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
Do you know what s happening in the wires of your network? There is a major
FLOSS player in the field of real time intrusion detection (IDS), inline
intrusion prevention (IPS) and network security monitoring (NSM).
I m talking about Suricata, a mature, fast and robust network threat detection
engine. Suricata is a community driven project, supported by the
Open InfoSec Foundation (OISF).
For those who doesn t know how Suricata works, it usually runs by loading a set
of pre-defined rules for matching different network protocols and flow
behaviours. In this regards, Suricata has been always ruleset-compatible with
the other famous IDS: snort.
The last major release of Suricata is 4.0.0, and I m uploading the package for
Debian stretch-backports as I write this line. This means the updated package
should be available for general usage after the usual buildds processing ends
inside the Debian archive.
You might be wondering, How to start using Suricata 4.0 with Debian Stretch?
First, I would recommend reading the docs. Please checkout:
In the coming weeks and months I intend to write a mini series about packaging Java software for Debian. The following article basically starts in the middle of this journey because the PDFsam upgrade is still fresh in my mind. It requires some preexisting knowledge about build tools like Maven and some Java terminology. But do not fear. Hopefully it will make sense in the end when all pieces fall into place.
A month ago I decided to upgrade 
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.
Earlier today, I demonstrated how to work with 
As 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
To be able to get in sync with Kali, I introduced an hashcat-meta source package (in contrib) providing hashcat-nvidia to make it easy to install hashcat for owners of NVidia hardware.
Misc stuff
Distro Tracker. I merged a small CSS fix from Aur lien Couderc (
Two scenarios are tested:
Today I noticed the internet buzz about a new alleged Linux malware called
OutlawCountry by the CIA, and 
I've recently been looking at linux security modules. My first two experiments helped me learn:
The news media deliberately over-rates social media
News media outlets, including TV, radio and print, gain a significant benefit crowd-sourcing live information, free of charge, from the public on social media. It is only logical that they will cheer on social media sites and give them regular attention. Have you noticed that whenever Facebook's publicity department makes an announcement, the media are quick to publish it ahead of more significant stories about social or economic issues that impact our lives? Why do you think the media puts Facebook up on a podium like this, ahead of all other industries, if the media aren't getting something out of it too?
The tail doesn't wag the dog
One particular example is the news media's fascination with Donald Trump's Twitter account. Some people have gone as far as suggesting that this billionaire could have simply parked his jet and spent the whole of 2016 at one of his golf courses sending tweets and he would have won the presidency anyway. Suggesting that Trump's campaign revolved entirely around Twitter is like suggesting the tail wags the dog.
The reality is different: Trump has been a prominent public figure for decades, both in the business and entertainment world. During his presidential campaign, he 
With the release of stretch we are pleased to open the doors
for stretch-backports and jessie-backports-sloppy. \o/
As usual with a new release we will change a few things for
the backports service.
A new minor version 0.2.3 of 
For each node, the prefix is known by its path from the root node and
the prefix length is the current depth.
A lookup in such a trie is quite simple: at each step, fetch the
nth bit of the 
Since some bits have been ignored, on a match, a final check is
executed to ensure all bits from the found entry are matching the
input 
The reduction on the average depth of the tree compensates the
necessity to handle those false positives. The insertion and deletion
of a routing entry is still easy enough.
Many routing systems are using Patricia trees:
Such a trie is called 
There are several structures involved:
The lookup time is loosely tied to the maximum depth. When the routing
table is densily populated, the maximum depth is low and the lookup
times are fast.
When forwarding at 10 Gbps, the time budget for a packet would be
about 50 ns. Since this is also the time needed for the route lookup
alone in some cases, we wouldn t be able to forward at line rate with
only one core. Nonetheless, the results are pretty good and they are
expected to scale linearly with the number of cores.
The measurements are done with a Linux kernel 4.11 from Debian
unstable. I have gathered performance metrics accross kernel versions
in 
The results are quite good. With only 256 MiB, about 2 million routes
can be stored!
For some reason, the relation is linear when the number of rules is
between 1 and 100 but the slope increases noticeably past this
threshold. The second graph highlights the negative impact of the
first rule (about 30 ns).
A common use of rules is to create virtual routers: interfaces
are segregated into domains and when a datagram enters through an
interface from domain A, it should use routing table A:
Yesterday I uploaded the first packages of 
I mentioned already in a