For the past 20 years, the Santa Barbara Public Library’s Santa Barbara Reads program has invited the community to gather and read 25 books together. These titles have varied in genre and form, all chosen to inspire conversations about issues that matter. In 2018, we celebrated the bicentennial anniversary of the modern science fiction genre by reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In 2022, we’re exploring just how far the genre has come by reading one of the most iconic speculative fiction titles of the past decade: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
Speculative fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, and the stories that fall somewhere between them) revolves around the question “What if?” At its best, it takes contemporary societal issues and imagines one version of their conclusion. What if, asks Frankenstein, a privileged and ambitious college dropout discovered the secret to a morally fraught scientific breakthrough? What would he do with this power? How would he take responsibility for its consequences?
What if, asks The Fifth Season, the world was collapsing around us and a small group of people had the ability to control it? What systems might be built to exploit this power and control those who hold it? In the midst of the end of the world, what does someone’s personal apocalypse matter?