
They can prevent earthquakes and manipulate temperatures. In Stillness live a people call the Orogenes, who possess the power to control energy. Every few centuries, the inhabitants of Stillness experience what they call a Fifth Season: an episode of catastrophic climate change. Stillness is a supercontinent made up of many races and species. Now that I have your complete attention, let me tell you about The Fifth Season, the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy! As I mentioned, all three books are great, but wouldn’t it be cool for me to tell you much about the second and third ones since that would effectively spoil the first. I find the Broken Earth trilogy to be brilliant but still very accessible, which is great for people who are looking for a jumping-off point into Jemisin’s oeuvre, or may be new to science fiction and need something compelling and not daunting for their first read. It is the first novel in the Inheritance trilogy, which is itself wonderful, but I think the Broken Earth trilogy is even more amazing. And her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published to wide acclaim in 2010, garnering tons of nominations and winning a few awards, including the 2011 Locus Award for Best First Novel. She had several fantastic short stories out in the world. Jemisin was by no means an unknown author when the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy came out. That’s a lot of firsts! And the third book, The Stone Sky, also won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel. And like LeVar Burton said on Reading Rainbow, “you don’t have to take my word for it.” Each book in the trilogy won the Hugo Award for Fiction, making Jemisin the first African American writer to win in that category, the first writer to win three years in a row, and also the first writer to win for all three books in a trilogy. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy! The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky are all astounding, each of them a complete marvel. But often the third book fails to stick the landing, disappointing readers who invested in the first two books.īut, holy cats, that is not the case with N.K. But the second book often ends up just being filler-it just serves the purpose of moving the story toward its conclusion in the third book. With many, many series, the first book is amazing and has everyone clamoring for the second. GET STARTED WITH THE FIFTH SEASON SYNOPSIS
