N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season (2015) depicts a world marked by civilizations that have been taken down by natural disaster. The world of The Fifth Season is both pre-industrial—oil lamps co-exist with electric lights; the protagonists cross the continent on horses—and highly technical. Surviving the planet’s very active geothermal activity includes everything from the rigorous training of the orogenes, who can control the earth's tremors,  to plate tectonics, stonelore, civilization-wide disaster plans, and deciphering the technologies of bygone civilizations. 

The Fifth Season is the first book in Jemisin's award-winning Broken Earth trilogy. The novel is Afro-futuristic, characterizing Black characters developing technologies that improve life and solve society’s most pressing problems.  But the novel is also social commentary; Jemisin credits the Black Lives Movement as inspiring the novel, and the reader does not need to read far to make connections between the protagonists’ stories and slavery, discrimination, “passing,” and other pieces of our country’s history of racism.

The Fifth Season tells the story of three protagonists from different time periods, all who have the ability to quell and redirect earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.  Essun is a mother searching amid a disaster of the highest order—a climate changing “Fifth Season”--for her daughterwho  is also an orogene.  Damaya is a girl, taken from her family to train at the Fulcrum, the capital city’s academy for orogenes. Syenite, finally, is an adult orogene on a mission for the Fulcrum who seeks to control her own destiny, but finds achieving it more difficult than she had hoped.

Excerpts, The Fifth Season

• Damaya's Identity in The Fifth Season--chapters 2 and 6
• Sci-Fi: Systematic Racism in Alternate Realities--chapters 14 and 22