The Chrysalids
A staple of school syllabuses across the Commonwealth and arguably the best thing Wyndham wrote; its influence runs through YA dystopia's entire bloodline.
Book Entry · Fantasy
The Fifth Season
by N. K. Jemisin · 2015 · The Broken Earth, book 1
What is The Fifth Season about?
The Stillness ends the world regularly — Fifth Seasons, continent-scale geological catastrophes survived on stonelore and ruthlessness — and manages the orogenes who could prevent or cause them by enslaving them to the Fulcrum, when communities don't simply kill them as children. Three women thread the narrative: Damaya, taken; Syenite, bred and assigned; and Essun, in second person, walking out of a personal apocalypse (her son, killed by his father for what he was) into the planetary one just beginning. The three-strand structure conceals a mechanism that, when it engages, re-reads as inevitability. Oppression rendered as tectonics, with the rage load-bearing.
Why it matters
Hugo winner 2016 — first volume of the unprecedented three-peat — and an instant canon entry: the most influential fantasy novel of its decade, on syllabuses from sixth forms to doctoral programmes.
Where does it sit in the series?
The Stillness, its Fifth Seasons and the enslaved earth-movers who end the world and remake it: the first trilogy to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos.
In the Guide from The Broken Earth:
- The Fifth Season (2015)
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