What will you do, when the inevitable catastrophe hits? Will you cower, will you go out to help people, will you take advantage? The empire has procedure in place for all of these things, and more. They are very prepared, you’ll find, for any eventuality. Because this has happened before, and it will happen again. The earth will move, the ground shatter, the volcanoes erupt, people will die. But some will live.
The Fifth Season takes on a lot of heavy topics and, by and large, handles them well. The enslavement of one group of people based on a particular trait they all share is the main focus of this novel, but the hidden history of a world controlled by a powerful bureaucracy is another. The empire in which Syenite has grown up is one in which everyone knows their place. It’s written in their names, which consist of designators for the community they live in and the kind of service they render to that community. Unless they’re an orogene, in which case their black uniform gives all the information others need about them. And then their are the guardians, highly respected, but possibly much more dangerous than an orogene could be.
Guardians are the slavemasters, the groomers, those given power to take innocent children and turn them into tools for the supposed good of the state. Essun believes she has escaped all this, or would like to believe it. But she has grown up in this empire and perhaps knew all along that it could not last. Nothing lasts, in the Stillness.
That is, of course, a false statement, and yet it isn’t. The empire is perpetual, but in the way that all empires are: through convincing its subjects that it is so. Syenite thought she had come to terms with the Empire, until she was brought together with Alabaster for a very special mission, and learns that all is not as she has always believed.
And amidst it all is the end of the world. Jemisin has achieved new depths to her narrative style with The Fifth Season, combining not only multiple viewpoints and an ability to tell a compelling story out of order, but also telling the story of the world itself in addition to that of the people in it. The Fifth Season is a visceral reminder that we are only the sum of the stories we tell, and that that can change in an instant. So, what would you do, at the end of the world?
Edge Cases 