I don’t read much fiction these days, but once in a while I do enjoy being carried off by a great story. The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, was a terrific end-of-summer escape from the daily horrors occurring all around the world. Not that The Fifth Season is all sweetness and light – far from it.

The Fifth Season
By N. K. Jemisin
Orbit, New York, 2015

The novel takes place on a seismically and volcanically active world called, with heavy irony, The Stillness. Every few hundred years or so, there’s a catastrophic “fifth season” of earthquakes and eruptions, darkened skies, crop failures and extreme hardship.

The inhabitants are used to it, sort of. They have special laws and special lore to guide them through these Seasons. They store food. They also rely on orogenes — hated, feared and enslaved people born with the mental power to quell the shakes and seal the volcanoes. (Orogeny is the geological process of mountain building that happens when two plates meet and press against each other.)

The Fifth Season tells the story of an orogene named Essen as she tries to track down her husband who has fled with their young daughter after brutally murdering their son during an especially destructive Season.

N. K. (Nora) Jemisin is a best-selling author of speculative fiction. She’s won multiple awards for her work, including three consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel, a Nebula Award, two Locas Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. The Fifth Season is book one of Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. It’s the first of her books that I’ve read.

The book could be a fictional companion to The Year Without Summer which describes the worldwide devastation caused by the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia.  

The Fifth Season also reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction story Nightfall which takes place on a planet bathed in constant sunlight because it’s located in the middle of a cluster of six suns. Every two thousand years, the suns align on one side of the planet and night falls. Unused to darkness, never having seen stars in the night sky, people go mad with fear and civilization collapses.

The similarities end there. Jemisin has created a complex world with a rich and layered history, peopled by characters of different races and cultures. She even provides appendices cataloging the history of previous Seasons and commonly used vocabulary. I was taken in by both the story itself and by the dazzling inventiveness of the world she’s created, like the community living inside a city-sized geode.

Since The Fifth Season is the first book of a trilogy, it leaves many questions unanswered. But I really enjoyed the book and the way various strands of the story came together in the end. I won’t go into as much detail as I usually do with nonfiction book reviews because, you know … spoilers.

I have some classes starting this Fall so I expect my reading will be confined to nonfiction for the next few months, but I’ll get back to fiction eventually. If you’ve read the whole trilogy and have any thoughts about how the remaining two books compare to the first, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading.