Three terrible things happen in a single day. Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on /roomfordebate.Add it: Goodreads Goodreads Summary: This is the way the world ends. 'The Fifth Season' is the most subtle, nuanced story you’ll ever read about giant explosions on an alien world. As we move between three characters, gradually uncovering the relationship between them, we realize that this tale of a fractured planet is also a study of the human psyche under constant pressure of imminent disaster. One of the greatest pleasures of reading 'The Fifth Season' is the narrative structure.

You can imagine how our society might evolve to become like the one in the 'Fifth Season.' This tale should sound familiar to any Earthling reading the news, threaded with increasing environmental threats and oppression of minorities. Trained to prevent quakes and volcanoes, the orogenes live as virtual prisoners in disaster-prevention facilities, feared and reviled by the ordinary “stills” who depend on them.

They are part of a minority group called orogenes that is carefully contained by the wealthy governments of the equatorial cities. The main characters, however, have mysterious powers over the laws of geophysics. Deviation from social strictures means exile, which is far worse than death. Everyone is assigned to a rigid social role in their community at birth and taught to cache food and supplies, just in case the next season is the fifth. The supercontinent they live on is rifting into two new continents, and massive gouts of ash are shooting into the atmosphere, changing the entire surface of the world and shattering civilization.Īgainst this backdrop of geological cataclysm, Jemisin introduces us to a culture whose foundational principles are rooted in disaster preparedness. In the novel, the inhabitants are facing one of the most awe-inspiring aspects of plate tectonics in their current fifth season. Every few centuries, its inhabitants endure what they call a “fifth season” of catastrophic climate change - sometimes caused by volcanic ash that blocks the sun, sometimes by toxic algal blooms, and sometimes by the mining industry. 'The Fifth Season' takes place on a planet with a single supercontinent – much like Earth's Pangea of some 250 million years ago – that’s periodically wracked by massive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Though we have plenty of stories about the physics of space travel and the biology of alien life, very few authors tackle the actual rocky, gassy, molten stuff that planets are made of.

The fifth season book 2