First Impressions Review: The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin
I had heard amazing things about this author and book series for some time, and I’m glad to say it is very much deserved. This is technically fantasy but has aspects of science fiction, since the magical abilities are linked to a person’s brain structure and can interface with various technologies. Either way, Jemisin creates a unique dystopian world unlike anything I’d read before, and her characters are very compelling.
The world of these novels is a very tectonically active one. The continent ironically known as “the Stillness” is subject to regular earthquakes and volcanoes. In extreme cases, these can lead to a “fifth season” - a time when ash-clouds fill the air and disrupt the climate or other earth processes for years at a time. This has clearly been going on for a long time, as flora and fauna have partly adapted to it: otter-like creatures that can switch from eating leaves to eating meat when food is scarce, melons that are produced above or below-ground depending on the conditions, and so on. Among humans, a modest percentage are orogenes (derogatorily called roggas1), who can redirect energy, particularly that which comes from the heat of the earth. They are unlikely to be killed in a tectonic event because can use this power when under threat to redirect or settle the shakes even if not fully conscious.
You would think this would make orogenes highly valued members of society, and indeed many are employed in stabilizing key areas or clearing harbors. But they can also cause earthquakes or draw energy for their powers from the heat of living things (literally “icing” anyone around them), which means that many people fear them and consider them cursed. A young rogga is likely to be beaten to death before the Guardians find them and bring them to the imperial capitol for training. As we start to get to know this world better, we learn more and more about how oppressive this empire is, particularly to roggas. That is a risky thing, of course, because an oppressed people will want to rebel, and a rogga in pain has the power to break the world. Which is exactly what happens at the start of book 1!
1. Though I’m going to use that term here as they start to reclaim the slur over the course of the first book.
The Fifth Season
This book has a really fascinating structure that adds some cool twists and turns that I will try not to spoil. For instance, we follow multiple characters, but I soon started to suspect that A) they aren’t all in the same timeline, and B) some of them might be different versions of the same person. It was very satisfying to see the storylines converge and the whole picture emerge! When we are with the character of Essun, a rogga whose husband has killed her son because of the child’s abilities and kidnapped her daughter just as a particularly bad “season” begins, the book uses second-person language (“you do X”), which is quite effective in getting the reader to feel what she is feeling.
Jemisin has a background in psychology and counseling; that – and, of course, her experience as a black woman in America – is probably coming through in her extremely convincing portrayals of characters dealing with repeat trauma. By the time she is done with this volume, you understand exactly why our main character acts the way she does, as well as why one of the other characters sets off a potential extinction-level event at the beginning. Even though he is at heart a gentle man, what the empire did to his kids alone - children he was forced to sire for them - would be enough! The amount of “We have to do this to you for your own good” and “Put the chains on yourself to show you deserve to live” the roggas get fed is chilling. But you also know that this character isn’t insane, and he wants his people to be free, not dead…so you suspect he has a plan to deal with the fallout.
Two elements that are introduced in this book to be followed up on later are the obelisks and the stone eaters. Mysterious obelisk-shaped objects hang in the sky over the stillness, and sometimes move around. Everyone figures they’re just some remnant of a dead civilization, but some roggas are able to draw power from them. The stone eaters are a mysterious intelligent species that live largely underground and can take on a humanoid appearance. Some seem to be aligning themselves to or claiming particular roggas, but as yet it is not explained why.
While this world doesn’t mirror ours too closely (having a single supercontinent like Pangea, for instance), there is a similar diversity in human appearance. Many of the main characters are black or brown because the continent is centered on the equator, but there are people with lighter skin or hair who hail from near the poles. There are some features unique to this world as well, such as “ash blow hair”, which is thick and acid resistant and can be used to filter ash, or ice-white eyes, both of which are valued by the dominant race, the Sanzeds. Women don’t seem to be systemically oppressed, and homosexuality or bisexuality seem to be accepted in a broad sense, although not necessarily respected in those selected for breeding. One of the main characters actually breaks down in tears when he finally gets the chance to select his own partner again. One fairly major character is a very nerdy (possibly autistic?) trans woman – I adored her, though neither trait was evidently much appreciated by her aristocratic family!
The Obelisk Gate
The timeline in this book is more linear, and we find out who has been addressing Essun as “you” – which connects to some fascinating revelations about the stone-eaters. We also get to see what’s happened to Essun’s daughter, who is still alive and traveling toward the south pole. Getting Nassun’s perspective is heartbreaking, since as a child she of course couldn’t understand why Essun was so harsh in training her to hide and control her orogeny, or why her father – the parent who seemed to love her more – can’t accept that part of her, and would even kill her little brother over it.
We get to see more of an unusual underground community called Castrima that welcomes roggas – though that is a somewhat unstable situation! – and how they respond to the challenges of a Season. The nerdy trans woman, Tonkee, can’t resist investigating the comm’s dead-civ technology, which puts its rogga leader Ykka on edge. This results in an unfortunate incident, but the damage to Tonkee gets repaired and she and acquires a girlfriend – so all’s well that ends well on that front, I guess! Essun re-unites with another main character from the first book in Castrima. He is dying but teaches her more about how to control the obelisks, and about a course of action that could prevent any future Seasons. Nassun, meanwhile, is with another character who both cared about Essun and was her oppressor…but who seems to be a changed person in some key respects. In exploring that, we learn more about what Guardians really are.
The Stone Sky
At the start of the story, Castrima is under attack by mid-latitudes community aided by stone-eaters. Essun is able to save her new community, but at great cost to herself…and to them, since the battle renders their cave unusable. The Castrimans have to go on the march through the falling ash to find their enemy’s city, which should now be empty. In the process of using the obelisks, Essun discovered her daughter was connecting to them as well. For much of the rest of the book, Essun and Nassun are in a race to get to a place and time where they can put the obelisk gate into action. But their purposes in doing so are diametrically opposed, bringing the extremely powerful mother-daughter pair into conflict.
This is the book where we find out who the stone-eaters were before they were stone-eaters, and the truth about the origin of humanity’s conflict with Father Earth. Jemisin does a terrific job evoking the depths of time in this book. We’ve already seen dead civilization on top of dead civilization. Now we see what the world was like in the time the obelisks – one of the oldest relics we knew about, previously – were build…and it is also built on an older civilization! Intriguingly, the buildings and tech of the obelisk-builders are all highly organic: people grow stinging nematocysts on their windowsills to deter thieves, the sewage treatment plants use actual plants, the “vehimals” are means of transport bio-engineered from an animal base, and so on. But the things that are “ancient” ruins to them look like what we live in: “dead” angular buildings built of brick or stone. However, even though this civilization hold life to be sacred…that isn’t necessarily a good thing, the way they mean it! Living things are the source of magic, and magic is their “oil”.
The exploration of Nassun and Essun’s strained mother-daughter relationship is really good, and the way their conflict resolves is bittersweet. I just wish we could have had a bit more of Essun’s relationship with other characters. What we got was good, especially the bits with Ykka, and Essun's re-union with another Fulcrum-trained orogene. We didn’t see quite enough of her new doctor boyfriend to really feel that relationship, though Essun wasn’t really letting herself feel it, so that may be appropriate. However, I was disappointed not to get more than a few snippets of Tonkee’s cleverness and infectiously obsessive interest in technology.
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This series does something very interesting with the ideas of prejudice and exploitation and the conflicts they create. The Stillness doesn’t really have sexism, or racism, or homophobia in the way that our world does, but the treatment of the orogenes incorporates aspects of all these phenomena: They are treated as monstrous or not-properly-human for a trait that they were born with; they are gas-lit with messages that they should be grateful to be used instead of just killed; that trait also gives them intrinsic power – not a feature of the real-world marginalized people on an individual level, but women and workers or enslaved people do usually have numbers on their side - and their oppressors are terrified the oppressed will realize they can use that power against them. In reading this, we understand the rage felt by those who realize the extent of the wrongs done, and their desire to tear the whole world down before letting that continue. But I like that the story ends with a message that what was and is isn’t necessarily what must be. Even if your civilization and its predecessor were based on a foundation of oppression…other choices could have been made and could still be made. The community of Castrima is an example of one wobbly step in the right direction.
Overall recommendation: I’d been slow to pick up this series because I couldn’t tell from the blurb on “The Fifth Season” or the rather vague reviews whether I’d like it. I now can say that it is EXCELLENT, and that the reviews tend to be vague because of how important it is to let the reader experience the story for themselves. I hope that here I’ve been able to give some hints about the things I liked without giving away any of the major twists.
