Review:
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
| Series: |
The Broken Earth #1 |
| Publisher: |
Orbit |
| Copyright: |
2015 |
| ISBN: |
0-316-22930-X |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
497 |
The world of
The Fifth Season is one of near-constant seismic
activity. Volcanoes, massive earthquakes, and all the catastrophes that
follow them are a constant threat. Civilization barely survives the
turmoil, and only because of two things: strict cultural rules about how
to handle a "fifth season" of heavy seismic activity and its aftermath
(called stonelore), and the orogenes.
Orogenes are humans (well, there is some debate about that) who have an
organ that others don't, a biological ability to manipulate the seismic
activity and the earth itself. They can protect others by damping down
activity, smoothing faults, and redirecting seismic shock waves, but they
can also destroy: pull earth out of shape, set off quakes, and create
paths for magma to surface. And, to gather the power to manipulate the
earth, they draw energy from everything around them, including from other
people, often fatally. Orogenes are feared and hated by the typical
person.
The Stillness, the ironically-named continent on which this book is set,
is very old and has had numerous civilizations destroyed by some seismic
catastrophe. The landscape is scattered with useless or dangerous
remnants of previous forgotten civilizations; the history, likewise, with
only the stonelore and some muddled mythology available to most people.
The current rulers have kept their empire for a surprising length of time,
however, due mostly to the stable ground beneath their centrally-located
capital. That stability comes from Fulcrum-trained orogenes, who are taken
from their family as children and trained harshly to serve their society
by suppressing or fixing dangerous seismic events. Fulcrum orogenes don't
have an awful life (well, most of them; for some, it is pure torture), but
they're effectively slaves, kept under the watchful eye of Guardians who
have mysterious powers of their own.
Against this background,
The Fifth Season tells three interwoven
stories. Essun lives in a small village (comm) at the start of the book,
leading a quiet life, until one of her children is beaten to death by her
husband following a seismic event that he thinks the child stopped. He's
taken their other child and left. Essun, severely traumatized, heads
after him to attempt a rescue, or at least revenge. Damaya is a child
from another comm who is sold to the Guardians by her parents when she
demonstrates orogenic ability, and who goes through Fulcrum training. And
Syenite is a Fulcrum orogene, assigned to a field mission with a difficult
but very senior orogene named Alabaster.
All of these stories eventually interweave, and eventually reveal where
they fit in the somewhat unobvious chronology of the story, but it takes
some time to get there. It also takes some time for the primary
characters to have much in the way of agency. Essun starts with the most,
once she recovers her senses enough to start her hunt for revenge.
Syenite is ambitious but junior, and Damaya is a child, trying to navigate
an unknown world of student politics and strict rules. And all three of
the main characters are orogenes, rogga when one is being insulting, and
this world does not like orogenes. At all.
The Fifth Season starts with an unusual narrative style: a
conversational narrator who begins with some of the world background and
some mysterious scenes that didn't make sense until much later in the book
(late enough that I didn't remember them or make sense of them until I
re-read them for this review). The book then focuses on Essun, whose
scenes are written in second person present. Normally I think second
person feels weirdly intrusive and off-putting, but once I got used to it
here, I think it works as well as I've seen it work anywhere. I also see
why Jemisin did it: Essun starts the story so traumatized that she's
partly disassociating. First person wouldn't have worked, and the
second-person voice gives that trauma some immediacy and emotional heft
that would have been hard to achieve in third person.
The story starts slowly, and builds slowly, as the world is introduced and
Jemisin lays down the texture and history of the world. The
world-building is ambitious in tracing down the ramifications of the
seismic chaos and the implications of orogene ability (although it's best
to think of it as pure magic, despite the minor science fiction
trappings). But through that world-building, what this story is building
is a deep, powerful, frustrated rage.
The Fifth Season is an
angry book. It's a book about outcasts, about slaves. About
people who, even if they're succeeding within the parameters they're
given, are channeled and stymied and controlled. It's a story about
smiling, kind paternalism hiding lies, control, and abuse, about how hard
it is to find enough space from the smothering destructiveness of a
totalitarian culture to let yourself relax. It's a story about the
horrible things people are willing to do to those they don't consider
fully human, and all the ways in which safety, expediency, tradition,
culture, and established social roles conspire to keep people within the
box where they belong. And it's a story about how being constantly on
edge, constantly dreading the next abuse, breaking under it, and being
left wanting to burn the whole world to the ground.
I struggled at the start of this book, but it grew on me, and by about
halfway through it had me hooked completely. At first, Syenite's part
of the story (the most traditionally told) was my favorite, but the
coming-of-age stories of her and Damaya were overtaken by Essun's far
more complex, cautious, and battle-weary tale. And I loved Jemisin's
world-building. There's a lot of depth here, a lot of things going on
that are unexplained but clearly important, and a restraint and maturity
in how the world is revealed that makes it feel older and more layered
than Jemisin's
The Hundred Thousand
Kingdoms.
The major drawback of this book is that it is very much the first book of
a series, and it doesn't so much have an ending as a hard stop. It's not
quite a cliff-hanger, but it's nearly as unsatisfying as one. Most of the
major questions of the book who the stone eaters are and what they want,
and the fate of Essun's husband and child, just to name two are still
unresolved at the end of the story. There is a bit of emotional closure,
but not a true moment of catharsis for all of the rage. Hopefully that
will be coming in a future book.
This is a very unusual story, mixing fantasy and a sort of magic (orogeny)
with some science fiction elements and a deep history. It's gritty,
textured, emotional, and
furious, and very much worth reading. I'm
looking forward to the next book in the series.
Followed by
The Obelisk Gate.
Rating: 8 out of 10
I've made several changes to the Weblate Docker container which are worth mentioning today.
First of all if you are still using 
Just getting back from the most fun meetup I have been to in quite some time: episode 
For years I've recorded solar panel data by hand. Filled two notebooks
with columns of figures. My new charge controller, an
Today marks the release of 
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
Debian Games
So I did start a project, to write a puppet-dashboard, it is functionally
complete, but the next step is to allow me to raise alerts based on failing
runs of puppet - in real-time.
(i.e. Now that I have a dashboard I wish to not use it. I want to be alerted to failures, without having to remember to go look for them. Something puppet-dashboard can't do ..)
Ok, what is happening here? First you can choose a source and binary package name. Then disable the tests and don t run javadoc to create the documentation. This will simplify things a little. Tests and javadoc settings can be added later. Choose the version you want to package and then you can basically follow the default recommendations and confirm them by hitting the Enter key. Throughout the project we choose to transform the upstream version with the symbolic debian version. Remember that Java/Maven is version-centric. This will ensure that our Maven dependencies are always satisfied later and we can simply upgrade our Maven libraries and don t have to change the versions by hand in various pom.xml files; maven-debian-helper will automatically transform them for us to debian . Enable all modules. If you choose not to, you can select each module individually. Note that later on some of the required build-dependencies cannot be found because they are either not installed (libjmagick6-java) or they cannot be found in Debian s Maven repository under /usr/share/maven-repo. You can fix this by entering a substitution rule or, as I did in this case, you can just ignore these artifacts for now. They will be added to maven.IgnoreRules. In order to successfully compile your program you have to remove them from this file later again, create the correct substitution rule in maven.rules and add the missing build-dependencies to debian/control. For now we just want to quickly create our initial debian directory.
If everything went as planned a complete debian directory should be visible in your root directory. The only thing left is to fix the substitution rule for the Servlet API 3.1. Add libservlet3.1-java to Build-Depends and the following rule to maven.rules:
You can just use an asterisk to match any value. Every value can be substituted. This is necessary when the value of upstream s pom.xml file differs from Debian s system packages. This happens frequently for API packages which are uploaded to Maven Central multiple times under a different groupId/artifactId but provide the same features. In this case the Twelvemonkeys pom requires an older API version but Debian is already at version 3.1. Note that we require a strict version number in this case because libservlet3.1-java does not use a symbolic debian version since we provide more than one Servlet API in the archive and this measure prevents conflicts.
Thanks for reading this far. More articles about Java packaging will follow in the near future and hopefully they will clarify some terms and topics which could only be briefly mentioned in this post.
Back in November, 
Playing with appengine python ndb. Some interfaces changed from the old interface and I don't think I quite got the hang of it. The last time I was actively using it is when I was doing tokyodebian reservation system that I haven't touched for 3 years and started 8 years ago.
Every month or two keyring-maint gets a comment about how a key update we say we ve performed hasn t actually made it to the active keyring, or a query about why the keyring is so out of date, or told that although a key has been sent to the HKP interface and that is showing the update as received it isn t working when trying to upload to the Debian archive. It s frustrating to have to deal with these queries, but the confusion is understandable. There are multiple public interfaces to the Debian keyrings and they re not all equal. This post attempts to explain the interactions between them, and how I go about working with them as part of the keyring-maint team.
First, a diagram to show the different interfaces to the keyring and how they connect to each other:
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during July 2017 (