Everything Is Better With Dragons

Blurb

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

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My Review

This book and the other two in the series have been on my TBR pile for several years, but one of the GoodReads challenges for the summer had this book on the list and I decided that was as good a way to decide what next to read from my TBR Pile as any.

My TBR pile is disturbingly huge…

My currently reading piles is disturbingly huge…

Anyway.

I picked up The Fifth Season the other day to read in bed while I was feeling ill, managed 130 pages then fell asleep. I read the rest yesterday – 319 pages. I think I’m feeling better today but I can never tell until I test my lungs during a walk or swimming. I’ve managed to get a bit of reading done while I’ve been ill. Two more books off the TBR Pile and on to the shelves. Obviously, next late month I’ll be buying more books at World Fantasycon, so I should probably prepare more shelf space.

Back to the book. The narrative follows a character who goes by multiple names over her lifetime as she confronts first her status as an orogene – someone who can move the earth with her mind – in a world where people with orogeny are either murdered as children or sent to a training camp in the capital city of Yumenes, where they are abused slaves, trained to hate themselves and do as they’re told by Guardians.

We see the main character through the eyes of a narrator, who turns out to be a stone-eater called Hoa, who has been following the main character through her life, and from the 3rd person POV of the main character. It’s an interesting structure, and took me a while to adjust to. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it, seeing the story from the outside eyes of Hoa and the internal narrative of the main character. Look, she can’t decide who she is, so I’m not going to use her name.

Each name is associated with a time in the main character’s life. She has the name her parents gave her as a child, Damaya, which she carries until she passes her first ‘ring test’ at the Fulcrum, and chooses another name. She calls herself Syenite. She carries that name through meeting her mentor-friend-partner-father of her first child, Alabaster, living on an island with pirates, and having a child, then the ending of that period. After that she spends ten years living with a husband in a small town and teaching children, with another name, Essen. This triple name situation gives her some difficulty with her identity by the end of the novel when people she knew at different point in her life also end up in the same place as she does.

The impetus for events is two-fold. Firstly, Essun finds her son dead and her daughter missing. Her husband is the culprit. Essun sets off to look for her husband and daughter to get revenge. Essun’s son is murdered because he is an orogene, a talent inherited from Essun. Nassun, Essun’s daughter is also an orogene. Essun has a lot to process and blames herself. She is a little mad, and her journey south, picking up first Hoa and then Tonkee, a scientist, on the way, helps her to regain some sense.

At the same time, Alabaster decided it’s time to destroy Yumenes, and the Fulcrum, the city and training centre that enslaves and abuses orogenes, and opens a giant rift from east to west on the Stillness. Alabaster is an incredibly powerful orogene, but under the control of the Fulcrum he has been abused and raped to produce children strong enough to be used in ‘nodes’. When he finds a safe place on the island of Moev, and a tripartite relationship with Syenite, and the deputy leader of the community, Innon (yay! Bi and gay rep), he starts to feel safe. They have a child, Coru, who is more powerful than Alabaster. Then the Fulcrum comes for them. Innon and the baby die in the battle, Alabaster is taken to safety by his stone-eater Antimony, and Syenite goes mad and disappears into the wilderness for 12 years. During this time Alabaster has been slowly devoured by Antimony and they’ve sought ways to destroy the people enslaving orogenes.

Damaya-Syenite-Essun and Alabaster have different motives for their actions, but the results are the same – the end of the system that has controlled the continent of The Stillness for thousands of years.

The planet is fascinating.

The continent that makes up The Stillness is two plates, the Maximal and the Minimal. There are plate boundaries that run through it and around it, but they use orogenes to dissipate earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Now, that’s not a sensible thing to do, in the long run. Continents move, that’s just how these things work; messing about with that would cause no end of trouble. Volcanic eruptions can destroy large numbers; they can, if big enough, block out the sun for years; but they also provide essential nutrients to the soil and recycle minerals and water through the system. Some of the most fertile soil is volcanic. Underwater volcanoes provide unique ecosystems and drive evolution. We didn’t think life could exist with photosynthesis until we discovered the chemosynthetic life of the deep ocean volcanic vents.

Earthquakes are terrifying. They trigger tsunamis and rock slides, they destroy homes and open fissures in the land. They also show that the rock recycling system of plate tectonics is working properly. When mountains are pushed up, or oceanic plates are subsumed beneath a continental plate, new land is made, old land is recycled, water is pulled into the crust and circulates through the system to come out in volcanoes.

Any planet that has a metal core – solid and liquid – and a liquid layer of rock will also have a magnetosphere, protecting the planet from cosmic radiation and solar flares. Life exists on earth because we have a living tectonic system. And a moon. It’s helpful to have a moon. The planet of The Stillness doesn’t have a moon, although Alabaster introduces the idea to Essun at the end of The Fifth Season, so at some point it must have had one.

The society in this novel is complex and well-developed. People think the earth hates life because humans caused damage thousands of years before and there was a massive eruption, and the first of the Fifth Seasons. Using orogenes to control the planet’s movements is supposed to protect life, but also makes people terrified of orogenes, who are so powerful that they can fight Father Earth. One aspect of the culture is disdain for the past that isn’t part of the Sanzed culture.

Former civilisations, ‘deadcivs’, are considered failures with nothing useful to provided the current civilization. This means archaeological remains are destroyed or covered up, pre-Sanzed knowledge is forgotten or corrupted to fit the ideological needs of the current civilization. They are an ossified civilisation, living by ancient lore written on stone tablets. Equally, scientists who don’t focus entirely on the earth and preparing for Fifth Seasons are considered to be practising pseudoscience – archaeologists and astronomers particularly. Contrasting the closeminded attitudes of most people are the independent community of Moev and later the community at Castrima, which is not only entirely different in attitude to orogenes but is also an artifact of a dead civilisation. The reader feels these contrasts through Syen-Essen’s confusion and fear.

This book was so good! Complex and beautifully written. I can see why it won a Hugo. I’ve already started reading book 2. If you haven’t read it yet, and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy, you need to read this book.