“Survival doesn’t mean rightness.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The Fifth Season’
A big theme of this blog (and my poetry, and my swamp monster novel-in-progress) is that contemporary USian society has a broken relationship to nature. We are not a society that understands what the world is, we are a society that invents leaf blowers and jet skis. We turn rivers into flammable trash cans. We drive ever-bloating SUVs (well, y’all do, I drive a Honda Accord). We do not understand our place on the Earth, and the Earth is taking terrible measures to remind us that we are not above it. The writers of Genesis were wrong when they asserted that God had given us dominion over the plants and the animals. We are of the plants and the animals, and subject to forces of nature we cannot control.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
CW: this novel has the death of a young child, like, almost right away. If that bothers you, as a still-relatively-new parent, I get it. Skip this book. Or—and this is what I’d advise—steel yourself, and read this book, because it rips and rocks literally and metaphorically.
A book I’ve been wanting to read since Alex Schimdt hosted the author on the Cracked podcast, like, nine years ago now, at this point. The concept fascinated me—I remember filling the coffee mug that lived on my desk at Corporate Copywriting Job, listening to the summary, and thinking “what an incredible concept for a trilogy.” All this hemming and hawing about sci-fi/fantasy I’ve been doing the last month or so has been, in part, for me to prep myself to be as ready as I can to take in this trilogy. Good thing, too, because reading this was a blast. I’m talking, of course, about The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, book one of the Broken Earth Trilogy.
Imagine living on a planet far more angry with you than our own. Earthquakes are constant, and “seasons”—a period of time when the Earth splits open and belches gas and ash into the sky and all the plant and animal life dies and humans have to survive on stored food—happen regularly enough that people know to expect them. Maybe the world won’t end in your lifetime. Probably will end in your grandchildren’s lifetimes, though.
There is a class of people in this society called orogenes who can manipulate the Earth itself. I never watched Avatar The Last Airbender but it may kinda seems like earthbending? They can stop earthquakes, they can lift rock up from the Earth, they can do a lot. These orogenes are not world leaders or revered knights or whatever, though. They’re feared outcasts, in danger of being lynched or captured and sent to a facility where they are trained to control their power. It’s almost like the X-Men, if Senator Kelly and the Sentinels were able to force them to do hard labor. This framing allows Jemisin to make some pretty salient points about how racism or casteism or simply fear of another person’s power can make people justify some pretty horrible things. Maybe I’ve been mainlining Kendrick Lamar for the past six months (or 13 years), but some of the book’s moments where this oppressed class of abused wizards take their power back—especially in regards to use of the slur they get called—made me want to cheer.
Let’s talk about that slur, for a second. It’s a made-up word for a people that don’t exist. Yet I, a white person, feel like typing it out would be the same as typing the n-word. When this dawned on me is hard to pinpoint, but you start to hear tone when people use it. There’s the way their Guardians (overseers, essentially) use the word, there’s the way common people use the word, there’s the way orogenes themselves use the word. It’s a masterful bit of worldbuilding, and it’s not the only example of make-you-feel–it writing in the book. It’s true that yr man the shipwrecked sailor don’t dance with fantasy very often. Partially because I gotta type three paragraphs of background before I can get to any commentary, ha. But let this normally-avoidant fantasy reader tell you: this book is a master stroke. None of the worldbuilding is clunky, most everything is either intuitive or dramatized in such a way that you feel like you’re part of the world. By the last 80 pages, I could barely stand to put the book down. Can’t wait for part two.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Hey, we got The Lazy & Entitled Podcast on Apple and Spotify! So I’ll once more drop the YouTube for episode one, but you should go subscribe (and rate) on Apple or Spotify! We’re doing these twice a month.
“When A Bully Punched Me In The Face on Halloween, I Understood Quantum Physics and Hyperbolic Geometry for One Second” by Gregg Williard in Bending Genres
“A Fallibility of Hoopoes” by Patricia Newbery in Bending Genres
“SUE the T. rex meets the new Spinosaurus fossil at the Field Museum” by Elena Zhang in BRAWL
“The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” by Catherine George in Flash Fiction Online
Over at Defector, Jen Golbeck goes to Ukraine and wrestles with the war tourism industry. A lot of tangled issues here, with lots of room for reasonable people to disagree. I’m not entirely sure where I come down myself, BUT I just *went to a movie theater* to see A Real Pain, which is wonderful. Incredibly well-written. Here’s a pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “I asked [tour guide] Kirill about some of the criticism directed at war tourism—crass, ghoulish, exploitative. He was unmoved…He echoed sentiments I heard in conversations with other Ukrainians on this visit: They appreciated people coming to see what was happening. They wanted us to see, and to go and tell people. And in Kharkiv especially, they wanted us to know how much they love their city.”
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Don’t let them make you forget your power, working person.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris