Apocalypse stories have always bothered me. The world is so disorganized, it feels like everyone alive is a scavenger. It’s all a little too material, a little too short-term minded. Maybe that happens at first. An initial anarchy when a system collapses. But humanity has lived through hard times, and we’ve seen what people do when the world gets tough. We form tight-knit communities and close ourselves off from the world until the danger passes.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin is a post-apocalypse fantasy, one that paints a real picture of how humanity survives.

Comms with High Walls

In The Fifth Season, the end of the world is a common occurrence. Every couple decades, Father Earth unleashes a ‘fifth season’ on the world. The season of death. In response, humanity has taken a permanent ‘prepper’ mindset.

Villages aren’t sprawling things that welcome anyone and everyone. They’re comms, short for communities, and they’re walled on every side. Visitors are treated like threats and newcomers have to prove their worth. Trust is so low it’s polite to offer guests a drink called ‘safe’, which is the only drink you can be certain won’t poison you.

The story begins in a comm at the start of another apocalypse. It follows a woman named Essun, who just lost her son, and is on the hunt for her husband and kidnapped daughter.

In most stories like this, we’d see the main character travel a while, then stop at a town and get a break from the danger. Maybe there’d be a nice innkeeper, or at least a warm place to sleep from time to time. Not here. With the start of the season of death, the world is cold, and every door is shut.

Essun sees dozens of comms on her journey. But never enters a single one.

People are a Utility

When a community closes its doors, they do it because they fear what’s outside. But once those doors are closed, resources become scarce, and every person in a bunk is a mouth to feed. The story regularly refers to a set of wisdoms called ‘stonelore’. Stonelore tells people how to survive in hard times. And one of Stonelore’s most important rules is that every person in the comm has a use.

That use becomes their name. Hoa Strongback. Essun Breeder. There aren’t many use-names, and each name is an implicit threat: Become useless and be thrown out into the cold.

This is not the kind of story where a leader softens their heart and lets a poor beggar woman into a community. This is a story where a dozen beggars are left stranded outside the comm gates.

On her journey, Essun allows a few others to join her party. Only because there’s strength in numbers.

But this story isn’t just a brutal take on a hard-hearted world. It’s also a fantasy.

Orogenes and Earth Magic

There are three POVs in The Fifth Season. Essun, the older woman in search of her daughter. Damaya, the young girl given away by her parents. And Syenite, the capital trained Earth Magic wielder. Earth Magic is the shared commonality between them. They are all Orogene, a race of humans capable of causing and stopping earthquakes while barely breaking a sweat. It’s what informs Essun that this season of death is far worse than any that ever came before. But there’s a downside.

The rest of the world hates Orogene.

As soon as Essun’s community finds out what she is, she’s forced to flee before they can capture and kill her. Damaya is given away to a stranger because her parents fear her powers. Even Syenite, the capital trained Orogene, meets low-level bureaucrats that talk down to her.

The author does a wonderful job painting Orogenes’ magics and their deep connection with the Earth. But any joy that might be associated with that skill is diminished by the shame, the distrust, and the overt hostility of the world. Syenite’s training gave her control over her abilities, but right alongside those abilities is a self-hatred that was ground into her from childhood.

The Sin To Kill The World

In most apocalypses, there’s this sense that most people are victims trying to get by. Victims of some mad scientist somewhere that decided to set off a bomb. In The Fifth Season, there’s a sense that it’s all deserved. A punishment for humanity’s misdeeds.

Damaya’s childhood is a caravan of terrors. Syenite uncovers terrible fate after terrible fate affecting her fellow Orogene. Even Essun’s rag-tag band of unwanteds all have that same sense of self-loathing. 

With every curtain we pull back, there’s another reveal of procedural pain. Organized evil. There’s a feeling that the apocalypse in this story isn’t the product of a single terrible moment, but the byproduct of humanity’s cruelty. Sure people are mean during bad times, but somehow they’re even worse in the good times, and all that cruelty is bubbling up under the Earth’s surface, waiting to bring about catastrophe.

When the apocalypse finally arrives, all those closed doors and locked comms look less like humanity trying to survive, and more like cruel people waiting for the apocalypse to take them.

Conclusion

The Fifth Season is a cold book. There are joys along the way. The happiness of an adventurous kid and the wonders of Earth Magic come to mind. But at its heart, it’s a story of a cruel world and the people stuck under humanity’s boot. Every inch of worldbuilding further paints the same picture. A story of oppression, control, and hate. It explores the emotions of the characters deeply, taking the time to really process their state of mind, and the meaning behind every action. One of the POVs is even written in second person, which makes the pain of the story even more unavoidable.

It’s compelling, it’s fantastical, and by the finish it feels like the end of the world.