I wanted to talk to Jemisin because she wrote a trilogy of books that largely took the world as it is now-buckling under the weight of systemic racism, income inequality, and environmental disaster-and portrayed it, through the lens of fiction, as what it truly is if left to momentum and entropy: the end of the world. Now she wants to find and kill him, and she doesn’t care if that means walking straight into the apocalypse.

With those two events, The Fifth Season introduces us to Essun, its protagonist and the wife of the man who just killed their son. The significance of one event to the other isn't immediately clear, nor does it seem to matter at first. The Fifth Season is a novel that demands you see it through the moment you begin it, as a man stands over the young son he's murdered with his bare hands in one part of the world, while in another, the end of the world begins. She called these recurring cycles of disaster the Fifth Season, a name good enough for a title. A world where you live one way when the seasons changed as usual, and another when the Earth churned in anger, threatening to kill everyone on it.

A society that had endured environmental disaster after disaster for generations in a cycle that was irregular but always inevitable, so much so that people were born into the world believing the Earth hated them.

As Jemisin, along with the rest of the world, watched a city rise up in rage in response to the injustice of then-officer Darren Wilson's murder of Michael Brown, she slowly began to imagine a new way for the world to end. Jemisin wants to talk about cities.įirst, Ferguson, Missouri.

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin