Stone Age Magic

Jan 2018
The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin – Publisher, 2015 (Kindle edition)
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I am mildly miffed. Back when I was a teenager I developed what I believed was my first original fantasy world, a roleplaying setting called Valtherion. This was a geologically unstable continent with frequent earthquakes and a large number of active volcanoes which brought misery to its hapless inhabitants. My brother was one of the players and his character, Rhogo, had the power, or curse, of causing earthquakes when he became angry. We played a few sessions and then stopped, partly because I realised that I knew what I wanted to happen next, leaving very little agency for the players, and partly because I left home to go to university. My grand plan was for Rhogo to master his powers and learn to block volcanoes, which would eventually lead to a spectacular climax where the entire planet split in two, solving the volcano problem forever (the people would survive, of course, thanks to the awesome and convenient magical abilities of the other player characters).

So here is a Hugo-winning fantasy set on a tectonically unreliable continent called the Stillness where frequent major eruptions - "fifth seasons" - bring misery to the people, and the viewpoint characters are orogenes, people with the magical ability to control earthquakes. I admire the way Jemisin has developed her world, which is more realistic and mature than my teenage imaginings. But I still think that she has somehow psychically stolen my ideas.
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