The Fifth Season Themes

N.K. Jemisin’s science fantasy novel The Fifth Season takes place in a world that often experiences apocalyptic periods called Fifth Seasons. These “Seasons” can be separated by hundreds or even thousands of years, and most are extended winters caused by massive seismic activity of some kind. The inhabitants of this volatile and dangerous world live on a single massive continent called the Stillness, which is ruled by the remnants of the Sanzed Empire and…

The Stillness, the supercontinent that is the primary setting for The Fifth Season, is a world constantly in danger of disaster. The complete collapse of civilization is always possible due to the apocalyptic conditions of its periodic “Fifth Seasons,” which could come at any time. This reality has led society to prioritize survival above all else—and violence is generally seen as a necessary aspect of that equation, as during Seasons, only some…

In the science fantasy world of The Fifth Season, certain beings wield incredible physical power over others through their inborn orogenic power. Orogenes are able to manipulate and enhance kinetic energy to affect seismic activity, setting off or quelling earthquakes and volcanoes or drawing life from everything around them within a certain radius. The fact that certain members of the population possess these abilities and others do not raises the immediate issue of when…

The society of the Stillness is shaped by its perception of its own history, which is mostly passed down through the Sanzed Empire’s own records and also through stonelore, the ancient commandments intended to help society survive through Fifth Seasons. Although most of the citizens of the Stillness consider such knowledge as true, timeless, and literally written in stone, it is revealed throughout the novel that stonelore is, like any human document, actually…

The major structural conceit of The Fifth Season is that the protagonist is initially presented as three different characters, each with her own plotline, and only towards the novel’s end is it made explicitly clear that all three characters are actually the same person—Damaya as a young girl, Syenite as a young woman in her twenties, and Essun as a woman in her forties. She takes these new names after experiencing a major traumatic…