Reading N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season
Friday, 3 January 2020
Just finished N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (this post is full of spoilers), on the advice of everyone for the past three years, but specifically the booksellers at Amherst Books (who pointed out specific virtues like how well Jemisin, a cisgender author, writes trans characters like Tonkee). I read the first half on the plane ride down to San Antonio, to visit my grandmother in hospice, and the second half on my way back up.
It has me thinking about archiving in the Anthropocene. I remember seeing my friend and collaborator Elæ post something on social media to the effect of: “are we just archiving while rome burns?” which I interpreted as being a call to examine archival impulses—publishing, for one—in light of the worsening global climate crisis.
This has been rattling around in my brain, and I think I came to The Fifth Season carrying this thought. And I wasn’t expecting it to resonate so much with my recent review of Laura Moriarty’s Personal Volcano, but these books, while they are very different in genre, have some deep affinities vis-à-vis a shared focus on geology and the Anthropocene.
The Fifth Season is set on an alternate Earth which I am reading as post-post-apocalypse (just as Le Guin’s Always Coming Home is post-post-apocalypse) or more accurately post-apocalypses and on the cusp of another one. Far future. And in this reality, some initial human-instigated event, lost in the fog of prehistory, damaged the earth (personified in the book as Father Earth), turning it against humanity.
This manifests as periodic climate events related to volcanic and seismic activity. These trigger periods of time ranging from months to many years—the eponymous fifth season—in which normal life is disrupted and survival is predicated on adherence to something Jemisin calls ‘stone lore.’ Although there is a brief allusion to an emerging and perhaps illicit group of so-called ‘pop lorists’ who tell stories for the purpose of entertainment, the main historic function of lorists is to transmit the stone lore, lore designed both to facilitate survival during a fifth season and to survive itself as a body of knowledge, from season to season, preserved in order to preserve humanity.
I found myself reading like a poet, in the sense that I asked myself how to write stone lore. That is, is there a way to encode knowledge in poetry in a way that will be relevant in the worsening climate crisis? I’m thinking here about Homer and the epic poets of ancient Greece that Plato and later writers reacted against, in part because of their status as preservers and transmitters of multiple kinds of knowledge. I’m also thinking about how to design for the apocalypse on a very long scale versus a more ephemeral encoded knowledge that is about lessening/shortening the current crash (/accelerating the crash of capitalism).
What should a poet do? What should a poet do not to fight ego death but to work for species survival?
The thing about stone lore, though, that Jemisin accurately describes is that it is not stone only in the sense that The Fifth Season’s crises are geologic, but stone in the sense of ossified: stiff, conventional, and stone lore prioritizes this static quality, as opposed to flexibility and adaptability, by design. But of course, stone lore is aspect of a much larger world that Jemisin has built, and her work isn’t stone lore, but sets it as one problem-solving approach among many, in the midst of a global story. It’s a complex system in which education and the advance, use, and preservation of knowledge are figured in various ways.
In the space of an institution in the book called the Fulcrum, orogenes (people who possess orogeny, “the ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to address seismic events”) learn to wield their abilities under the supervision of the Guardians, who are overseers of the enslaved Fulcrum orogenes (462). The intuitive capacity of orogenes instills fear in the ‘stills’ who don’t possess the same powers, so it is seen as something to attack or expel or else to be shaped and used.
Learning here is connected to manipulation, domination, and cruelty, which raises questions like how to survive, but also how to survive ethically, without oppressing others. And if a political system is predicated on slavery, shouldn’t it be destroyed?
History is one of the battlegrounds of the book, and one of the tools by which Guardians, and the polities they serve, oppress the orogenes. One of the arcs of the book is Damaya aka Syenite aka Essun learning and unlearning in the context of a story about freedom and survival.
I hope it’s clear that I’m doing my own reading of this. It’s not a heavy-handed didactic book! But a lot of its themes and Jemisin’s methods give me a feeling of permission to read it, if not as a guidebook to our current crises, then as generative apposite book.
Okay. So at the end of this book, Alabaster attempts to enlist Essun in the destruction of the world, asking her if she has heard of something called a moon. I haven’t read the next book yet, so I don’t know how the moon is involved, but I’m using it as a transition here (and noting in passing that Neal Stephenson’s recent Seveneves kicks off with the destruction of the moon) by taking a look at Jemisin’s acknowledgments:
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) in Mare Tranquillitatis on July 20, 1969. They spent a total of 21.5 hours on the lunar surface, performing one Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) and collecting about 47 pounds (21.5 kilograms) of lunar samples.
These views of the landing site come from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken on separate occasions when the Sun was at different points in the sky over the site. The lunar module descent stage is clearly visible, as well as tracks left by the astronauts on the surface.
The germination point for this idea was Launch Pad, a then-NASA-funded workshop that I attended back in July of 2009. [note: the decade meme] The goal of Launch Pad was to pull together media influencers—astonishingly, science fiction and fantasy writers count among those—and make sure they understood Teh Science, if they were going to use it in any of their works. (467)
She goes on to note that this was so because, “A lot of the falsehoods the public believes re astronomy have been spread by writers, see. Alas, by pairing astronomy with sentient rock people, I’m not so sure I’m doing the world’s best job of delivering accurate scientific information” (467) Except that I think she is! Or if not information, per se, then a study of a world like our own in which multiple paradigms of information, including the scientific, are in simultaneous operation.
On the plane back to Massachusetts, I listened to a podcast (based on a book I haven’t read yet) in which Seth Godin talks about history of the space program, up to and included the Apollo program, whose goal was to land humans on the moon. I was reminded of the dynamic exchange between fact and fiction that inspired this program and was inspired by it.
Apollo had nationalist motivations, like the Cold War, the launch of Sputnik by the USSR, but it was also a massive collaborative effort which necessitated, and subsequently facilitated, the development of all sorts of technological advances. These days space has a bad savour, being more associated with wealthy industrialists. It’s easy, under late capitalism, to imagine a future like the movie Elysium, where the 1% live in posh space digs, while the 99% scrapes by on earth. But if you are reading this, maybe you’ll indulge for a moment my Carl Sagan / Ann Druyan fantasia (I did grow up following the Voyager satellites) that story-telling, in meaningful exchange with other modes of knowledge, could help catalyze the collective projects that would help us survive capitalism and the end of the world. Meaningful but still imaginative writing.
How to not write as if we are not in a social crisis that is also an ecological one—in this book the problems of slavery and xenophobia and racism are inextricable with both the plight of the world and its possible salvation. How to navigate the narrow strait between defeatism (ineffectual, and, tbh, a mode I’m constitutionally averse to) and denial (even worse).
PS Look who else has a patreon—why, it’s N.K. Jemisin.