Book Review: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.” Beginning the book with an apocalypse as a cold open is just the first audacious and bold maneuver that writer N.K. Jemisin pulls off in The Fifth Season, the first of the Broken Earth series. The Fifth Season continues Jemisin’s technique of crafting interesting, diverse and unique fantasy worlds to explore ideas, concepts and characters in her burgeoning signature style. I listened to this in audiobook form, an excellent narration by Robin Miles. After that cold open, and a very brief immersion into the world, less than a page, the novel launches us into the stories of the characters. The novel focuses on three characters, and given that apocalypse, one quickly realizes that two of the characters’ stories predate that critical cold open event, and one, the character we meet first, is a survivor of the aftermath. The characters are all women, all in different stages of life.
Worldbuilding: Why It Ain’t So Easy
So, I appeared at an event at the San Marcos Library on Sunday where I’d been asked to give a talk about research. During the question and answer section, someone asked me why I would go to all the trouble of setting a fantasy in the real world? “Why do that when you can just make stuff up? That’s easier, after all. It’s a short cut!” Yeah. Um. Not so much. First, writing isn’t easy, nor is making up stuff. Worldbuilding is hard work — very difficult, detailed work. If you’re not thinking about the worldbuilding aspects of your story that much, then what you’re doing is probably derivative, and that’s not good. It’s far easier to work with environments with which the reader is already familiar than it is to make up a foreign world and make it plausible. There are certain cues
