The Fifth Season

, #1

paperback, 512 pages

English language

Published Sept. 7, 2016 by Orbit.

ISBN:
978-0-356-50819-1
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
1028482684

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (402 reviews)

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle …

8 editions

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Exploratory, rocky

4 stars

The broken earth has a lot of appealing elements (sorry) with narrative experiments going on at different scales. Some worked better than others for me, none were total flubs. The power dynamics between characters are fairly well balanced, but sometimes the characters felt a little too imaginary to me.

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Slightly disappointing Hugo Winner

No rating

Warning: Extremely Vague Spoilers

It’s clear to see why The Fifth Season won a Hugo award and became immensely popular. Jemisin is an amazing world-builder and extremely good at plotting. She knows exactly at what pace to reveal the mysteries of her world to make her readers desperate to find out what happens next. The culture and history of her world are shaped by the titular “fifth seasons” years-long periods of environmental disasters, which is a great concept, and her orogenes are a really cool half-magic, half-science twist on typical elemental magics. She also manages to do something that was once thought impossible: create fantasy-cursing that sounds both thematic and natural.

Jemisin wants to do more than just write an exciting book though, she has a message, a two-fold one at that. She’s clearly both inspired by climate disasters in our world, as well as (racial) oppression. I say racial, …

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Cool page turner

5 stars

I came upon a list of queer books and thought I'd give a try to the Fifth season. I haven't Heroic fantasy for more than a decad (apart from a book by Damasio). The book is good : well written, the way the narration is built is brilliant. In terms of representations it is very good as well, compared from what I read in the past. I enjoyed the female characters and the fact that heterosexuality or being cis isn't the norm. Yet the book is definitely speciesist : eating other animals or exploiting them is not questionned. A total page turner. I read it in four sittings, which means I spent a lot of time reading in bed haha. Personnally, I'm both grateful for this page turning effect and uneasy. For me it's totally addictive, I have no motivation to do anything else than reading what comes next. This …

reviewed Zerrissene Erde by N. K. Jemisin (Die große Stille)

Dystopischer Fantasy-Epos

5 stars

Die Welt ist zu einem einzigen Superkontinent - die Stille - zusammengefallen. Tektonische Spannungen sorgen kontinuierlich für Erdbeben oder Vulkanausbrüche. Besonders heftige Ausbrüche können eine Fünftzeit auslösen - eine mehrjährige Periode aus Asche- und Schwefelregen mit wenig Sonnenlicht und geringen Überlebenschancen für die Bewohner:innen des Kontinents. In dieser Zeit zerfallen Reiche, Gemeinschaften ("Gems)" kämpfen um ihr Überleben und ganze Zivilisationen gehen unter. Allerdings ist die Menschheit der Wut von "Vater Erde" nicht völlig machtlos ausgliefert. Einige Menschen können mittels der Gabe der Orogenie durch Beeinflussung von Wärme und Bewegungsenergie sogar Erdbeben aufhalten und Vulkane abkühlen. Aufgrund Ihrer potentiellen Macht werden die Orogenen gejagt und ermordert. Im günstigsten Fall entdeckt ein:e Wächter:in ein orogen begabtes Kind und nimmt es zur Ausbildung mit ins Fulcrum - dort werden die Orogenen zur bedingungslosen Unterwerfung unter die Wächter erzogen.

Auf verschiedenen Zeitebenen wird die Geschichte der Orogenen Essun erzählt, die als Kind von einem …

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Not sure why I got confused by this one so much

3 stars

There’s some interesting world building in the book, but I ended up getting pretty confused by the multiple timelines and main characters the author was following, including one bizarrely in the second person. Spending a bit of time on Wikipedia to better get a synopsis of how the plots tied together was pretty helpful. I did enjoy the chapters opening with a quote from one of the sacred texts (very Dune like), but a bit more sign posting would have been helpful in its stead.

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Review of 'The Fifth Season' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Took me a bit to get into it, and the changing of character names over time confused me a bit, but once I got past those two issues, it was a really fun read. Looking forward to the next two books to see what happens on Earth in a possible distant future where earth magic is common and nothing is stable.

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

An introduction to a fascinating world

5 stars

I don't recall how I discovered Octavia E. Butler twenty years ago but I'm pretty sure I noticed N.K. Jemisin thanks to a review in the Washington Post that compared her work to Butler's Parables books.

The Fifth Season is the beginning of an epic, laying the foundation of a world with a magic system and a hierarchical guild that employs it. A world, like ours, that is changing, changing in ways the humans within it do not expect and may not survive. If you're watching fantasy series via streaming ... the world of The Wheel of Time is probably the best match in terms of feel and scope.

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

Review of 'The Fifth Season' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

This book is every bit as good as you’ve probably heard. Original, engaging, and deeply moving in parts. It is full of longing in every form, and ultimately a thoughtful take on privilege and purpose.

You should have told Jija, before you ever married him, before you slept with him, before you even looked at him and thought maybe, which you had no right to ever think.


It will break your heart, which is a feat for a book set in such a foreign fantastic universe.

reviewed Zerrissene Erde by N. K. Jemisin (Die große Stille)

Review of 'Zerrissene Erde' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Mein erstes Buch dieses Jahr ist gleich ein Treffer. Dieser Fantasyroman in einer finsteren, postapokalyptischen Welt, in der jederzeit erneut Katastrophen auftreten können, hat mich in seinen Bann gezogen und ich werde ganz sicher auch Band 2 lesen, auch wenn ich an einigen Punkten schlucken musste. Einige Ereignisse und Figuren war doch schwer zu verdauen.

Die drei Handlungsstränge scheinen zunächst wenig miteinander zu tun zu haben, man erfährt auch nicht, in welcher Relation sie zeitlich zueinander stehen - bis schließlich am Ende alles zusammengeführt wird. Der Schreibstil des dritten Handlungsstrangs ist extrem ungewöhnlich (zweite Person Singular - würde man das analog zum Ich-Erzähler dann Du-Erzähler nennen?) und hebt ihn von den beiden anderen Strängen ab.

reviewed The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth, #1)

The Fifth Season

4 stars

1) "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things."

2) "'You hate the way we live. The way the world makes us live. Either the Fulcrum owns us, or we have to hide and be hunted down like dogs if we're ever discovered. Or we become monsters and try to kill everything. Even within the Fulcrum we always have to think about how they want us to act. We can never just... be.' He sighs, closing his eyes. 'There should be a better way.' 'There isn't.' 'There must be. Sanze can't be the first empire that's managed to survive a few Seasons. We can see the evidence of other ways of life, other people who became mighty.' He gestures away from the highroad, toward the landscape that spreads all around them. They're near the Great Eastern …

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