The Fifth Season’s subplots (spoilers ahead) trace Damaya and Syenite, two past names and eras of Essun’s life. But her world is poised to end, and her past will not keep silent – if she fails to confront her own immense power and identity as an orogene, they will surely consume her. As a red rift erupts along, the Stillness and another Fifth Season begins, she discovers unexpected truths and allies. When her husband discovers that their children share her supernatural talent, killing one and abducting the other, Essun embarks on a quest to save her daughter. She lives in a small common within the Stillness, a geologically tumultuous continent prone to Fifth Seasons, long eras fraught with cataclysmic natural disasters. The Fifth Season primarily follows Essun, a woman concealing orogenic powers to channel the earth’s energy. Her Broken Earth series, beginning with The Fifth Season, is the first trilogy ever to win a Hugo for all three novels, which also makes Jemisin the first author to win three Hugos consecutively.
After a self-described tough journey into the publishing world, she has used her platform to speak out against racism, climate change, and gentrification, among other social issues. Jemisin has published ten novels and many short stories. It says what it means without flinching, redefining “dark fantasy” and unearthing the specific literary purpose it should serve. It avoids navel-gazing and violent spectacle, channeling its uglier elements into hard-hitting commentary on marginalization, climate change, and sexual politics. Her 2015 Hugo-earning novel, the first in a trilogy of subsequent winners, uses its apocalyptic bleakness for a tangible, relevant impact.
Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, however, has sharpened the diluted genre label in my mind. I’ve picked up two kinds of self-declared “dark fantasy” books in the past year: vanilla fantasy with nary a brutal element, and simplistic bro-fantasy that revels in white patriarchal nihilism. The meaning of this genre is self-evident – it’s fantasy, but edgier – but it’s a capacious descriptor, and it rarely refers to an actual tone or set of tropes. In the wake of Game of Thrones, works labeled “dark fantasy” have pervaded the literary market.
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