The Essential Malady

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, Orbit, August 4th, 2015

The Fifth Season is the first book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy which scored a hat trick of Hugo Award wins in 2016, 17 & 18. Before getting into the review, I should probably start by giving a brief background on how I became familiar with the author. This will in part be to make plain my bias but also just because it is worth going over as these controversies; as I believe they contributed to her three Hugo wins more than the quality of her writing.

In June of 2013, she gave a speech at the Continuum Convention in Melbourne, Australia. Although not named directly, she referenced Vox Day in her speech and described him as:

a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of ***hole

Vox Day responded stating that he does not describe himself this way though his detractors have. He then described Jemisin as:

an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine

The context for Jemisin’s attack was that Day had recently ran for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and lost to author, Steven Gould. He unsurprisingly lost by a significant margin but even receiving 10% of the vote was too much for Jemisin. Now whether or not you think Vox’s reply was particularly charitable, he was not the first to fling the dung and there had been a lot more flung at him before this. The above quote provoked proverbial (and probably no few literal), shrieks from the SFWA “community” and led to his expulsion from the organisation. It has often been quoted (and misquoted) since and usually without the context. I found Vox’s response highly amusing and agree with him completely.

Something I’d forgotten is that Jemisin opened her speech with a spiel about feeling unsafe in Australia and other countries though to my knowledge, was never lynched, mugged or even harassed on her visit. Had anything like this happened, we’d certainly have heard about it. She stated after spending some time in the country that:

This is not a safe country for people of color. It’s better than it was, certainly, but when the first news story I saw on turning on my first Australian TV channel was about your One Nation party’s Pauline Hanson… well. Still got a ways to go.

This was given to an audience in Melbourne who were likely mostly left-wing, so she wasn’t called out on any of the inaccurate things she said in just the first few paragraphs. In reality, those residing in Australia (regardless of their ethnicity), generally have a lot more to fear from people that look like her than any other group; as is certainly true in the United States. The only evidence of Australia being unsafe she had was seeing a politician who advocates immigration restriction on television. If you can stomach reading it, you’ll also observe how devoid it is of the topic of speculative fiction which is the stated purpose of the convention.

The next time her name came up for me was during the Rabid Puppies Campaigns in 2015 and 2016. The Fifth Season was published in 2015 and she was nominated and won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2016. This win, as well as her two subsequent wins were used as evidence that the Rabid Puppies had failed when they actually demonstrated exactly what Vox Day had been saying about the politicisation of the awards going back years.

So this should be enough context before I proceed but I will add that I my initial expectations for this novel would be that it would be simply bad and that Jemisin was promoted not because of her ability, but because she is a black female. After reading it, I would say that these are certainly reasons but not the most important.

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