During December and this first part of January, I inhaled the first two installments of N. K, Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy, via audiobook.  When I take in a book as audio, the clearest signs of the book’s quality are how clean my house is and how much exercise I’ve had lately.

I searched for mindless little tasks to do so that I could listen to Robin Miles’ excellent performance of Jemisin’s prose.  I spent about a month and a half visiting that dark and terrible world, and the eight month wait for the next book’s release in August looks like an eternity from here in January.

I picked up the first book, The Fifth Season, as a recommendation from my partner.  He’s been working his way through Hugo winners and nominees on our Audible account, and after The Fifth Season won the 2016 Hugo award for Best Novel, it shot to the top of the reading/listening queue.

The Fifth Season absolutely deserved that Hugo.

The Fifth Season is the first book of a trilogy waiting for its final installment, to be released later this year.  The concept of the world is very interesting, and I love the characters, feeling their emotional struggles like a punch to my own gut.

The planet this story takes on has basically been experiencing an apocalypse of large or small scale every few centuries, for the last several thousand years.  Civilizations have risen up and been knocked back down by these events, called ‘Seasons.’  Only one empire has managed to weather and survive the millennia, with a strictly enforced culture of scrappiness and ever-readiness throughout the empire’s interior.

Against that back drop is a group of people who are born with mysterious powers; they range from telekinesis to remote sensing, and are considered very dangerous by the general population.  Part of the empire’s cultural elements is a deep-seated fear among the common people of these powered individuals, to the point that children are often killed by mobs if signs of those powers show up.  Any of these individuals who survive are rounded up as wards of the empire and trained to use their powers safely.  Legally they are not people, and there is a complex system for keeping them under control.

The focus of this story is Essun, a woman of exceptional power, and her journey at the beginning of one of the worst seasons in recorded history.  It is effectively the end of the world as she sets out on a dangerous road.

It’s such a cool setup for a story, and Jemisin does fascinating things with it.

The way the story is framed is a bit different from what most people are used to, the rare First Person Peripheral, with a supporting character actually telling the story to Essun.  And flashbacks are in normal third person.  It took a few chapters for me to get used to it, but the rhythm of the prose, and the immediate shock into the brutality of this world, had me in there listening to this story teller.

I think the ‘magic’ system of this fantasy world is really cool and unique.  It’s hard to talk about without spoiling the events of the second book, The Obelisk Gate, as part of Essun’s arch is figuring out some lost, deeper secrets of this power.  But Jemisin definitely put a lot of thought research into this system.  One of the rules of building a believable fantasy world is to establish the rules, the ‘physics’ of the world, if you will, and sticking to those rules consistently.  Breaking the rules has to be justified within the terms of the system, or the reader just is going to lose their suspension of disbelief.

I’ve also been reading a non-fiction book called Spooky Action at a Distance, which is tackling one of the weirdest mysteries of physics, a concept called non-locality.  In short, non-locality is whenever one thing affects another thing without touching or otherwise directly interacting with it.  It was kind of the bane of Einstein’s work, and physicists who look into this phenomenon lose their minds a little.  I just finished reading a section in the book on the history of Western Magic, as it related to the history of physics.

Taking in those big ideas in conjunction with listening to the story of Essun learning the deeper secrets of the Broken Earth has had my head spinning a bit.  So props to Jemisin for so thoroughly and completely building out this fantasy world.