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Jun. 29th, 2016 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Fifth Season by NK Jemisin
The Fifth Season is an epic fantasy that strongly reminds me of Samuel Delany's Neveryon cycle in a lot of ways- in the reshuffling of racial boundaries married with a deeply nuanced sense for the way structural power imbalances shape societies, in the exploration of alternative sexualities and relationship shapes, in the sense of historical and geographical scope, in the power of myth and magic, in the fascination with complicated nonlinear story structures. But the problem with comparing Jemisin to Delany is that on the one hand, comparing a black fantasy writer to Delany feels so obvious, and on the other hand, failing to note that influence feels so dismissive. *shrug* What can you do? Racism is hard.
Neveryon is my favorite fantasy series, in any case, and so the comparison I'm making is about as flattering as I can possibly make it. There are many ways The Fifth Season is not like Neveryon, too. Delany was responding to the dominant sword and sorcery epics of his childhood- Howard, Haggard, Dunsany, Leiber, etc... as well as conversing with the New Wave fantasies of LeGuin and Moorcock and so on. Pulp sword and sorcery fiction has a set of genre conventions driven by the haste at which the stories were written and the reader's expectations... a certain kind of overly elaborate, conventionalized descriptive language, a certain set of acceptable lurid settings and scenarios, and Delany is writing responsive to those conventions. Jemisin, while certainly aware of Delany and his forbears, is much more responsive to Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time and the more elegantly designed and planned epic fantasy that has dominated the genre over the past twenty years.
So in Neveryon, there are power structures and empires, but they're all a little bit vague and abstract. Carefully and delicately planned by Delany to make his thematic arguments, to be sure, but their inner workings are inexplicable and unimportant to the story. In The Fifth Season, though there is no palace intrigue or nation level conflict, the empires are specific and carefully planned out and their structures inform the plot at deep levels.
And it's just a great, great book all around, and I'm looking forward to the sequels, but one of the unusual things it does that I want to single out is the later parts of Syenite's narrative, when they are on Meov and the book basically just takes a break from plot. And you know, from genre conventions and from the peculiarities of the book's structure that plot is going to start happening again, and it's going to be painful, and you just want the no-plot section to go on and you're anticipatorily frustrated for when it comes to an end. I feel like in this moment Jemisin is as brilliant as Delany: she makes you realize that her epic fantasy heroes don't actually want to save the world, don't have any stake in saving the world, and are just fighting and clawing with every bone in their body just to save themselves. And she makes you care anyway, makes you believe in her story subversion as a story in its own right. The Meov section of the book is a little island of fluff in an otherwise very dark (andcahn uses the word 'angry' to describe it- rightly so, I think) story, but it's a structurally significant piece of fluff. And its very existence thus calls to attention questions about what we are looking for in stories, what the balance between character and plot looks like and what it CAN look like.
That's just generally illustrative of how well written The Fifth Season is. It does all sorts of unconventional and unexpected things with genre and storytelling conventions and it makes all of them work. It does second person and it does third person and even a little first person, it does omniscient narration and then it subverts the omniscience of the narration. It plays with Nalo Hopkinson-style vernacular narration, but never overplays it. It creates new swear words and new setting-specific vocabulary without ever overwhelming or confusing, and it handles infodumps as smoothly as it handles incluing. It does seamless time jumps and nested stories and it does it all without every seeming gimmicky or twee.
And at the center is Damaya, fierce and clever and constantly evolving as the world around her constantly evolves. The Stillness is a land of reinvention, where constant tectonic activity reshapes the land and its people on a regular basis, for Father Earth hates man. It's a really great way to heighten the stakes, to intensify and create an epic setting without requiring massing armies and warring kingdoms. And of course it's an allusive way of speaking about the spate of terrible natural disasters the world has been grappling with over the past number of years- Katrina and Sandy and Irene, Haiyan, the 2004 Tsunami, and so on. In a lot of really compelling ways, The Fifth Season feels like a fantasy with relevance to our own world more than most fantasies do.
The Fifth Season is an epic fantasy that strongly reminds me of Samuel Delany's Neveryon cycle in a lot of ways- in the reshuffling of racial boundaries married with a deeply nuanced sense for the way structural power imbalances shape societies, in the exploration of alternative sexualities and relationship shapes, in the sense of historical and geographical scope, in the power of myth and magic, in the fascination with complicated nonlinear story structures. But the problem with comparing Jemisin to Delany is that on the one hand, comparing a black fantasy writer to Delany feels so obvious, and on the other hand, failing to note that influence feels so dismissive. *shrug* What can you do? Racism is hard.
Neveryon is my favorite fantasy series, in any case, and so the comparison I'm making is about as flattering as I can possibly make it. There are many ways The Fifth Season is not like Neveryon, too. Delany was responding to the dominant sword and sorcery epics of his childhood- Howard, Haggard, Dunsany, Leiber, etc... as well as conversing with the New Wave fantasies of LeGuin and Moorcock and so on. Pulp sword and sorcery fiction has a set of genre conventions driven by the haste at which the stories were written and the reader's expectations... a certain kind of overly elaborate, conventionalized descriptive language, a certain set of acceptable lurid settings and scenarios, and Delany is writing responsive to those conventions. Jemisin, while certainly aware of Delany and his forbears, is much more responsive to Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time and the more elegantly designed and planned epic fantasy that has dominated the genre over the past twenty years.
So in Neveryon, there are power structures and empires, but they're all a little bit vague and abstract. Carefully and delicately planned by Delany to make his thematic arguments, to be sure, but their inner workings are inexplicable and unimportant to the story. In The Fifth Season, though there is no palace intrigue or nation level conflict, the empires are specific and carefully planned out and their structures inform the plot at deep levels.
And it's just a great, great book all around, and I'm looking forward to the sequels, but one of the unusual things it does that I want to single out is the later parts of Syenite's narrative, when they are on Meov and the book basically just takes a break from plot. And you know, from genre conventions and from the peculiarities of the book's structure that plot is going to start happening again, and it's going to be painful, and you just want the no-plot section to go on and you're anticipatorily frustrated for when it comes to an end. I feel like in this moment Jemisin is as brilliant as Delany: she makes you realize that her epic fantasy heroes don't actually want to save the world, don't have any stake in saving the world, and are just fighting and clawing with every bone in their body just to save themselves. And she makes you care anyway, makes you believe in her story subversion as a story in its own right. The Meov section of the book is a little island of fluff in an otherwise very dark (and
cahn uses the word 'angry' to describe it- rightly so, I think) story, but it's a structurally significant piece of fluff. And its very existence thus calls to attention questions about what we are looking for in stories, what the balance between character and plot looks like and what it CAN look like.That's just generally illustrative of how well written The Fifth Season is. It does all sorts of unconventional and unexpected things with genre and storytelling conventions and it makes all of them work. It does second person and it does third person and even a little first person, it does omniscient narration and then it subverts the omniscience of the narration. It plays with Nalo Hopkinson-style vernacular narration, but never overplays it. It creates new swear words and new setting-specific vocabulary without ever overwhelming or confusing, and it handles infodumps as smoothly as it handles incluing. It does seamless time jumps and nested stories and it does it all without every seeming gimmicky or twee.
And at the center is Damaya, fierce and clever and constantly evolving as the world around her constantly evolves. The Stillness is a land of reinvention, where constant tectonic activity reshapes the land and its people on a regular basis, for Father Earth hates man. It's a really great way to heighten the stakes, to intensify and create an epic setting without requiring massing armies and warring kingdoms. And of course it's an allusive way of speaking about the spate of terrible natural disasters the world has been grappling with over the past number of years- Katrina and Sandy and Irene, Haiyan, the 2004 Tsunami, and so on. In a lot of really compelling ways, The Fifth Season feels like a fantasy with relevance to our own world more than most fantasies do.
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Date: 2016-06-29 08:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-06-29 11:48 pm (UTC)