The Hugo Award for best novel is wrongfully considered by many to be one of the premier science fiction awards for the written word in speculative fiction. The prizes, awarded by the World Science Fiction Society at the annual Worldcon, are voted on by all the members an attendees. It’s essentially a popularity contest. By the 2000s it was regularly awarded to Fantasy novels as well, which is fair enough because the distinction can at times be muddy. 

Presaging Gamergate, 2013 saw the rise of a movement called the “Sad Puppies,” a campaign launched by people frustrated by what they saw as a trend towards giving the Hugo award to literary works and socially progressive themes. The campaigns aimed to create voting blocks for their works of choice: mostly right wing, military science fiction. 

It was a bit ridiculous. Awarding works of literary merit over popular schlock is not a bad thing. And Science Fiction can be at its best and most poignant when it explores how sociological matters change with new technologies. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness does this excellently with gender and sex. Delany’s Babel 17 does it with polycules, making them essential for ship navigation. Over the following years, progressive minded attendees backlashed against this campaign, and voted for their preferred works. The Fifth Season’s reception and awards can’t really be removed from this context. The Fifth Season has identity politics and representation in spades; it’s an intersectionality themed bingo card. Conceptually, however, Jemisin’s novel does little with it. 

Instead, the thematic focus is on race based oppression. Jemisin inverts some historical realities of our world for her fantasy world. Dark skinned ethnicities from equatorial regions have more geopolitical and imperial power. White people from higher latitudes are looked down on as more barbaric. Most typical humans are divided into professional castes. The orogenes, humans with innate geologic magic, are functionally enslaved by the rest of the humans as tools to quell the world’s severe vulcanism. The orogene's power is checked by a cadre of assassins called Guardians. 

Despite their power, the orogenes are functionally enslaved and are representative of 19th century American slavery. They have no reproductive rights and are ordered to breed at the whims of their political leaders. When they do have children, they are taken and raised elsewhere. There’s even a in-world slur for the orogenes: “rogga”, which comes to be used amongst orogenes to refer to one another much like “nigger” is used among black Americans. 

Having the fantasy world’s primary nexus of oppression hinge on a powerful, outwardly invisible trait instead of skin color is a good move. It saves the novel from being a simplistic allegory and opens up questions on how oppression is enforced via social and political means rather than physical power. Maybe the next novels deal with it more, but I doubt I’ll pick them up because on a sentence level The Fifth Season is probably the least artistic novel I can remember reading. 

Jemesin seems quite incapable of any artful simile or metaphor. I genuinely think she struggles with analogies. Most of her similes and metaphors rarely cross from one concept to another.

[...]you begin, grabbing his shoulder to yank him back -  but he doesn’t yank. It’s like trying to move a rock that’s wearing a jacket; your hand just slips off the leather.

This is actually a magical humanoid rock character with human clothes on.

[He] breaks off the tip of a red crystal. It is a small piece, perhaps the size of a grape, jagged as broken glass.

Why would a crystal break in any other manner?

The mast creaks and goes over like a felled tree, and it hits the deck with the same force.

A mast is a felled tree. That is exactly what it is.

There’s just little abstraction in any of these. Maybe that’s the point. They’re concrete… because this is a book about rock magic. Admittedly, there are some scant, better ones which I’ll include to demonstrate what amounts to the heights of the prose:

Plate boundaries are never still. They jump and twitch and vibrate against one another in a million infinitesimal ways that only a rogga can sess, like the electricity that geneers can make come out of water turbines and vats of chemicals.

Fingers splayed across his cheeks like spiders

Is the Fulcrum like a spider, perching in Yumenes’s heart and using the web of nodes to listen in on every conversation in the Stillness?

It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man Lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows

Perhaps the best device - and I’m being generous here since I might be stretching this beyond the author’s intent - is the nickname of one of the characters. The character Syenite is ordered by the order of geology magicians to conceive a child with the character Alabaster. Alabaster is gay and not enthusiastic about the task. Syenite will come to nickname him ‘Baster, a clear homograph for “baster.” As in turkey baster. Not wanting to engage in hetero sex, being only a tool for impregnation, he’s a figurative turkey baster for Syenite.

Rather than be descriptive, Jemesin prefers to emphasize words with italics. No page is spared. One of the most egregious examples is on the first page, which I’ll quote here because it also encapsulates the flippant tone:

"And architectural structures called balconies that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish, that no-one has ever built them before in written history. (But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.) The streets are paved not with easy to replace cobbles but with a smooth, unbroken, and miraculous substance the locals have dubbed asphalt."

There’s frequent use of ellipses, the narration obliquely talks around things, struggling for an adequate word. One third of the book is in second person. It’s so bad I wonder if it is a deliberate exercise in decolonizing prose. But if these narrative choices are praxis, it doesn’t save the novel from being dogwater. Science fiction and fantasy fans deserve every criticism literary snobs levy at them for giving this series a hat trick of Hugos.

I did not like this book!