Literature / The Broken Earth Trilogy

Broken Earth is a Science Fantasy trilogy by N. K. Jemisin written in the mid-2010s. All three books won the Hugo Award.

The story is set on a massive continent called the Stillness, on a planet much more geologically active than the one we're accustomed to. Every few centuries tectonic activity kicks off what they call a "Fifth Season". The survival-obsessed population scrapes by living in disaster-prepared city-states called "comms" and following the survival tips of the ancients known as "stonelore".

1. The Fifth Season (2015)
2. The Obelisk Gate (2016)
3. The Stone Sky (2017)

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Tropes

• Anti-Hero: Essun is cynical about the prospect of anyone treating orogenes like humans and is more concerned with surviving than doing anything to fix the world to the point of repeating the same abusive tactics of the Fulcrum on her own daughter because she fears, not unreasonably, that she will be killed or horribly treated if she can't control and hide her powers, and is responsible for many deaths, though when it comes down to it she's willing to take action to save the world even at the likely expense of her life.
• Anti-Magic: Guardians become Guardians because they're capable of doing this. An orogene can't even sense their footsteps.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Human brain stems have sensory organs called sessapinae, which give them a limited ability to sense vibration and seismic phenomena. Humans born with the Functional Magic of orogeny have a vastly more powerful ability to "sess" things like the exact composition and stratification of the earth for miles around, text written on stone (likened to reading a page blindfolded by tasting the ink), distant conversations spoken near rock, and so on. Discussed by Essun when she and several other orogenes are discussing a strange seismic event: in her internal narration, she's frustrated that they don't have words to describe most of the phenomena related to their powers.
• Bizarre Seasons: Every few centuries, the tectonic activity of their geologically active planet kicks off what they call a "Fifth Season." It's what we'd call a "volcanic winter" — think the eruption of Mount Tambora and the "Year Without a Summer".
  Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all.
• Bullying a Dragon: How the people of the Stillness generally treat orogenes, even though they can control earthquakes and suck the heat and energy out of whatever is around them. Alabaster actually lampshades this when the deputy governor of Allia fails to show him and Syenite any basic hospitality or politeness.
  Alabaster: We are merely here to wield powers greater than she can comprehend in order to save her region's economy, while she—she is a pedantic minor bureaucrat. But I'm sure she's a very important pedantic minor bureaucrat.
• Cold Equation: In this setting, everyone is familiar with cold equations. During the global cataclysms known as "fifth seasons"; comms enact seasonal law under which everyone is potentially subject to being drafted for suicide missions to get supplies, left to likely starve to death outside the comm (being "ashed out"), or being killed and eaten if necessary for other people to live ("you don't think about the meat").
  • Invoked directly in "The Obelisk Gate" by Tonkee when she makes a mathematical model of Castrima's food supply.
• Constructed World: The series is set in the supercontinent of the Stillness, in a planet that is called Earth but doesn't seem to be the same earth we know.
• Creator In-Joke: Like in the author's previous work, once again the snobby imperialists have a history of cannibalism.
• Death World: The Stillness becomes this during a season, as its people and animals become meaner in order to survive.
• Detonation Moon: The Seasons began because a Precursor experiment Gone Horribly Wrong hurled the Moon out of orbit. This happened sufficiently long ago — and the knowledge of it deliberately suppressed — that nobody so much as remembers the word "moon". Folklore records it only as humanity stealing away the Earth's only child, and nobody can agree on what that child actually was.
• Deuteragonist: After the main character Essun, her daughter Nassun's parallel journey gets the most focus in the story, culminating in the two confronting each other for control of the Obelisk Gate.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Orogenes have the ability to control the earth, allowing them to cause or prevent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and attack people with rocks and slabs of earth, among other uses of their power.
• The Empire: The Sanzed Equatorial Affiliation, previously the Sanze Empire, conquered the entire Stillness several Seasons before the series began and successfully imposed its culture and governmental structure upon the entire continent. The prologue ends with its capital and other major cities getting obliterated by the opening of the Rift, so it plays no role in the plot outside of flashbacks (apart from a pseudo-remnant faction made up of ethno-nationalists that appears in the second book).
  • In The Stone Sky; we learn about Syl Anagist, a culture that conquered the entire planet tens of thousands of years before the events of the series. It is stated that numerous other empire-equivalents have existed in the intervening time, but they only show up as "deadciv" ruins.
• Encyclopedia Exposita: Each chapter ends with a quote from stonelore or another in-universe document.
• Endless Winter: The continent-shattering earthquake at the beginning of the book opens a volcanic rift continually pouring out enough ash to blot out the sun for thousands of years, kicking off a Season worse than any in history.
• The Epic: The tale of a woman's quest through a post-apocalyptic world to find her daughter, and becoming enmeshed in a war between immortal beings, with her actions on The Day of Reckoning having the power to destroy the world for good or stop the Vicious Cycle of apocalyptic events from ever happening again, leading her into a life-or-death conflict with that same daughter.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The Stillness during a Fifth Season.
• Fantastic Naming Convention: People have three names, the first which is the given name that people call them, the second which is their "use-caste", which determines what job they are to have during seasons, and their last name is the community they belong to.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Orogenes are widely viewed as subhuman monsters who'll go nuts and kill everyone around them at the drop of a hat. In fact, they were legally ruled not human a few thousand years before the start of the book. The hatred of orogenes is so strong that Essun's husband beats his three-year-old son to death when he finds out he is one.
  • Humans distrust Stone Eaters, claiming that their motives are unknowable. However, established human culture is very wrong about orogenes, and the few Stone Eaters we see are generally empathetic.
  • More mundanely, Sanzeds look down on other ethnicities, because Sanzed racial traits (hair that filters ash easily, wide hips, etc) are considered better for surviving apocalypses.
• Fantastic Slurs: "Rogga" for orogenes. Ykka aims to make it an Appropriated Appellation in her orogene-friendly community and adopts it as a use-caste name, effectively treating the term as if it were a profession rather than an insult. Orogenes on the other hand call non-Orogenes "stillheads" (usually shortened to "stills"), which according to the Fulcrum at least is offensive.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Yumenes has asphalt and electric lights, but the cannon is a brand new technology. The handheld weapon of choice seems to be the crossbow. Borders on Schizo Tech, considering that gunpowder predated hydroelectric power in the real world by more than 500 years. This is justified due to metallic iron & steel being a conduct for Father Earth to spy on, mind-control, and kill people.
• The Famine: Society is built around surviving years-long famines. Every household and community maintains caches of non-perishable food, and they're familiar with the Cold Equations of rationing resources when a "Season" comes. ("You don't think about the meat.")
• Fantastic Caste System: Under Imperial custom, everyone is born into one of seven "use-castes" dictating their function in society, including especially during Seasons.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Stone eaters take humanoid form in order to make interacting with their chosen orogenes easier. There are varying levels of good at it.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Folklore says that Father Earth hates humanity because they stole his only child. Evidence suggests that the Stillness' tectonic instability was caused by the planet losing its moon. Whether it's an angry Genius Loci or simple physics causing the Seasons, this trope applies.
• Gender Is No Object: Both men and women are allowed to have any job in their comms, from physical laborers to soldiers, generals and leaders of empires, and there's no discrimination or distinction between them made. Schools, military units, and bathrooms are gender-integrated. Trans characters show up and are generally socially accepted (however, with regards to Binof/Tonkee, the wealthy elite of Yumenes are shown to disown children whose gender disrupts plans for arranged marriages).
• Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?: How orogenes are treated. They are oppressed and many people will kill them if they ever discover one exists. Jija'a reaction to Nassun where he wishes to find a "cure" for her has particular resemblance to real-life discrimination.
• Hired by the Oppressor: Orogenes (people with Dishing Out Dirt powers) are heavily discriminated against, but the ruling Sanzed government keeps some under their employ in the Fulcrum to achieve various tasks like preventing dangerous earthquakes and removing coral clogging up harbors. The protagonist, a Fulcrum orogene, gradually realizes that, despite being told that they will be accepted if they control their powers and follow all the rules, it's still a rigged, oppressive system even for the "good ones", containing such abuses as killing children training their powers who are too disobedient or uncontrolled, forcibly breeding orogenes to produce more powerful offspring, and even using some as "node maintainers" where they get brain surgery to make them helpless, barely alive and able to only use their power reflexively, which causes them constant agony.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: "Rust" replaces "fuck," as the go-to, universal curse word. That said, Syenite still uses "fuck" as a vulgar verb for having sex, and sometimes you'll hear a character curse with "Rusting fuck" or "Flaking, fucking rust."
  • There are several others, too, such as "Earthfires" for "hell".
• Humans Are White: Averted. Almost everyone is a descendant of the Sanze, who have dark skin, and lighter-skinned people like Schaffa only show up in the arctic and antarctic regions which are largely seen as backwaters. And in Hoa, who was around long before Sanze ancestry became so common.
• An Ice Person: As a side-effect of their powers needing to conserve energy, orogenes can freeze the area around them, killing any living things there.
• Life Energy: Magic works like this, and thus can be used for things like healing or killing someone by draining it. However, it can be also found in anything that once was alive, however long ago, such as rock like limestone that originated as living organisms. It's also in the Earth, which is actually alive and sentient.
• Lost Technology: Civilization in the Stillness seems to follow a general cycle where it builds up over time and is then set far back by a Season. Rinse and repeat a few times and you've got a lot of deadciv artifacts lying around, like the obelisks of the orogeny-activated geodes of Castrima. The official stance of the Empire is not to touch or study any of it, in part because it could be dangerous, and in part because, well, it didn't save them, so why waste effort on it?
• Magic by Any Other Name
  Essun: What did they call it?
  Alabaster: Hn?
  Essun: The obelisk-builders. You said they had a word for the stuff in the obelisks. The stuff of orogeny. What was their word, since we don't have one anymore?
  Alabaster: Oh. The word doesn’t matter, Essun. Make one up if you like. You just need to know the stuff exists.
  Essun: I want to know what they called it.
  Alabaster: They called it magic.
• Metal-Poor Planet: Zig-zagged; the Earth has plenty of metal in it, but people rarely use it for anything and consider it an unreliable material for making anything out of because of how it bends out of shape. There's a reason why "rust" is an expletive in this world. The fact that iron is a conduit for the Earth's malevolent will also has something to do with it.
• Multiple Narrative Modes: In the trilogy, the sections focusing on Essun are written in second person while the sections focusing on other characters are in third person. This turns out to be because Hoa is narrating the story to Essun to remind her of her past self after becoming a stone eater, while also telling her about what other characters were up to at the same time.
• Mythopoeia: Folklore says that Father Earth hates humanity because they stole his only child. Folklore diverges on what that child actually was; sometimes it's not even a child, but a prized possession or a lover.
• Narrator All Along: The end of The Stone Sky reveals that the second-person narration is Essun's companion Hoa, collecting his knowledge of her story to help her process her own Metamorphosis into a Stone Eater.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Characters who are variously gay, lesbian, and bi are featured and are not discriminated against for their orientation by itself in any of the cultures of the Stillness. However, the Fulcrum forced orogenes to have sex with designated partners without regard for desire as part of its Super Breeding Program.
• Noodle Incident: At the end of the trilogy, with so many other questions answered, how Hoa ended up trapped inside an obelisk and buried under the sea never gets revealed. All he ever says about it is that he "pissed off the wrong rogga".
• No Party Like a Donner Party: Cannibalism as a last resort during a Season is an accepted practice. What is not acceptable is cannibalism outside of a season - but some of the Sanze leadership kept eating people anyway. Refer also to The Famine and Winter of Starvation.
• One Degree of Separation: No matter where you travel on the Stillness, you'll run into the same 10 or so characters you already know. Justified in some cases by people directly searching for each other; left unexplained in others.
  • Lampshaded by Nassun in The Stone Sky.
• Our Humans Are Different: Humans have "sessapinae" in their brains that let them sense vibrations and seismic phenomena, a survival trait in the Death World they inhabit. Those born with the Functional Magic of orogeny can "sess" the exact composition of the earth for miles around, drain energy from their surroundings, and control seismic activity in the region.
• Outcast Refuge: We see two places that have high populations of orogenes (energy manipulators viewed as sub-human monsters), including among their leaders, who are discriminated against by mainstream society to the point that some people would kill them as soon as they are discovered; Meov, which avoids being discovered by being on an island in a setting with geological activity that makes living on an island very dangerous, and Castrima, where people hide by living underground in a city maintained by orogenes' powers.
• Power Incontinence: Orogeny, in two ways. On the one hand, orogenes instinctively stabilize earthquakes near them, even as young children. On the other, their fight-or-flight response also triggers their powers, so they need to discipline themselves not to cause a quake or freeze their surroundings solid when they're in stressful situations. Discussed when Schaffa explains that those instincts are rubbish at gauging the magnitude of a threat, which causes problems when you're a Person of Mass Destruction.
• Power Levels: The Fulcrum established a power level scale for orogenes; with unranked 'grits' at the bottom and ten ranks above them, denoted by the number of rings worn on the fingers. Position on the rank scale was set by completing standardized tests and completing assignments for the Fulcrum.
  • Subverted by Ykka, who is an untrained independent orogene who can do things that even the highest-ranked Fulcrum orogenes cannot do (except for Albaster). She just never needed to learn to use orogeny to read words written on pebbles.
• Randomly Gifted: Zig-zagged alongside Superpowerful Genetics. Family with a history of orogeny by and large have orogene children. But orogenes can also be born to Muggles. It annoys the Fulcrum to no end, since it means that orogeny will never be within their complete control.
  Alabaster: You're a feral. [...] That's what they call you, I mean. If you didn't know. Ferals—the ones from outside—often don't know, or care. But when an orogene is born from parents who weren't, from a family line that's never shown the curse before, that's how they think of you. A wild mutt to my domesticated purebred. An accident, to my plan. What it actually means is that they couldn't predict you. You're the proof that they'll never understand orogeny; it's not science, it's something else. And they'll never control us, not really. Not completely.
• Ragnarök Proofing: Invoked Trope. In a world where periodic apocalypses are inevitable, this has become a standard of virtue. Habitation is judged by susceptibility to damage from earthquake or tsunami to the point that most people consider islands uninhabitable by default. Instructions for surviving an apocalypse are literally written in stone and taught with religious reverence. Common standards of physical beauty are based on those most likely to survive a long, sunless Fifth Season. Yumenes has survived as long as it has by systematically controlling and lobotomizing oregenes and forcing them to quell equatorial shakes. Various deadciv artifacts also qualify. Castrima's underground vault was found In Working Order despite having been buried under a lava flow for millennia. For the past few thousand years, Lorists have preserved stonelore on specially-produced polymer tablets. Stone was no longer considered durable enough.
• Required Secondary Powers: Energy is conserved when using orogeny (No Conservation of Energy averted), and is drawn from around the caster. This is one of the reasons why orogenes are so deadly—they can easily suck all the heat of people around them, snap-freezing them to death. While orogenes' main thing is Dishing Out Dirt, they functionally double as An Ice Person. Syenite uses this at one point to project her orogeny to no productive end, simply to lower the temperature and cloak her ship in fog.
• Scientifically Understandable Sorcery: Orogenes' powers follow the laws of energy transfer—in order to use their power, they must find a source of heat in the environment and if they can't, they suck heat from the ambient and freeze everything around them. This allowed Shemshena to defeat Misalem by removing any possible source of energy for him. The same applies to magic, which the ancient Syl Anagist learned how to generate, transfer, and amplify like any other power source to build a world-spanning metropolis. The orogeny-magnifying obelisks were once components for a colossal power plant that would have bounced power to the Moon and back, and their functioning is described in technical terms, not fantastical.
• The Stateless: As part of everyone being Properly Paranoid survivalists, being a member of a comm, or community, is an essential characteristic of one's identity. During a Season, comms seal their gates to outsiders and focus completely on their own survival. To be commless during a Season means being forced to live in a wilderness that grows increasingly barren and dangerous by the day. Commless often form bands of raiders preying on other commless or poorly-defended comms, desperate for food and shelter.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Zig-zagged and discussed, alongside Randomly Gifted. The Fulcrum has a Super Breeding Program and breeds orogenes with each other, especially the more powerful ones, in hopes of producing more orogenes or Guardians. It works, although orogenes can also be born to Muggles.
  Alabaster: I was bred to order. Not even as haphazardly as our child will be. I'm the product of two of the Fulcrum's oldest and most promising lineages, or so I'm told.
• Survivalist Stash: Every established comm has at least one of these, as commanded by stonelore, with the exception of the Fulcrum since the Fulcrum orogenes are to all be immediately murdered by the Guardians during Seasons. So do many families and individuals.
• Training the Gift of Magic: Among orogenes, a child can start an earthquake, but it takes a master to throw a boulder. They train to use their abilities and senses in more precise ways, as well as to increase their overall power.
  "F-focus," he says, between pants. "Control. Matter of degree."
  It's the first lesson of orogeny. Any infant can move a mountain; that's instinct. Only a trained Fulcrum orogene can deliberately, specifically, move a boulder. And only a ten-ringer, apparently, can move the infinitesimal substances floating and darting in the interstices of his blood and nerves.
• Winter of Starvation: In a world that suffers periodic volcanic winters that can last anywhere from months to decades, this is accepted as a fact of life. During a Season, martial law is enacted, communities have the right to close their gates to outsiders, and food becomes anything that can pad out your stores and keep you alive a little longer. Survival is the highest virtue during a Season. You don't think about the meat.
• World Sundering: The series begins with the world's only continent being torn in half along a faultline by Alabaster, setting off a Season of such severity that it promises to end humanity once and for all. The series ends with it closing, after being used as an energy source to return the Moon to stable orbit.
• Vicious Cycle: The catastrophic Seasons happen every few hundred years and would happen far more often than that if it wasn't for orogenes. It turns out it was not always like that, but the seasons were caused by Gaia's Vengeance over the loss of the moon, and once the moon is brought back the seasons end.

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