The Socially Distant Tor.com Read-Along continues! We recently wrapped up Katherine Addison’s fabulous steampunk/fantasy/goblin bildungsroman, The Goblin Emperor, but there are still more excellent books in our To Be Read stacks. Next week we’re excited to dig into N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning tale of magic and climate upheaval, The Fifth Season! We’ll be reading and discussing the novel over the course of the next six weeks, and you can follow along with us on Twitter using the hashtag #TorDotReads.
When we first started the Read-Along three months ago, many of us were settling into our homes to stop the spread of the Coronavirus; reading together made staying inside more fun, and helped foster a sense of community in the midst of isolation. We’re grateful for each of you who made the initial journey with us, and we’re looking forward to heading into a new fantasy realm with our latest read.
The Fifth Season, the first entry in the “Broken Earth” series, is a multi-generational tale that unfolds on a planet with a single continent, called the Stillness by its people, who fear a time called “the Fifth Season” when the planet will undergo a cataclysmic shift in its climate. The story follows three female “orogenes”—people who can control the energies of natural elements, including the ground and temperature—who are feared, oppressed, and weaponized for their ability to manipulate the land and weather around them.
Here’s the plan: If you already have a copy, great! If you need a copy, you can find one at the links below, or order from your local indie bookshop if it’s making deliveries—here’s a handy spreadsheet of indie stores, so you can find one near you!
We’ll all meet on Twitter on Wednesday, June 3rd under the hashtag #TorDotReads to discuss the opening chapters, from the Prologue, “you are here” through Chapter 5, “you’re not alone.” From there we’ll read about five chapters each week, and check in every Wednesday to talk about the power systems, structural racism, and the weather on Stillness.
And remember, many of us are going into this as a first time read, so please, NO SPOILERS in the Twitter threads!
Hope to see you soon!
Buy the Book
The Fifth Season
Talk about mood whiplash.
Literally just finished this book over the weekend, soooo good!
I’m curious why this is just 1 book and not the trilogy? Do you think when you reach the end of the first book people would *not* want to continue?
Wow, just yesterday I put this in my June TBR stack!
I finished the first book and I haven’t yet continued with the series. I had quite mixed feelings about Broken Earth, and I will be very curious about the read-along. The whole “oppressed super-powered class” seemed a bit dubious, especially when the Orogenes have so much leverage to negotiate (as glimpsed in the chapters in Allia, but generally, if they just went on a little strike, entire cities would collapse from geological instability). Furthermore, they do in fact prove themselves incredibly dangerous (protagonist destroys a couple of settlements, including the aforementioned city with a population of around a hundred thousand people, while Alabaster razes a multi-million city to the ground in the process of triggering an apocalypse). Of course, every action could be argued to result from oppression, but I still had issues with ethics and the logic of world-building, especially when I expected a powerful treatise on oppression. But perhaps if I continued with the series, I would find that the author addresses these issues?