The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)

by N.K. Jemisin

“Don’t look back,” Schaffa advises. “It’s easier that way.” So she doesn’t. Later, she will realize he was right about this, too. Much later, though, she will wish that she had done it anyway.

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

.

But human beings, too, are ephemeral things in the planetary scale. The number of things that they do not notice are literally astronomical.

Unfortunately that means it’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going—or if you don’t have a compass, or a map, or a sign saying filicidal fathers this way.