Climate Reads: On N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season with Sheree Renée Thomas

The November Climate Reads book club book is N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, moderated by Sheree Renée Thomas. BPL Presents and Writers Rebel NYC invite you to join a community of readers and writers across the nation in the Climate Reads series—a year-long reading and discussion of books shedding light on the climate crisis and environmental justice, to help guide and inspire us to take necessary action.

At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)

This is the way the world ends. . . for the last time.

It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Our moderator: ​Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning writer and editor. Her work is inspired by mythology, natural science, music, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. She is the author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, and Shotgun Lullabies (2016, 2011). She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies (2000, 2004) that won two World Fantasy Awards and first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Widely anthologized, her work appears in The New York Times and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. She is honored to be a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for contributions to the genre. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, near a mighty river and a pyramid.

Panelists: Matto Mildenberger writes: “I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara. My research explores the politics of climate change here in the United States. and around the world. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Nature Climate Change, Political Science Research Methods, Nature Energy, and elsewhere. My second book, Carbon Captured: How Labor and Business Control Climate Politics, is available from MIT Press.”

Gerry Canavan is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Marquette University, specializing in 20th and 21st century literature. An editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, he has also co-edited Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014) and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015) and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019). His first monograph, Octavia E. Butler, appeared in 2016 in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series at University of Illinois Press. He is president of the Science Fiction Research Association.

Read the book and then come and join the discussion on Zoom. Please register for this free Zoom event. Registered audience members will receive a Zoom link prior to the event.