"The Fifth Season" by N.K.Jemisin

“I read everything. The No 1 thing I tell my students...is read diversely. And I’m not talking about demographics, though that’s part of it. Aesthetic diversity, genre diversity. It matters because it just makes us better informed, and it protects us from our worst instincts.”

So said Roxane Gay in a recent interview with Aida Edemariam titled: Roxane Gay: ‘Public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that’s gotten us.’  According to this article, Gay "reserves a particular ire for those who read only literary fiction;" she particularly likes spy thrillers and romance novels, according to the interview.

I agree with Roxane Gay that a diet of all literary fiction is really tedious, and I really know it because I just read five or six works of literary fiction in a row. Some of them were set in other cultures or in American subcultures, but they were pretty typical of literary fiction.

Would Roxane Gay say to me what she said in the article: "Anybody who tells me, ‘I only read literary fiction,’ I’m just like, ‘Well, you’re an asshole. What are we going to talk about?’" Whatever Roxane Gay thinks, I felt like it was time to read something different, so I read The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Winner.

Unfortunately The Fifth Season didn't satisfy my taste in this type of literature. I prefer sci-fi and fantasy that has a certain type of spontaneity, where a naive character faces an unfamiliar society or other-worldly reality, but faces it from a purely human perspective. Examples -- The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, The Hunger Games, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Left Hand of Darkness, Anansi Boys, and Oryx and Crake come to mind. When I think about Dorothy, Bilbo, Katniss, Alice, Harry, Genly Ai, Charles Nancy, Snowman, and various others, I realize that the journey or life experience of every one of them boils down to an intelligent and resourceful central character facing a variety of new situations and challenges in a totally human way. No matter how strange the fantasy or sci-fi situation was, the authors gave these characters courage, empathy, and curiosity. The reader can join them in discovering their worlds. Not so in The Fifth Season.

While The Fifth Season did have a bizarre society and a non-earthly reality, it had far too much other baggage for my taste. Jemisin's characters possessed so many special powers that they simply were not facing their challenges as human beings, but as some other type of creature. Further, they were very well-informed and educated about the natural history, political history, and social history of their world, not at all naive in the same way as the characters in the books I enjoy the most.

I find the book had just way too much made-up stuff. It distracts from the central challenges of the characters. Their planet is full of seismic upheavals: small tremors, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis, and gigantic cracks in the earth. Whole cities are swallowed up. Moreover, there are human-type creatures who can harness these forces or who can trigger them unwittingly. There are other human-type creatures with other powers as well -- too many powers to leave them as really comprehensible individuals.

Their world is very bizarre and unstable, and full of invented technical terms and concepts -- so many of these that the book has an appendix explaining many words like orogene, stillhead, geomest, lorist, and sesuna. (Since these words exist only in this invented world, I'm not going to define them here, even though today could be Wordy Wednesday.) Moreover, this world has a very very complicated history which the characters often discuss -- they learned it in school. There's an appendix with a time line of this history too. For me, this is just too gimmicky.

As always, I look at the way food is used, and here are some examples of how distracting the excess of made-up stuff is, stretching the reader's attention so that the psychological side of things gets overwhelmed (which is probably ok with some readers, it's just the part that I prefer).

Here are some examples of the foods mentioned in The Fifth Season. In the type of book I like, foods evoke pleasure or not, and contribute to the reader's ability to empathize with fictional characters no matter how bizarre their lives. These passages, I feel, demonstrate that the over-use of inventions diminishes the vividness of human experiences:

"You’ve eaten something from your pack: cachebread smeared with salty akaba paste from the jar you stuffed into it a lifetime and a family ago. Akaba keeps well after it’s opened, but not forever, and now that you’ve opened it you’ll have to eat it for the next few meals until it’s gone. That’s okay because you like it." (Kindle Locations 962-964).

"...finding a couple of derminther mela— small melons with a hard shell that burrow underground during a Season, or so the geomests say— and rolling them into the remnants of their fire, which she’s very glad they hadn’t gotten around to smothering yet." (Kindle Locations 1564-1566).

"The station’s buildings hold all the comforts Syen’s been craving: hot water, soft beds, food that isn’t just cachebread and dried meat." (Kindle Locations 1735-1736).

"Room service arrives, bringing a tray of modest but filling local food. Fish is cheap in most Coaster comms, so Syen has treated herself by ordering a temtyr fillet, which is an expensive delicacy back in Yumenes. ... Syenite has a side dish of garlic yams and carmelized silvabees, in addition to her own meal, on a separate smaller plate." (Kindle Locations 1922-1928).

"...people get up for second helpings from the massive pot of spiced shrimp, rice, and smoked sea-bubble that is tonight’s meal." (Kindle Locations 4223-4224).

"... just grabbing a plate of roasted tulifish and braised threeleaf with sweetened barley that must have been stolen from some mainland comm." (Kindle Locations 4422-4423).

Yes, I did find some things to like in this book, but I don't feel that it matches up to my favorites that I mentioned above, or to many others by those same authors. I started with a quote from Roxane Gay that encouraged reading of non-literary fiction. Soon I plan to read something by Roxane Gay herself, though I haven't decided whether to read her fiction or her essays.