NK Jamisin creates a unique world in her Hugo award novel, The Fifth Season

cover of book, the fifth season, review by Markus McDowell

This Hugo award winner took me a while to become engaged. The first 50+ pages were interesting because the author had created an entire world. It was also interesting because this appears to be a world with one supercontinent which experiences periodic and devastating earthquakes, delineating “seasons” with all sorts of results to population, mass extinction, economies, flora and fauna changes, and the rise and fall of states. Sure, there is probably the old, tired message of “if we don’t take care of the earth, the future could be terrible,” but the author is not pounding a socio-political message that no one has not heard. Instead, she sticks to the speculative future.

But the world is more than ours, for there were different races—some who have “powers” to control elements of nature. It is never depicted as “magic,” but an ability to work with the forces of nature, avoiding the commonalities of modern fantasy novels.

It took me, at least, a while to understand the society, the caste system, and exactly what was happening geothermally, seismologically, and ecologically. The characters were interesting, but the point of view jumped around without any apparent reason: from limited third person (from the POV of a few different characters, which is fine and common) to a strange second person (which is almost never done, for good reason). I am open to literary experimentation, but the second person never seemed to have a literary purpose. It was quite jarring at times, and it is almost like the author gave up on it after a time.
However, through the last half of the novel, the varying strands of plot and characters begin to coalesce into a coherent whole. The reader is treated to some revelations and epiphanies about what went before, and exactly WHO some of these characters really are.

This is an ambitious book, and somewhat complicated. But for the reader who stays with it, it pays off. You might guess the connection between three of the characters sooner than I did, but you won’t see the purpose and meaning. The world-building aspect is excellent, and that alone would make me want to read the sequel if it were not the questions raised at the climax.