In 2006, Liu Cixin became famous with his book The Three-Body Problem. An alien planet struggles with non-periodic but frequent mass extinctions due to the unstable planetary orbit. The Fifth Season is exactly that kind of extinction in the world of The Broken Earth. While the visible causes are usually volcanic in origin rather than solar, the results are similar. Endless civilizations, species, and empires have been wiped out—just like in The Three-Body Problem. Society’s main goal is to prepare for the next extinction, but of course, it is never the same as the previous one. How bad can an apocalypse be to countries which had tens of thousands of years to prepare and lots of experience? We’ll see.
Unlike The Three-Body Problem, N. K. Jemisin chooses to tell the story in a chaotic and confusing way. It is not always clear who exactly the main character is, where the story is headed, or what they are fighting for. The book is written as if I am the protagonist, similar to choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks. All this confusion is likely to make the reading experience more unique and to compensate for the similarity with The Three-Body Problem and the excessive superheroism.
Fantasy has a very limited number of clichés, and the trope of constantly dying and reborn civilizations is relatively new—perhaps inspired by science fiction stories about alien artifacts, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rama, The Expanse, Gateway, Alien, etc. While we’ve seen fragments of this book elsewhere, the combination is somewhat innovative. The magic felt fresh—bordering on science fiction. The closest system I can think of is the Midi-chlorians from Star Wars.
Despite the off-putting style, which reminds us a two-page Reddit post without new lines or punctuation, the book is interesting and overall great. I hope the sequel gets translated as well. Curious to see how Jemisin will solve the boringly overpowered superhero problem.
5*/5
Veselin.blog 
I was thinking of reading it and then I came to the line about the ‘two page Reddit post…’😬
Beautiful artwork though
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It’s an unusual book. This style is not random, it gets somewhat explained towards the end.
I gave it 5/5 because it was interesting to me and memorable despite the stuff I didn’t like. You may enjoy it as well but it’s non conventional and you also need to have some tolerance for the main characters committing unreasonable evil acts.
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Like? Or is that going into spoiler city?
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Some of the main characters commit atrocities
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I read The Fifth Season series a few years ago. The writing style does take a bit of getting used to and I also found it quite a “dense” book in that there is so much going on that you really do need to keep paying attention.
That said, It’s a really original novel and I did enjoy it. So much so that I immediately went out and bought the next book in the series.
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Did you read the next books?
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I did. I found that The Obelisk Gate sagged a bit (which is something I often find with the middle book of a trilogy) but The Stone Sky was absolutely superb.
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Great, thanks. Looking forward to reading the continuations as well.
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Thanks for the suggestion. As a non-native English speaker, I struggle to visualize most fiction books in English, and sci-fi is one area I feel I sorely miss out on because I stay away from them. I’m experimenting with the idea of using LLM to describe — or visualize — certain scenes from books, and so far it’s been… interesting.
I’ve been reading War of the Worlds and I used some of the descriptions to see how AI shows those long metal thingy. It wasn’t great, to say the least, never mind the fact that it breaks immersion and makes reading a more complicated experience.
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