The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, Book 1; The Obelisk Gate, Book 2; The Stone Sky, Book 3

The Broken Earth Trilogy is set on a single supercontinent called the Stillness, a world of frequent geological catastrophe where civilization has developed around the management of extinction-level events called Seasons. The social order is organized entirely around survival, and at its center is an institution of profound brutality known as the Fulcrum, a state-controlled organization that identifies children born with orogeny, the ability to manipulate geological forces, and conscripts them into lifelong service. Orogenes are the most powerful people in the world and among its most oppressed. They are registered, leashed to Fulcrum control, and regarded by the broader population as subhuman. The word used for them in common speech is not a neutral descriptor.

The Fifth Season opens at the end of the world. Someone has cracked the continent along its equator, triggering a Season that will likely last centuries and kill most of humanity. The novel follows three women: Essun, whose husband has just murdered their son for showing signs of orogeny and fled with their daughter; Damaya, a child being collected by a Guardian after her power manifests; and Syenite, a trained orogene being sent on assignment with the most powerful orogene alive. Their stories converge in ways that become clear only as the novel progresses, and the second-person narration that addresses Essun throughout is one of the trilogy's strengths and maintained throughout.

The Obelisk Gate narrows its focus to Essun and her daughter Nassun, now separated and moving toward opposite conclusions about what to do with the world they have inherited. Essun is trying to survive and find her daughter. Nassun, raised in hiding by a father who killed her brother, is developing her power in directions the Fulcrum never taught. The floating obelisks that drift above the Stillness, mysterious in the first novel, begin to reveal their purpose.

The Stone Sky moves between the present catastrophe and the deep past, revealing the origins of the Fulcrum, the Seasons, the obelisks, and the moon that was torn from the world thousands of years ago by a civilization that used orogenes the way a machine uses fuel. The trilogy ends with a choice between two versions of the future, and Jemisin does not make either of them easy.

The series is overtly about systemic oppression. Jemisin has been explicit in interviews about the parallel between the treatment of orogenes and the treatment of Black Americans, and the novels do not soften that argument. The Fulcrum is not metaphor so much as mechanism, a detailed portrait of how a society institutionalizes the exploitation of those it fears. The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, the first time any author had achieved this.