Elevating Wokeness: Why N. K. Jemisin's 'Broken Earth' Trilogy Defines the 2010s
Part III of 'Will Science Fiction Ever Be Literary?'
This is the third part of a three-part series. Part I | Part II
MODERATE SPOILERS FOR THE BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY AHEAD.
Introduction
The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin features disintegration imagery truly worthy of this issue— splitting supercontinents, collapsing civilizations, and acidic hellfire raining down on worlds below. The story is set in the roiling climate of the Stillness: an apocalyptic wasteland reminiscent of Trisolaris from Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. Every few generations, a catastrophic “Fifth Season” follows the usual four, leaving continental destruction in its wake. As such, civilizations cannot build; they cannot iteratively improve. They are cursed to walk atop the bones of greater fallen societies, waiting for that fateful Fifth Season to consume their world once more.
Taking center stage are orogenes: enhanced humans who can harness kinetic energy from the Earth. While the Stillness needs orogenes to mitigate natural disasters, most of the population still resents them and treats them like witches. The protagonist of the series, Essun, is an orogene living undercover with her children in a small village. When her identity is exposed amidst another continent-wide cataclysm, Essun must cross the Stillness to find the peace she seeks.
In Part II, I profiled The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, which faced a lukewarm literary reception despite its literary qualities. I attributed this to the book being too timeless: it did not reflect its time to resonate with a broader audience. It is perhaps already clear how Broken Earth reflects its time— even a summary evokes modern hot topics like the climate crisis, systemic oppression, and intersectionality. But in Part III, I would like to focus on how Broken Earth manages to reflect its time while also transcending it, succeeding where The Book of the New Sun failed.
I will begin with a deep dive into the qualities that date a text, expanding upon the literary framework established in Part I. This will give us the vocabulary to delve into specifics and explore what exactly sets the Broken Earth trilogy above the rest.
Part I: Woke Literature as Didactic Literature
What does it mean for a work to be too of its time? Or, what does it mean for a work to not be timeless? This question may be abstract, but some things are pretty obvious at a glance. Consider this passage from Andy Weir’s The Martian:
For the record… I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars”.
—Andy Weir, The Martian (2011)
This “Cool Science Teacher English” is certainly entertaining, but no one would say that it sounds classic. If we want to be analytical about it, we can already predict how this passage might age poorly. Wikipedia may not exist anymore. Sarcasm is likely to be totally different. I can imagine future translators having a hell of a time trying to explain the humor in some massive footnote, totally skipped by 2100s schoolchildren who just want to get their assigned chapters over with.
A big reason why people wax nostalgic about the classics is survivorship bias. Old books in an English class are vetted to ensure some minimum level of quality, because lesser books have faded from the popular memory. Obviously, it is good for students to spend most of their time reading good literature. But I wish English classes spent just a bit of time on books that are not remembered today.
You’ve probably heard of the 1850 classic The Scarlet Letter. But you probably haven’t heard of a novel that was far more popular at the time: The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins. The text isn’t entirely devoid of value, but consider this passage:
"Gertrude," said Fanny, pulling Gertrude's dress to attract her attention, and speaking in a loud whisper, "are you engaged?—are you engaged to him?" "Yes," whispered Gertrude, anxious, if possible, to gratify Fanny's curiosity and silence her questioning.
"Oh, I'm so glad! I'm so glad!" shouted Fanny, dancing round the room and flinging up her arms.
"And I'm glad, too!" said Gracie, catching the tone of congratulation, and putting her mouth up to Gertrude for a kiss.
"And I am glad," said Mr. Clinton, placing his hands upon those of Willie and Gertrude, which were still clasped together, "that the noble and self-sacrificing girl, whom I have no words to thank, and no power to repay, has reaped a worthy reward in the love of one of the few men with whom a fond father may venture wholly to trust the happiness of his child."
—Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (1854)
You can think of this style as an 1850s equivalent to Weir’s snarky 2010s English. It isn’t necessarily poorly constructed, it’s just so unabashedly sentimental. This type of writing played really well at the time— essentially making of a play for the Hallmark movie audience of the time. But as tastes in literature evolved (and as mass audiences moved over to TV), the age of sentimental prose slowly came to an end.
In the end, complicated literary analysis isn’t necessary to expose the qualities of dated literature. These qualities are usually pretty obvious on their own.
While colloquial literature can quickly become dated, something else ages far worse: didactic literature. One way to conceptualize didactic literature is moralist literature that is not timeless. It may have resonated with the cultural environment of its time, but it sounds preachy or even embarrassing outside of that specific cultural context.
The key ingredient for non-didactic literature is empathy. It is difficult to predict how mainstream perspectives may change in the fullness of time. The best authors can do is empathize with different perspectives of the past and present. If a book can at least do that, then it has a fighting chance of avoiding didacticism.
Most readers should be familiar with the phrase “woke literature”, a pejorative for the didactic literature of our era. It may have a guiding ideology at its core, but woke has come to mean “extremely close-minded and unable to accept other people's criticism or different perspectives”. Much ink has been spilled over writers exhibiting these tendencies, especially in left-leaning institutions like publishing and academia. While it is hard to say how much of this push is just a Trojan horse for reactionary rhetoric, didactic woke literature does exist. Consider the following passage from 2024 Nebula Award nominee “Bad Doors”:
“You pampered children.” Instantly, his uncle’s voice switched condescensions. He went from irate condescension to an insincere condescension, like this was entertaining for him now. “First you kids said there was this super virus sweeping the planet. Now you say there are evil doors everywhere. This is what’s wrong with your generation. You scare easily.”
—John Wiswell, “Bad Doors” (2024)
“Bad Doors” explores the sudden appearance of mysterious doors that swallow people up without warning. The protagonist fails to convey the dangers of these doors to his conservative relatives, because their masculinity is too fragile, their ideas too close-minded. He decides not to worry about his uncle getting swallowed up by the doors, since he deserves it anyway. At the end of the story, his uncle literally dies of COVID, and the narrator doesn’t seem to express any sympathy.
The above passage is especially grating because the doors = COVID analogy is already didactic enough on its own, but the author still felt the need to spell it out further. It also employs a pernicious didactic tactic: giving bad characters a lack of empathy for the author’s perspective. This allows the author to be uncharitable to opposing views while also suggesting that they are in fact empathetic because they view a lack of empathy as bad. In the end, the story fails to convey much empathy at all.
I won’t contest the idea that giving literary accolades to woke literature like “Bad Doors” sets a bad precedent. What I will contest is the conservative claim that this level of didacticism is unprecedented. A quick examination of the popular literature of the past shows that current didacticism is well within the historical norm.
Consider The Dairyman’s Daughter (1825), a wildly popular religious tract meant to teach the poor how to be good Christians. Here is a passage from the end of the text:
My poor reader, the Dairyman’s daughter was a poor girl, and the child of a poor man. Herein thou resemblest her; but dost thou resemble her as she resembled Christ? Art thou made rich by faith? Hast thou a crown laid up for thee? Is thine heart set upon heavenly riches? If not, read this story once more, and then pray earnestly for like precious faith!
—Leigh Richmond (The Dairyman’s Daughter)
The didacticism on display here puts even the most woke novels to shame. Are you poor and sad? You should be poor and happy, because you are made rich by faith! If you aren’t convinced, read this book again!
Didactic literature is not new; it has existed for literature’s entire history and will continue to exist. Woke literature is simply its latest iteration. It may seem novel, but that is only because we receive such a rose-tinted cultural sample of the past.
Before we move on, I want to identify the ideology behind woke: the worldview that the term referred to before being co-opted by political opponents. Critic David Brooks gives one of the better definitions: “to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures”, particularly in the context of racial justice. In other words, to be “awoken” to injustices that are more hidden, more institutional.
During the “Great Awokening”, this worldview (AKA social justice progressivism) raised the salience of many topics for White audiences, e.g. systemic racism, redlining, and mass incarceration. For a time, this opened up the discussion on issues of social justice considerably. But over time, woke ideology became hard to decouple from the woke didacticism that often accompanies it. The American public’s lack of patience for woke didacticism led in part to a right-wing backlash in American politics.
This didacticism has been the focal point of most anti-woke criticism, not the ideas themselves.1 It has gotten to the point where most so-called “woke” media doesn’t really engage with the original worldview anymore (“Bad Doors” is a good example). But most people still wouldn’t hesitate to apply the woke label. In the next section, I will explain what Broken Earth does to transcend this didacticism while still making the case for social justice progressive (SJP) ideas themselves.
(From this point forward, I will refer to the original “woke ideology” by the more specific term social justice progressivism. I will continue using “woke” in the pejorative sense, referring to a suffocating didacticism informed by SJP.)
Part II: ‘Broken Earth’ as a Vehicle for SJP Ideas
Now that we have a foundation for empathetic literature and SJP, I can explore how Jemisin uses both prose and scientific elements to get even the most skeptical readers to feel certain aspects of her worldview.
Let’s start with the prose. Keep the above Andy Weir passage in mind as we look at this passage from the first chapter of Broken Earth:
The end begins in a city: the oldest, largest, and most magnificent city in the world. The city is called Yumenes, and once it was the heart of an empire. It is still the heart of many things, though the empire has wilted somewhat in the years since its first bloom, as empires do.
—N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)
N. K. Jemisin’s “Ancient Storyteller” English almost suspends the text in time— not to the same degree as Wolfe’s “Mythopoeic Historian” English, but still enough for it to escape immediate association with the 2010s. Unlike The Martian, The Fifth Season is clearly written with future generations of readers in mind, hoping to influence the culture in the decades ahead.
Jemisin’s narrative voice enhances not only the timelessness of her work, but also the moral aspect. While Western values are typically set in the context of Enlightenment ideals like the primacy of the individual and human advancement, SJP values are more inspired by oral indigenous traditions. The oral-inspired prose style of Broken Earth nudges the reader away from a Western mindset, priming them to receive SJP ideas.
There is a clear link between indigenous values and SJP views about the environment. The Enlightenment mindset imagines a passive Earth, one primarily designed to serve its human masters. But indigenous traditions present the Earth as a more active force, not to be mastered but respected. This idea comes with a skepticism of human hubris that fits in nicely with the modern SJP project. The prose of Broken Earth is able to capture this sentiment, creating a foreboding atmosphere that questions how much humans can really control a natural spirit that does not wish to be controlled.
This idea of an active natural spirit is carried further by the scientific elements of the text. The title Broken Earth of the series is a terrifying geo-spirit: perhaps the only true villain in the series— less out of malice and more due to sheer, cold indifference. In modernity, we are used to nature being a mild inconvenience, never truly threatening the comfort of our climate-controlled homes. But consider this ominous passage:
Ah, my love. An apocalypse is a relative thing, isn’t it? When the earth shatters, it is a disaster to the life that depends on it – but nothing much to Father Earth. When a man dies, it should be devastating to a girl who once called him Father, but this becomes as nothing when she has been called monster so many times that she finally embraces the label. When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper worn finer by the friction of history. (“So you were slaves, so what?” they whisper. Like it’s nothing.) But to the people who live through a slave rebellion, both those who take their dominance for granted until it comes for them in the dark, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment longer in “their place”…
—N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky (2017)
Here, Jemisin spells the idea out in full, with crackling metaphors that place it in the context of historical struggle. There’s a later scene where orogenes descend into the maelstrom that is Father Earth, seeing his indifference towards their survival in all its terrible glory. Anthropomorphism is often overdone, but it justifies itself here because of our tendency to zoopomorphize the Earth. We tend to ascribe properties of a helpless animal to this fearsome rock, when nothing could be further from the truth.
When people think climate change, they often think conservation: saving animals out of the goodness of our hearts. This inspires pity towards the Earth, perhaps regret about the “harm” we are causing it. But the Earth isn’t some kind of helpless animal. It will be fine, climate catastrophe or no. The real animals in danger are us.
Glaciers falling into the ocean and polar bears stranded on ice can inspire action, but Jemisin’s horrifying visions of climate catastrophe create another kind of motivation. Modernity provides so much shelter from the untamed wilds that we tend to forget how quickly we can come to be at their mercy. Jemisin is here to remind us of that fact.
But what I remember most about the text is how its stylistic and scientific elements came together to produce an extremely memorable physicality. The fight scenes are extremely kinetic— an orogene will PULL a ton of energy from the Earth and then PUSH it out, unleashing untold destruction. There are many such scenes that you can really feel in your bones, even when they feature ideas as fantastical as flying obelisks. This writing style is particularly useful for conveying the emotional core behind SJP ideas like class exploitation. Consider the following passage:
The body in the node maintainer’s chair is small, and naked. Thin, its limbs atrophied. Hairless. There are things—tubes and pipes and things, she has no words for them going into the stick-arms, down the google-thread, across the narrow crotch. There’s a flexible bag on the corpse’s belly, attached to its belly somehow, and it’s full of—ugh. The bag needs to be changed.
—N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)
Node maintainer stations are facilities placed across the Stillness to protect against major earthquakes. But unbeknownst to almost everyone, these stations are manned by orogenes who are taken as children and kept as slaves, barely alive but still useful.
A key part of SJP is awareness of the exploitation that drives our economy, especially in the Global South. Like node maintainer stations, many of these unsavory details are hidden just enough for people to turn a blind eye. For example, many industries depend on cobalt mining, a coercive industry in which children sacrifice their bodies for profit. But horrific as it is, the image of cobalt mining just doesn’t activate us in the same way as does the image of a child vegetable-slave in the wastes of the Stillness. By elevating existing bodily horror into something more visceral, Jemisin is able to guide the reader closer to her feelings about reality.
Conclusion
There are far too many examples of SJP allegory in Broken Earth than can be analyzed here. But the key point is this: unlike The Book of the New Sun, Broken Earth was able to reflect its own decade and really tell a story about the 2010s. It tells a story not just about American culture but also science fiction itself.
As I implied in Part II, every decade has a few sci-fi books that really capture the zeitgeist. The 1950s had Foundation, Fahrenheit 451, and Starship Troopers. The 1970s had The Left Hand of Darkness, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Dangerous Visions. The 1990s had Snow Crash, Jurassic Park, and Red Mars.
Plenty of books from those decades are still read today, but I selected these because they tell the story of a genre. The first trio reflects a genre with pulpy roots coming into literary maturity. The second trio reflects a genre becoming more experimental, romantic, and socially aware (see “New Wave”). And the final trio reflects a genre poised to break into the entertainment mainstream, each work influencing not just literature but also television and cinema.
The story of 2010s science fiction is partially a story of representation. 2011 saw more female nominees than male ones for just the third year in the Hugo Awards’ 50-year history. And this was just a sign of things to come, as women outperformed men 7 out of 10 years in the 2010s. Non-White authors also experienced huge gains for the first time, as authors like Rebecca Roanhorse, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ted Chiang became the new faces of a genre that had been overwhelmingly White since its inception.
As a black woman, N. K. Jemisin would obviously also belong on that list. But while representation matters, the real importance of Broken Earth is not its author’s race, but its ability to empathetically provide context for these circumstances. It ties up the progressive worldview that has led to this diversity with a bow, making the case for SJP in a way that transcends didacticism.
Of course, none of this matters without institutional proof— has Broken Earth really broken through sci-fi’s glass ceiling? Perhaps the best sign of progress is the attitude of the New York Times. While Gene Wolfe’s oeuvre only received mention from NYT’s dedicated science fiction reviewer Gerald Jonas, both The Fifth Season and The Stone Sky were proudly listed as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Vulture even named it as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
It’s a new dawn for science fiction. Perhaps science fiction will become literary yet.
You wouldn’t know this from browsing pundits on Substack (lots of them have strong ideological opposition to SJP ideas), but when talking to people in real life this has generally been my experience.