The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season is a 2015 science fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. It was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016. It is the first volume in the Broken Earth series and is followed by The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky. Setting The Fifth Season takes place on a planet with a single supercontinent called the Stillness. Every few centuries, its inhabitants endure what they call a "Fifth Season" of catastrophic climate change. Society The society of the Stillness is broken up into many "comms," "use-castes," ethnicities and species. Orogenes: People with the ability to control energy, particularly that of the ground (directly) and temperature (indirectly). They can cause and prevent earthquakes, and when angered can unintentionally kill living things in their "torus", or area of influence, by extracting the heat from their bodies to use as energy to manipulate the ground. When this occurs, a visible circle of frost appears around them and living things can be flash-frozen solid. They are widely hated and feared, and many are murdered by small-town mobs when their powers are discovered in childhood. If they are not killed by their family or community, they are given to a Guardian, to be trained at a location called the Fulcrum inside the city of Yumenes. Fulcrum-trained orogenes are marked by their black uniforms and are tolerated slightly better than untrained orogenes, in that they are not murdered quite as often. They wear rings on their fingers to denote rank, ten-ring being the highest. The slur "rogga" is used against orogenes, who likewise call non-orogenes "stills." The orogenes of the Fulcrum are tasked with servicing the comms of the Stillness in many different ways, such as clearing debris, reproducing inside the compound and quelling micro-shakes. Guardians: Warriors, hunters, and assassins tasked with controlling orogenes through pain and training or, alternatively, execution.