Stone Age Magic

[mtvessel]

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.

The story revolves around three female characters at three different stages in their lives. Damaya is a girl whose parents have discovered that she is an orogene. Syenite is a new member of the Fulcrum, an organisation that trains orogene Guardians to protect towns and villages. Essun is a mother living in a small village who is secretly an orogene. Various unpleasant things happen to each (this is not a happy book) and we follow their travels and travails. Somehow they are linked to a dramatic event at the start of the book that triggers a Fifth Season that is likely to be worse than any that has come before, but how?

The world, it has to be said, is quite grim. Life is hard and a caste structure of "strongbacks" (peasants), "resistants" (healers), "breeders" (guess) and "innovators" (engineers) has evolved. People are members of communities, or comms, and being made commless is a ticket to death by starvation or disease. Orogenes are hated and feared, despite their usefulness, because an untrained orogene can bring disaster just by getting angry and a trained one is effectively god-like in their powers. There are also hints of strangeness - stone obelisks hover in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't (to quote Douglas Adams), and creatures called stone eaters, statue-like beings who can travel through solid rock, have their own mysterious agenda.

Usually I would complain about the lack of a cultural history, but Jemisin cleverly subverts this by having the Fifth Seasons act as mini-cataclysms that effectively reset the clock. It does mean that the societies she builds feel rather thin and aren't particularly memorable, but it fits with the setting.

There are some other nice things - Jemisin pulls off a clever trick with timelines that I didn't see coming, and I appreciated the racial and sexual diversity of the cast. But the grimness of the thing is off-putting, particularly at time of writing when politicians seem intent on putting us through a Fifth Season of our own. That said, I will probably read the sequels at some point, if only to see if Jemisin has stolen my transcendant climax as well as everything else.