In fact, as the lorists tell it, once upon a time Earth did everything he could to facilitate the strange emergence of life on his surface. He crafted even, predictable seasons; kept changes of wind and wave and temperature slow enough that every living being could adapt, evolve; summoned waters that purified themselves, skies that always cleared after a storm. He did not create life--that was happenstance--but he was pleased and fascinated by it, and proud to nurture such strange wild beauty upon his surface.
Then people began to do horrible things to Father Earth.
In the world of N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth novels, people have an adversarial relationship with the earth. Volcanic and seismic activity is a fact of life; earthquakes are likely to strike at any time, though every few centuries these periods of upheaval are so severe they are considered a "fifth season." The continent is littered with the remains of dead civilizations, or "deadciv," who tried to maintain order in the face of chaos, and lost, like the strange garnet obelisks that float silently over cities. In the present day, the Empire is kept safe by "orogenes," powerful people who can control the rocks and minerals of the earth, but the power of these orogenes is so fearful that they are kept enslaved, and shunned by regular folks, who call them "roggas."
The first novel, The Fifth Season, follows three different orogene women: Damaya, a "grit" taken from her home to train at the orogene base, called "Fulcrum"; Syenite, a woman tasked with having another orogene's child to perpetuate their lineage; and Essun, a woman whose orogeny is a secret until her husband discovers their son's power and beats him to death, then absconds with their daughter. These parallel stories occur at different time periods. We know this because in Essun's, the fifth season, another apocalyptic seismic upheaval, as finally begun. (And I won't spoil it, but this makes the big reveal about these characters, I think, fairly obvious.) In each storyline the protagonist chafes under the oppressive system that controls the orogenes while discovering, little by little, the truth about how the earth came to be so hostile, and about the obelisks and the mythical stone eaters who are somehow connected to them.
Friends, I really wanted to like this book. The success of the series--three straight Hugo best novel awards, a first for anyone, let alone a woman author or an author of color--is really something, especially in the face of some ugly extremism. But I did not. It seemed to me to embody a lot of what I find tedious about most science fiction, like the way "worldbuilding" overtakes narrative. The tension between the earth and humankind is interest and clever, but it leads into overly familiar tropes. Here's another society with a rigid caste system that a very special hero must confront. The images and set action are cool, but they'd be better in a graphic novel or a comic book, or even a television series. The term "rogga" felt to me unfortunately on the nose, and reflective of the book's flattened ideology, both as a parable about ace or about climate change. There is some signficant polyamory and a trans character, but I felt that the opportunity to say anything interesting or profound about sex and gender was largely squandered.
I like science fiction, or at least, I think I do. But when I read some of the really acclaimed recent stuff in the genre, like this or Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, I feel a little like I'm reading a language whose idioms aren't made for me. I can buy that this book is exceptional, but it's like eating an exceptional pineapple pizza: it's just not for me. Am I wrong to feel like lots of science fiction doesn't live up to its potential to push boundaries? I don't know. I'm willing to be wrong, and I'd love for one of the many people who love this series to tell me what they like about it. Me, I'll wait for the TV show to find out what happens next.
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