The Fifth Season — N.K. Jemisin (2015) Hugo Award 2016
The Obelisk Gate — N.K. Jemisin (2016) Hugo Award 2017
The Stone Sky — N.K. Jemisin (2017) Hugo and Nebula Awards 2018
The Broken Earth Trilogy is a rollercoaster of creative fantasy. Its unexpected twists keep the reader moving forward, though its main characters are not particularly engaging.
My guess is that author N.K. Jemisin had a stupendous thunderbolt idea of the history of an alternative world populated by some very inventive groups of human-like beings. This world suffers epochs of damage, change and mass death instigated by the conflicts and interactions of these groups. The epochs are fantastically created and developed.
But, Jemisin needed to find individual characters to populate the world, and these characters do not quite have the personal resonance to match the brilliance of the setting.
The world that is called Earth in this 1400 page trilogy is nearly identical with our world. The behavior, the forms of language, the commerce, and even the social structures are nearly the same, albeit the era is more like our pre-industrial age.
The main difference is that this world has regularly suffered environmentally catastrophic Seasons brought about by massive destructive substrate events, such as supervolcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and natural gas eruptions. These events usually set off a series of species extinction, agricultural failure, and environmental collapse that kill off major portions of the population. Each Season wipes out the urban and rural infrastructures, and the surviving population is forced, generation by generation, to begin again to rebuild and re-generate the next society. There are at least a dozen Seasons in 12,000 years of recorded history, each with its own unique form of destruction and rebirth. Each emerging group of survivors adds to the lore of survival techniques to aid future generations at surviving the next inevitable Season.
This novel, of course, has its own, most catastrophic of all, Season, and the plot follows the lives of the main characters prior to and during this Season.
A particularly compelling concept is the hint, tantalizingly developed over the course of the three volumes, of the existence of ancient civilizations – deadcivs. These deadcivs pre-date all lore and knowledge, such that the existence of these civilizations of billions of people, with incredibly advanced technology, are virtually unknown. However, there are some groups of isolated beings who appear have knowledge of an inscrutably distant past. But, I won’t spoil it any more than to say that these deadcivs and those who remember them are the best and most memorable parts of the books.
Jemisin is really onto something with her concept of deadcivs. It is just amazing how quickly we, as human beings with fantastic capabilities of memory and communication, forget our past. I don’t mean forgetfulness as in the cliché that history repeats itself. I mean that we really, utterly, forget the past completely. Why should it take scouring by archaeologists to discover Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the cave art of Europe, or the Olmec of Mesoamerica? Even when discovered, we know next to nothing about the people of these cultures. How do we lose knowledge of our history so quickly? How many great and powerful prior civilizations – each of which surely reveled in their might and renown — are completely unknown to us?
My take is that the culture of war and identity is one of the only constants in our world. Every civilization will eventually be sacked, and to discredit the merit of the sacked society the victors cannot resist deliberately wiping away the monumental structures and belief systems of the defeated regime. One difference between our world and Jemisin’s Earth is that its history does not include frequent warfare; therefore, lore survives for thousands of years. But not even a lack of warfare can avoid, over the course of many tens of thousands of years, the complete loss of memory of the deadcivs.
I loved this historical perspective of the Broken Earth Trilogy, and fortunately the dynamics of the deadcivs powered the plot of The Stone Sky, the last of the three books.
Our main character is introduced as a rural girl named Damaya who is born with the inherited powers of an orogene, which permit her and others of her kind to mentally manipulate the substrate of the earth in ways that are both destructive and constructive. They can kill others, sometimes impulsively, by mentally reconstructing the surrounding terrain. Orogenes are relentlessly discriminated against by non-orogenic humans, apparently for cultural reasons born of a fear of otherness as evidenced by the powers of the orogenes. Damaya is removed from her village and taken to the main city to reside with other orogenes. The orogenes are isolated from others, bred to maintain a population of orogenes, and trained to use their powers for the public good. Damaya has unusually strong orogenic powers, and as she matures she changes her name to Syenite. Syenite is a self-centered and cynical woman, given to erratic bursts of anger. Later, on the eve of a Season, she blends in with a Comm (small rural town) as the re-named Essun, a married mother of two.
Whether as Syenite or Essun, she essentially resents just about everyone she meets, orogene or not. We are, I believe, expected to sympathize with her, due to the culture of discrimination and the social isolation suffered by orogenes. But, this didn’t offset my weariness as she raged against the world.
She connects with another powerful, equally anti-social, orogene named Alabaster. They have plenty of angry arguments about just everything. It gets to the point where the reader tunes out the conversation, while being propelled forward by the worldwide catastrophic events.
Weirdly, and somewhat awkwardly, the third-person narration of the book is interrupted periodically by a second-person narrative. Syenite/Essun’s story is occasionally told by a first-person narrator, Hoa, a stone-eater (a type of being) who takes Essun under his care. This change in narration works, because Hoa’s personal perspective brings warmth to his relationship with her, and his vigilant protection of her helps propel otherwise unsympathetic characters forward.
To say much more of the plot or the characters would be unfair to readers. I cannot resist, however, noting the unexpected role of the Moon, and I have to believe this was a tip of the hat by Jemisin to Asimov’s Foundation SF series.
The books certainly surface issues of social policy – of motherhood, discrimination, sexual orientation, and violence. One could take this social culture as an allegorical tale of our world’s comparable problems, and as the trilogy’s dominant take-away, but Jemisin gives the reader enough room to embrace the issues or to move on with the adventure.
At times, the events seem deliberately obtuse, perhaps to create surprise later when secrets are revealed. It causes one to want to read the books again to seek clarification of all the dense, obscure twists and turns. One could speed-read a second time by skimming through some dead-end subplots that turned out not be very important to the main story.
Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy is a bit uneven, perhaps because it so ambitiously reaches to create a vast landscape, and thereby has some gaps, but it is a creative and entertaining trilogy of novels.
Bob Fall 