Nora K. Jemisin wants to talk about cities.
First, Ferguson, Missouri. As Jemisin, along with the rest of the world, watched a city rise up in rage in response to the injustice of then-officer Darren Wilson's murder of Michael Brown, she slowly began to imagine a new way for the world to end. A society that had endured environmental disaster after disaster for generations in a cycle that was irregular but always inevitable, so much so that people were born into the world believing the Earth hated them. A world where you live one way when the seasons changed as usual, and another when the Earth churned in anger, threatening to kill everyone on it. She called these recurring cycles of disaster the Fifth Season, a name good enough for a title.
