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