We talk a great deal about World Building in science fiction and fantasy, but more often than not I suspect it refers to the equivalent of interior design and decoration. If the motifs of costume and manners conforms to a general tableaux of architecture, climate, and the suggestion of a history a bit more than two months old, with none of the corners out of place, it is hailed as an example of world building. In fact, it may well be nothing more than sticking antlers on the dog, painting the castle mauve, and handing out swords to characters who would be otherwise right at home in any particular middle period Court one cared to name, and reviving institutions we are well rid of and renaming them or layering them with mystical significance or “bloodline” gravitas.

World building worthy of the description requires more, and some understanding of how a holism evolves. (I find it noteworthy that when discussing this, one rarely hears it applied to something like Star Trek, which, for all its flaws, it one of the most successfully sustained examples of world building ever put forth. Perhaps because the path to it seems obvious and it’s really just the end result of a suite of logical assumptions instead of a complete substitution of what we recognize as “our” world? Hm.) Which is why Dune, for all its ecological problems, is a viable example of the art. All its parts are necessary to create the political, social, economic, environmental, and historical verisimilitude of a complete world that is not, for all the suggestive borrowings from it, our own. Or, for another example, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (or his later Book of the Long Sun); or for a more sustained example, C. J. Cherryh’s magisterial Union-Alliance novels, which cover centuries of history, hundreds of light years of territory, and dozens of cultures, each recognizably its own…

N. K. Jemisin has given us world building at the highest level in her Broken Earth trilogy.

The Earth of The Fifth Season is similar to but quite unlike our own. It could very easily be in a distance past, but more likely an equally distance future, one in which the ever-shifting plates on which the continents ride have brought all these landmasses back together in a new supercontinent. She suggests that such compaction has created a situation in which geologic forces are concentrated and history has been subsequently sorted out by Seasons, noted for periods of extreme geological convulsion. It’s not like we have nothing like this now—we speak of Ice Ages, warm periods, and have broken down the pre-human periods into large parenthetical Ages distinguished by flora, fauna, and, yes, continental configuration (though that is a relatively recent inclusion), but we don’t talk about them as part of our daily cultural vocabulary. In this world (let’s say the far future) tectonics dominates the mythology.

Like any time in human history, people are sharply divided into groups as well, only in this case the attributes dividing them are a bit less arbitrary. There are classes of people born with extraordinary abilities. Frightening abilities. The Orogenes possess the capacity to channel the energy of local geology. They are dangerous. When working this ability, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is in full play and consequences manifest unless their efforts are very carefully controlled. Of course, such control requires discipline and learning. Which requires a social system.

Which requires a civilization.

And so we have Yumenes, capital of the empire that more or less manages the continent—which is ironically called the Stillness. Yumenes, among other things, maintains the roads. This fact denotes an attention to detail and how the small things, the things too often taken for granted, matter sometimes far more than the grand histories we tell about ourselves or past Selves.

Not only the roads we see, though, but all roads, especially the roads that connect people. As we read we feel the history underlying all of this, and sense of the cohesion. It is that cohesion that makes this place real. What is more, it makes it real and alien, because this history is not ours. We recognize its validity in the consequences of that history.

This is the story of Essun. And Syenite. And Damaya. And how they—she—become a pivot point along a fault line that changes the world.

Syenite belongs to an elite order of Orogenes, protected and wielded by Yumenes to maintain the integrity of the empire. Literally. And while she enjoys certain privileges and a position of some power, she is still, at the end of it, a slave. She has no real choice but to serve in this order. The alternative is one of a variety of deaths.

What she expected to be an ordinary life along traditional lines within the order changes when she is paired with a man of immensely more ability than she exhibits and she travels with him on what should have been a simple mission to clear a harbor of coral. What she learns, what she sees, what she begins to become alters her path and puts her on the road to a revolution.

Jemisin has built in layers, carefully accruing history and myth and the physical realities in which these people move in such a way as to give us the full experience of another world. From the configuration of the government and the ruling classes down to the street slang hurled at the unwanted and frightening to the intricate network of relationships between communities and individuals, the Stillness—anything but still!—is a walkable, breathable world with stories to tell about people just like us—only different.

It is not the tectonics of the land that matter, but the drift among the people, the shifts in history, the maddening subduction of memory—and how finally they are all the same thing when combined.