The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season

by

N. K. Jemisin

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The Fifth Season: Prologue Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
 “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” the narrator says. But first, he describes a more “personal ending” as an unnamed woman sits beside the corpse of her young son. Her own world has ended with his death, but the narrator says that this is not the first time that the woman’s world has ended in this way. The woman realizes that her son was never free until now.
The narrator is unidentified at first, but from the start has his own personal voice and seems to have a specific audience in mind as he speaks. The first sentence immediately introduces the idea that The Fifth Season will be concerned with disasters and apocalyptic situations. These global catastrophes are then connected to a disaster on a personal level, as a mother loses her son and feels like her own individual world has ended. Her thoughts about the boy’s freedom also introduce the tragic idea that when one is living in an oppressive society, sometimes death is the only chance for true freedom.
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
Freedom Theme Icon
Identity and Naming Theme Icon
The narrator then describes the world ending on a continental scale. The continent he describes is enormous and frequently unsettled, like an old man stirring in his sleep. Ironically, its inhabitants have named this land “the Stillness.”
This description introduces the world of The Fifth Season as one of constant danger and instability. The peoples and cultures of the Stillness have developed in response to this looming threat in ways that are different from most societies in the real world.
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
Identity and Naming Theme Icon
The city of Yumenes is the oldest, largest, and wealthiest city in the Stillness. Most Stillness towns never get a chance to grow into cities because of the earth’s frequent movements, but Yumenes has survived and grown for thousands of years. It is the only place in the Stillness where people build with “bravery,” assuming that they will never experience an earthquake and therefore constructing precarious structures like balconies. At the center of Yumenes is an enormous pyramid called the Black Star, where the emperor lives. The narrator then notes that “none of these places or people matter, by the way.”
This passage further clarifies how precarious life is for most people in the Stillness. In contrast, the people of Yumenes are unique in that they have come to expect wealth and stability— they’ve even built up a ruling class out of that stability. In most narratives, the emperor and the continent’s capital city would seem like important things to know about, but The Fifth Season immediately undercuts readers’ expectations by instead beginning with “the end of the world” and asserting that “none of these people or places matter.”
Themes
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon
The narrator introduces an unnamed man who “will matter a great deal.” The man is standing on a hill outside the city, looking down on Yumenes. With his “sessapinae,” he can feel all the delicate movements of the city’s millions of inhabitants. He speaks aloud about how “stonelore” was originally written in stone so that it couldn’t be changed. The man’s companion is shaped like a human woman, but she looks like she is made of stone and moves incredibly slowly—she is a “stone eater.” The man asks her what she will do “when it’s done,” and if she and her kind will take over the world. The stone eater says no, because humans will still be around.
Several new terms are identified in this passage, like sessapinae: people in the Stillness have special organs at the base of their brain stems that are sensitive to seismic movements. This man’s sessapinae are incredibly sensitive, as he can “sess” even the footsteps of people miles away. The stone eaters are a non-human species whose true nature is left mostly mysterious in the novel, first introduced here without explanation in order to fully draw the reader in to this alien world. Both characters seem to anticipate the imminent end of the world.
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon
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The man on the hill suddenly longs for silence and an ending to everything, and he reaches out with his orogeny—using all the skill “that his masters have bred into him”—to feel all the people of Yumenes and even his “fellow slaves” far outside the city. He knows that he cannot save them, but he can at least make their pain have meaning. The man then uses his orogeny to take hold of all the life within the city and the magma beneath it, and to grasp the entire tectonic plate on which Yumenes sits. Finally, he reaches upwards, “for power.” He holds all this in his “imaginary hands,” and then he breaks it.
Here, the unnamed man is revealed to be an “orogene”—someone who can manipulate energy to affect seismic activity. He wields incredible power, but the narrator claims that the unnamed man has also been treated as a slave his whole life, even having been “bred” like an animal. His reach upwards “for power” is left purposefully ambiguous here but will be explained later in the novel.
Themes
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
Power and Control Theme Icon
Quotes
As a result, the entire continent of the Stillness cracks in two. The crack runs in a straight line from east to west across its equator, beginning at Yumenes, and magma wells up into the earth’s “wound.” In geologic terms, this injury will heal quickly—but in the meantime, ash will blot out the sun, causing a winter that lasts for thousands of years and during which millions of plants and animals will die. The inhabitants of the Stillness are always prepared for disaster, but never for anything like this.
The narrative shows its sense of cosmic scale and heightened stakes as it zooms out from humanity’s perspective and takes a geological view of time. The man has killed millions of people and essentially destroyed the world, but the fact that his society has slaves living in constant suffering also complicates what might otherwise be seen as an entirely evil action.
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon
The narrator then notes another aspect of this world: there are enormous obelisks floating above in the atmosphere, moving very slowly and appearing to be made of crystal. No one knows what they are or what they’re for; they are assumed to be a relic of another long-dead civilization, as there are many other “grave-markers” like this in the Stillness. People are taught not to admire such things, because the people who built them were too weak to survive.
The description of the obelisks here is an example of how the book mingles fantasy with acute descriptions of humanity. The presence of the obelisks makes the landscape seem especially eerie and alien, but people’s reactions to them are mundane and realistic—they don’t wonder about them or even usually notice them, instead relying on the practical wisdom that they are taught as children.
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon
Now the narrator returns to the woman whose son is dead. She is far to the south of Yumenes, in a small “comm” (community or town) called Tirimo. Tirimo is simply constructed, designed to survive earthquakes, and would be mocked by the people of Yumenes. Many of the houses are essentially roofed holes in the ground, and one of these belongs to the woman, who is introduced as Essun. She is 42 years old, and her dead son Uche was almost 3. Essun knows that Uche’s father is the one who has beaten him to death.
The opening chapter introduces many mysteries at once: here, it finally names its protagonist at a moment of incredible trauma but leaves that trauma largely unexplained. Essun’s young son has been murdered, but the narrative doesn’t yet say why the boy’s father would commit such a horrifying act. The description of Tirimo contrasts with that of Yumenes and suggests how most people in the Stillness live: in constant preparation for disaster.
Themes
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
The narrative shifts back to the day after the continent breaks in two. The land is devastated and filled with death except for a perfect circle several miles wide, with Tirimo at its center. The townspeople know that this means a “rogga” is in Tirimo, as their stonelore tells them to “Look for the center of the circle.” Hearing some of the rumors coming from the North, Tirimo’s “headman” sends out scouts to collect all the dead animals that they can find to preserve their meat. Some of the scouts pass by a strange object at the bottom of a newly broken cliff, but they do not notice it. The object is an egg-shaped boulder, the size of a human and colored differently from the other rocks around it. It smells like rust and blood and is warm to the touch.
“Rogga” is a slur for orogene, though this term takes on multiple layers of meaning as the book progresses. This passage also introduces the contradiction at the heart of society’s treatment of orogenes: they both need orogenes and hate them. An orogene has saved the town of Tirimo from certain destruction, but people are then told via “stonelore” (ancient wisdom about how to survive Fifth Seasons) to use this as evidence to find the orogene and presumably kill them. In sending out the scouts, the town leader immediately begins preparing for a disaster situation.
Themes
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon
Suddenly the object splits in two, and from the crack, a liquid-like substance spills out onto the ground. Days pass, and something in the rock pushes it apart and emerges. The being crawls a few feet, collapses, and stays still for another day. The object has now cooled, and its inside is lined with white and red crystals and a mysterious fluid. The figure that emerged from the geode—who resembles a human boy—slowly gets up. He walks to the geode, breaks off a few of the crystals, and starts to eat them. Then, he breaks off more crystals and gathers them in his arms. Slowly his movements grow more natural and humanlike. When he seems satisfied, he sets off toward Tirimo.
This passage introduces another alien aspect of this world that is left unexplained until later. The book presents a universe that is entirely strange yet vivid, and it seems visceral and real. The woman at the beginning of the book was described as a “stone eater,” and the way the figure eats the crystals suggest that he might be a stone eater as well. At the same time, he seems to be learning how to be human. The figure also has great patience and a different sense of time than human beings, as it moves at the pace of days rather than hours or minutes.
Themes
Power and Control Theme Icon
Identity and Naming Theme Icon
Now speaking in the second-person, the narrator reminds the reader that the world has ended before. But the planet has always survived, and new civilizations have replaced the old. However, the narrator says, this time is different—“this is the way the world ends. For the last time.”
The narrator often uses the second-person perspective, but who he is and whom he’s addressing are two more mysteries introduced in this opening chapter. The book begins to build a fantastical world of tragedy and disaster and sets the scene for the world to end “for the last time.”
Themes
Disaster, Violence, and Survival Theme Icon
History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Theme Icon