Kadomi reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Review of 'The Fifth Season' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Utterly amazing. This book makes up for all the mediocre stuff I have read this year. READ THIS BOOK!
Ahem. Now to a more detailed review. The Fifth Season is the first book in N.K. Jemisin's post-apocalyptic far future trilogy The Broken Earth. Due to natural disasters the world has changed, and there's only one super-continent now, called The Stillness. There is a lot of seismic activity on Earth, and there's always the looming danger of a Fifth Season, a post-apocalyptic winter when volcanic ash prevents sunlight, sometimes for months, sometimes many years. People gang together in towns that are called comms, storing up caches for a season, divided into a caste system of seven major castes. The safest area in the Stillness is the belt of cities at the equator, where Yumenes is the largest city in the world. In Yumenes there's the Fulcrum, a school of orogenes. Orogenes …
Utterly amazing. This book makes up for all the mediocre stuff I have read this year. READ THIS BOOK!
Ahem. Now to a more detailed review. The Fifth Season is the first book in N.K. Jemisin's post-apocalyptic far future trilogy The Broken Earth. Due to natural disasters the world has changed, and there's only one super-continent now, called The Stillness. There is a lot of seismic activity on Earth, and there's always the looming danger of a Fifth Season, a post-apocalyptic winter when volcanic ash prevents sunlight, sometimes for months, sometimes many years. People gang together in towns that are called comms, storing up caches for a season, divided into a caste system of seven major castes. The safest area in the Stillness is the belt of cities at the equator, where Yumenes is the largest city in the world. In Yumenes there's the Fulcrum, a school of orogenes. Orogenes have the natural ability to control seismic activity and kinetic energy, which makes their existence a blessing and a curse.
The story drops you in at the deep end straight away, with two individual events of importance. Someone sets off a Fifth Season at Yumenes on purpose, ringing in the end of the world. And our protagonist Essun comes home from work in her small comm, to find her husband has killed their 3-year old son and ran off with their daughter because they were orogenes, or roggas, as the common people call them. Essun, who is also an orogene and had been hiding this from everyone. She sets out to find her daughter and make her husband pay for the murder of their child.
In the course of the book, we learn how Essun, who is Fulcrum-trained, came to live in hiding, follow her and her companions along as the Fifth Season begins, and how the Fulcrum and the mysterious Guardians who control the orogenes work.
I cannot rave about this book enough, it's so goddamn good. I love Numenera, and The Fifth Season is so very very Numenera. It's science fantasy, as technology levels are low, but there are deadciv remnants everywhere, including mysterious obelisks that drift in the skies. It's a work of art how the story unfolds, from the eye-boggling beginning with zero exposition, and then everything comes together beautifully. Wonderfully complex characters, including a trans woman, bisexual relationships, seriously, everything that I hope for in a sci-fi novel in 2017.
READ THIS BOOK.
