The End of the Ends of the World

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth 1)

Essun, a humble schoolteacher and mother, returns home one fateful afternoon to find her toddler son murdered, presumably by his father. Her world, as she knows it, has ended. The grief leaves her so shocked and paralyzed that she fails to notice when the literal end of the world begins around her: earthquakes, volcanoes, ashfall from the sky. Only latterly does she realize she has to venture out into Armageddon.

N.K. Jemisin had written several critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels before beginning this, her breakout success. This volume addresses the circularity of time, how past events form our present in ways we can’t shake. Essun wants to establish herself, but doesn’t know herself. She’s been molded by a system of fears and doubts, a terrifying bureaucracy which has taught her to fit in or be, literally, struck down.

This novel belongs to a science fiction subgenre called “Dying Earth.” This subgenre deals with civilizations so far into the future, our present isn’t even a historical oddity. Technology has become so advanced that, as Clarke posited, it’s indistinguishable from magic. Yet entropy has become widespread, the Earth is used up, and the Sun is dying. Characters can’t fight for the future, because there barely is any future.

From childhood, society has taught Essun to fear certain people. Then she discovers she’s one of the feared. This novel addresses three stages in Essun’s life: Jemisin doesn’t state this directly until late, we could be reading about three different women, but experienced readers will recognize early that we’re witnessing Essun’s Maiden, Mother, and Crone stages, sort of. The ways she learns to love and hate.

Lifted from her provincial childhood and taken to the Empire’s greatest academy, young Damaya is taught the ways of orogeny, a sort of plate-tectonic wizardry. She’s immensely powerful, but the Empire fears her powers, and molds her through intensive conditioning. She isn’t permitted to pick her own career, or even her spouse; her life is about compliance with unquestionable authority. This authority is paternalistic, even loving, but always autocratic.

As a child, Damaya simply asks questions and wants to better understand her world. She seeks knowledge, but the bureaucracy deems certain knowledge too dangerous. Instead, she’s channeled to public service. Her career is chosen, and her sexuality becomes a matter of semi-public spectacle. She could’ve been a scientist, but the state deems science dangerous. When she rebels against social order, it literally kills people.

N.K. Jemisin

In young womanhood, renamed Syenite, the Empire uses her abilities to preserve its own ideals. This concept of Empire matters greatly. Jemisin’s characters discuss power, conquest, and the instruments of control. The Empire, we learn early, is moribund and decrepit, the Emperor a prisoner, and the bureaucracy marches on. Nothing new gets invented, because to the Empire, the only meaningful truth is continuity.

Finally, in adulthood, Essun wants what everyone wants, love and relationship and community. She becomes a wife and mother; but the secrets she’s spent decades burying reveal themselves in her children. She has to pay for the secrets she’s kept, because even amidst the End of Days, powerful people out there still see her as an enemy who needs to be crushed. And somewhere, she still has one surviving child.

Jemisin’s system, reflecting the three stages of woman in pre-Christian religion, suggests that Essun might be a nascent goddess. She faces systems of control and, in different ways at different times, decides whether to comply or resist. This may include malicious compliance, near the end: on one level she’s broken, but on another, she becomes independent where the world abandons her, and she transcends the world’s fight-or-obey dichotomy.

Essun’s maturation reflects ours, as all literature is about its audience. Throughout the story, she faces the reality of her dead child, or children; she exists without a real future. Environmental decay, technological bloat, and alienation from herself: Essun is the modern adult woman, adrift in a world that perceives her as inherently dangerous, even before she’s actually done anything. Sadly she lives up to, or down to, the world’s expectations.

Jemisin combines several existing tropes: pre-Christian stages of womanhood, or Freud’s belief that civilization causes neurosis, to name just two. But she sees these tropes through a lens that is particularly modern, American, and Black. She offers a literature of rebellion, of anti-imperialism, even when breaking the empire could have grim ramifications. This isn’t a manifesto, don’t misinterpret me; it’s simply a book about not complying with evil, dying systems.