history and cycles and the deep feeling like it is all headed somewhere huge. 

This is a story for our times. And yet, it is also timeless. It is about the brokenness of earth in the literal and metaphorical sense. Nature in the Stillness can kill. So can its political and societal systems of oppression. But in Jemisin’s world, the very fact that orogenes -- people born with an innate ability to control their environment - exist, is cause to be hopeful. They just need to find a way to overthrow the Sanze Empire.

Izza

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 Shortlisted for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Nebula, Kitschies, Audie and Locus Awards The inaugural Wired.com book club pick THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS . . . FOR THE LAST TIME. IT STARTS WITH THE GREAT RED RIFT across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. IT STARTS WITH DEATH, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. IT STARTS WITH BETRAYAL, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

ashley

Aditi

4.5

This book is fairly hard work during the first 40 pages, then starts to pull the reader along quickly. This is a really political book, and that contributes to the work the reader must do, and the narrative style is unique too. The rewards are in plenty.

eliz

4.5

"Obey the lore, make hard choices, and maybe when the Season ends there will be people who remember how civilization should work."

this is that type of book that will always be at its best at first read as you start to bind the puzzle pieces together as you flip through the gripping chapters. such a smart approach of shifting perspectives. intricate. excellent narration style. hooked till the last chapter. currently devastated.

excerpts:
p. 2 "Yumenes is unique because here alone have human beings dared to build not for safety, not for comfort, not even for beauty, but for bravery."
p. 226 "Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind."
p. 318 "The history don't say what they're afraid of."
p. 418 "It's a gift if it makes us better. It's a curse if we let it destroy us. You decide that."

Montgomery Pierce

I'm still not sure that anything I can write here can adequately unpack, dissect, and discuss the brilliance that was The Fifth Season, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I finished reading it a couple of days ago, and I don't think that I will stop thinking about it for a long, long time. 

If there's ever a book that combines phenomenal world building, poignant character development and characters, and untouchable commentary that spans systems of oppression, racism, power imbalances, and climate decline, it's The Fifth Season. N.K. Jeminisin is a veritable powerhouse of a writer. Her prose is as tight and beautiful as her story is mesmerizing. It's gritty. It's dark. But in terms of how well a fantasy can take something that is truly as dark as systematic oppression and slavery and adequately handle its complexities and nuances, that grittiness and darkness is every bit earned and used to its fullest potential. Parts of this book made me put it down, because for as unique and utterly alien the world of the Stillness is, it is so harrowingly real that it's hard not to act viscerally when reading. This wasn't to The Fifth Season's detriment; I think the point was to react, and to react deeply. 

Syenite and Alabaster are easily two of my favorite characters in any fiction, hands down. They are wonderfully complex, interesting people. Their relationship is something that I don't think I've seen done half as well elsewhere. When I think of dynamic characters, N.K. Jemisin's have settled at the top as some of the best. 

Final Thoughts? This book belongs on everyone's bookshelves. Between the amazing and often daring writing, the world building, the characters, and the themes, The Fifth Season is above and beyond anything I ever expected when I started reading it. Add on to that how seamless queerness and polyamory were included and you've got the perfect book. Easiest five stars I've ever given.

Janice Hopper

Excellent world-building. I love stories that actually do something NEW in SF or fantasy, and this novel qualifies. It's also the story of a woman, and a man, and a world like, and not like, our own, and the ability to make super volcanoes happen with your mind.

I liked it quite a bit. It does kinda end in the middle of the story, with many things unresolved, so be aware of that. 

I should have written this review right after I read it, because I just finished Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn West, and my head it totally full of that right now. :)

Didi Chanoch

I came to THE FIFTH SEASON late. The book's size, and the fact that I wasn't able to buy an audio copy, kept me from reading it for quite some time. But once it became one of the Hugo award nominees that weren't the result of a slate - the only one I hadn't already read - I redoubled my efforts and managed to get Amazon to sell me an audio copy.

I shouldn't have waited this long. 

By now, you're likely to have heard of THE FIFTH SEASON. You've heard that's it's powerful, and dark, and that it is epic fantasy that's original and fresh. And I'm here to tell you that it's all true. The novel is bleak, but it is a novel about the breaking of the world. It's an apocalypse novel and a post apocalypse novel and a pre apocalypse novel all in one. But it is also incredibly human, and powerful. Alongside Kameron Hurley's Worldbreaker Saga, Jemisin's The Broken Earth is remaking epic fantasy into a genre of greater depth, power and diversity. This isn't escapism - not that I don't love escapism - but stark, forceful reality, with magic. It's a must read.

The Fifth Season

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