12 May, 2016

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, The Fifth Season is a sensational book: so gripping and exciting. But I also think it’s flawed. (As a joke before my notes begin: clearly Jemisin has never watched CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada and those commercials for a bank that I will not name. After reading the title, I was half hoping for a speculative fiction hockey novel.)


1. The most astounding thing I found in here was Jemisin’s ability to delve so deeply into both the macro and micro scales in such a short space—the whole book is 520 pages or so, but much of that is appendixes. By the end, without reading the appendixes, I had a massive amount of understanding about the fictional world, its history, and its peoples; as well as about each character.
—The worldbuilding is spectacular. She even deals with geological history, which is important because it shows how consistent, interconnected, and wholistic her world building is. Geological events spark, sustain, and star in the titular fifth seasons—long periods of ash and gas blocking out the sun, and volcanic activities which are clearly the biggest influence on world history for this fictional world. Geological features determine the survivability of every community from the capital of the empire down to the lowliest roadside wellhouse, both in a fifth season and in the peaceful interludes between them. Even roads’ locations, types of material used for building, and how to engineer a flexible ridgeline are determined by the geological activity. The fifth seasons cause everybody to be insular within their community, precise and formal outside their community, and paranoid preppers on a personal level. Cultures are arranged around use-castes that are determined by a person’s essential usefulness to a community during the many emergencies geology provides. These are just a few, general examples, but I could easily list more. On a world where geology is as active as this, it makes sense that the entire culture is changed from what we are, and those changes are rooted around the geology. This is the basic premise worked out brilliantly: whether the author’s initial premise was asking what a geologically active world would cause a culture to look like, or what would cause a culture repressed to this extent, she ended up with a well-built, complex world that is incredibly consistent—to the point where I can’t tell whether the geology or the culture came first in her mind.
—And the characters are all so tied into this world-building that they’re defined by the world they live in, whether they’re for or against the repression of culture. Jemisin’s characters couldn’t live anywhere but where they do. Well, maybe they could, but that’d be unlikely. I mean, we’ve got a cast of stone-eaters and geomancers—which fit this world precisely. And that’s not to say they don’t compare to us: when they’re not informing or being informed by the world, they’re going through struggles and emotions that are understandable and relatable. Finding out everything you trusted wasn’t actually trustworthy? Check. Finding the skillful and abrasive outsider’s views on things explanatory to your own mysteries? Check. Trusting people in the moment and asking questions after the fact? Also in here. Experiencing loss and trying to continue living? Yup, a few times. Making a mistake and endangering those you love? Of course. You get the idea. There is a lot in this novel—a lot of emotional experience. And each circumstance and action serves to explain characters to a degree that I feel like I know these as people.
—Jemisin doesn’t overwhelm the novel with an intro-info-dump, forced classroom scene, or overbearing explanatory character. Rather, spread throughout the whole novel is a mix of small explanations and hints injected directly into the action and dialogue of the plot. For instance, when Hoa reveals himself as a stone-eater, Essun consciously files that away for later discussion, moves on with the immediate concern, then gets to questioning Hoa a few chapters later. This is how Jemisin builds both the world and characters: details naturally springing out of the plot foreshadow brief explanations that come a few pages or chapters down the line. This is incredible worldbuilding without relying upon the “history of every lichen-covered rock between the Shire and Mt. Doom”. This is world-building with a purpose that complements and strengthens the discussions and plot within the novel, rather than distracting from it.
—In short, while culture and geology get all combined together, the characters form a third strand in the knot. The consistency and complexity through these three threads is astounding. If this book were a person I would be amazed at their intellectual rigor. If for nothing other than this world and character building, I will be reading more Jemisin.


2. Structurally, this is fantastic. At the start, there appears to be three characters. There are three chapter families, one for each of the main characters—Damaya the child, Syenite the young woman, and Essun the woman. Each chapter focuses on one of these characters and doesn’t include the other two. But as the book progresses, realization slowly dawns, then is confirmed, that all three are the same person, but in different stages of life. Jemisin does something amazing here by collating three narratives from a single character’s life, showing successive slices of each, and effectively telling three time periods simultaneously: Damaya’s present and future; Syenite’s past, present, and future; and Essun’s past and present. It’s amazing because once this fact is confirmed in one of the last chapters, my mind immediately crawled backwards and forwards in attempting to piece everything together and that was an enjoyable puzzle. Each of the storylines works towards the fault line where Damaya becomes Syenite, where Syenite becomes Essun, and where Essun has to come to terms with being Syenite and Damaya as well. In this way, each of the three plots is engaging and exciting: even after the end is know in the sense that Damaya becomes Syenite who becomes Essun, I enjoy finding out the specifics. The whole novel has a prologue that I reread because it hints at things and contains specifics and mysteries not explained until much later. There are also two short interludes where the author breaks the fourth wall in the second person—but the first one could be from Hoa’s point of view. These help as pauses in the story to give the reader a brief respite to put all the pieces together, to foreshadow the coming chapters, and to let Jemisin drive home a few things these talking about.


3. The writing is all over the place. Some things I like, some I don’t. Really, there are four things that I want to discuss.
—First, the one everybody talks about: some of this novel’s chapters are written in the second person. At first, I was hoping that the novel would be about three characters, each one’s chapters written in a different person. It ended up being about one character but told from two different points of view—one written in third person and the other in second. That was clever and interesting. But how cool would it have been to have it turn out the way I was hoping? I was disappointed, but this disappointment is only because I expected too much. My fault for being disappointed, not hers. So I’m not judging the voices negatively—Jemisin wrote both effectively and it is a cool tactic the way she used it.
—Similarly, the fourth-wall breaking was fine. There are points in the second person portions where it’s ambiguous whether Jemisin is talking to the reader or Essun, and that ambiguity helps the reader understand what Jemisin is questioning through the plot. There isn’t too many bits where Jemisin talks to the reader directly, so it’s not overdone in the sense of explaining the whole book directly and making the narrative itself feel unimportant. She keeps a good balance between forcing the question on the reader and letting the reader come to it themselves by breaking the fourth wall so rarely.
—Third, she mixes colloquial and rare word choices in a way that doesn’t excite me, but I don’t really hate it either. It seems like some of the word choices don’t fit the tone or setting of the novel. For instance, on the same page she uses the words comm and ire—ire being a formal word choice, and comm being the colloquial abbreviation for community. This is fine, on the surface, but I don’t enjoy how much of the colloquial is within the novel. At my most pessimistic, it’s blog-writing trying to be fantasy. At my most honest, it almost works. Unlike Iain M Banks’ consistent colloquial formality played for laughs and to build characters, I found Jemisin’s colloquial-formal language to be inconsistent in density within the novel and in purpose of use. In each family of chapters, the mix of colloquial and formal is different, which makes some sense, but sort of sends me spinning. In short, I didn’t enjoy many of the word choices, though there were a couple of beautiful alliterative moments. But in a book where so much of the novel is so deeply thought through and interconnected, the word choices weren’t as well thought through.
—Fourth, the most annoying thing in the novel: Jemisin has one past tense sentence in the middle of the novel. I believe it is an error in editing, not intentional, but I spent a lot of time thinking about what it could mean.
No one in the Fulcrum talks about the Guardians’ politics, probably because no one in the Fulcrum understands them. The Guardians keep their own counsel, and they object to inquiries. Vehemently.

Not for the first time Syenite wonders: To whom do the Guardians answer?

As Syen’s considered this, they’ve reached the cove, and stopped at its railed boardwalk. The avenue ends here, its cobbles vanishing beneath a drift of sand and then the raised wooden walkway. Not far off there’s a different sandy beach from the one they saw earlier. Children run up and down the boardwalk’s steps, squealing in play, and beyond them Syen can see a gaggle of old women wading...

—Chapter 14
—In closing, the writing was fine. It wasn’t spectacular, but it didn’t hide points Jemisin was trying to make.


4. Thematically, Jemisin is talking about minorities and advocating understanding and working together among different people. She does this through showing how one character’s outsider point of view can influence and benefit another person. She does this through describing how the different people groups react and interact to the geology and each other. She does this through the universally second class geomancers. She does this through the unknowns in the history. She uses the theme to focus the novel, to tie all the threads of world-building and characters together. She uses the unique geomancers, who are inherently interesting because they are so different from us, as a central part of the novel, and this insures the reader never forgets the theme. In short, as everything here, the theme is rigorous.


5. The sex is overdone. After the first few times, I get what she’s trying to do with the sex—explaining that certain characters are less jealous than others. But after that, it just seems sensational and uninformative, and that’s a real bummer. I mean, if you’re putting sex in a novel, you necessarily limit the potential audience. And if the sex doesn’t payoff for the reader’s understanding, or the world building, then why is it in there other than sensationalism? To be clear, my complaint isn't that there is sex in the novel, it's that the sex doesn't inform the reader to the same extent the other aspects of the novel do. In point one above I state, "each circumstance and action serves to explain characters to a degree that I feel like I know these as people." The sex didn't always accomplish this, and that's my main complaint here. In this, it was slightly discongruous.


6. I am amazed by how rigorous and complex this novel becomes without losing its excitement. It remains an exciting adventure throughout, but is also a wonderful study of this fascinating world she has created. The way she focuses on the macro and micro is spectacular. My two big annoyances were the sex and the word choices. But they weren’t significant enough to turn me off of this novel or from reading her other works. I’m excited to read the next book in this trilogy, and some of her past work as well. Yet another example of fantasy being used to explain something in our own culture by recontextualizing it. And this is a good, good book. I can see why it’s so popular. I really, really enjoyed reading this novel!

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