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May. 26th, 2016 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Fifth Season is by far the most depressing of N.K. Jemisin's books and I think I like it best of all the ones I've read? Perhaps in fact because it is the most depressing, like, everything is certainly terrible and I and N.K. Jemisin wholeheartedly agree on everything that is terrible, which is a change from past N.K. Jemisin books where some things are definitely terrible and some things are just the author's id angling a few degrees off from mine in small but significant ways.
...I really want to emphasize that everything in The Fifth Season CERTAINLY IS terrible though. Like, a small child dies on the third page, and things go downhill from there. The apocalypse is kind of the least of it.
The Fifth Season is actually set in a world (which I suspect is probably far-future our world, but that's not confirmed) where smallish geological apocalypses happen every few hundred years and people have sort of learned to cope with them. In one strand of the book, a woman named Essun lives through the start of what's looking like an extremely epic apocalypse, but is not so concerned about that as she is about the fact that her husband has just murdered her small son and run off with her small daughter into the apocalyptic night.
Essun is a secret orogene, a person with the power to manipulate geological forces. Orogenes are considered highly dangerous; they're hated and feared by the general population, and, if discovered, are liable to be murdered by mass mobs unless sent for training to an official centralized location called the Fulcrum where they learn to do important geological work on behalf of the proper human members of civilization. This system is definitely not coercive, abusive, or exploitative in any way!
In the two other threads of the book (not taking place during the apocalypse) a little girl named Damaya discovers she is an orogene and is brought to the Fulcrum on a road trip that is no fun at all, and a young orogene named Syenite is paired up with an extremely powerful but kind of batshit orogene named Alabaster for another road trip that is no fun at all. Essun's murderous-husband-hunting post-apocalyptic road trip is also kind of by its nature no fun at all for Essun, but she does get a creepy possibly-inhuman child and an eccentric scholarly genius hobo as travel buddies, who are both WAY more fun than Alabaster. (Tonkee the hobo genius is my favorite character in the book, possibly because she spends the least amount of time being miserable; this is especially nice because Tonkee is a transwoman and frequently trans characters are narratively assigned to be the most miserable. Though admittedly Alabaster, who is very beautiful and very tortured and very gay, is there on the other end taking up significantly more than his fair share of misery. Which, again, is kind of impressive in a book that starts with a woman mourning the death of a child.)
Anyway. It's a very good book, a very dark book, and a very unflinching book which is deeply concerned with the consequences of treating people as not-people. I super want to find out what happens next, though I don't expect it will be much happier than what came before.
...I really want to emphasize that everything in The Fifth Season CERTAINLY IS terrible though. Like, a small child dies on the third page, and things go downhill from there. The apocalypse is kind of the least of it.
The Fifth Season is actually set in a world (which I suspect is probably far-future our world, but that's not confirmed) where smallish geological apocalypses happen every few hundred years and people have sort of learned to cope with them. In one strand of the book, a woman named Essun lives through the start of what's looking like an extremely epic apocalypse, but is not so concerned about that as she is about the fact that her husband has just murdered her small son and run off with her small daughter into the apocalyptic night.
Essun is a secret orogene, a person with the power to manipulate geological forces. Orogenes are considered highly dangerous; they're hated and feared by the general population, and, if discovered, are liable to be murdered by mass mobs unless sent for training to an official centralized location called the Fulcrum where they learn to do important geological work on behalf of the proper human members of civilization. This system is definitely not coercive, abusive, or exploitative in any way!
In the two other threads of the book (not taking place during the apocalypse) a little girl named Damaya discovers she is an orogene and is brought to the Fulcrum on a road trip that is no fun at all, and a young orogene named Syenite is paired up with an extremely powerful but kind of batshit orogene named Alabaster for another road trip that is no fun at all. Essun's murderous-husband-hunting post-apocalyptic road trip is also kind of by its nature no fun at all for Essun, but she does get a creepy possibly-inhuman child and an eccentric scholarly genius hobo as travel buddies, who are both WAY more fun than Alabaster. (Tonkee the hobo genius is my favorite character in the book, possibly because she spends the least amount of time being miserable; this is especially nice because Tonkee is a transwoman and frequently trans characters are narratively assigned to be the most miserable. Though admittedly Alabaster, who is very beautiful and very tortured and very gay, is there on the other end taking up significantly more than his fair share of misery. Which, again, is kind of impressive in a book that starts with a woman mourning the death of a child.)
Anyway. It's a very good book, a very dark book, and a very unflinching book which is deeply concerned with the consequences of treating people as not-people. I super want to find out what happens next, though I don't expect it will be much happier than what came before.
