Although The Fifth Season is a work of speculative fiction, the society it depicts is one struggling with the real-world problems of oppression and hierarchy. The clearest example of this is the treatment of orogenes in Sanzed society. Orogenes’ ability to control the movements of tectonic plates—and (indirectly) the kinetic and thermal energy around them—make them both dangerous and useful to a culture plagued by constant seismic activity; as a result, society both persecutes and exploits the orogenes. On one hand, orogenes are not legally human, and are often murdered as children when their powers manifest. On the other, the orogenes the Fulcrum recruits are used to serve the interests of the state in ways that are, if anything, even more dehumanizing than the conditions “feral” orogenes encounter: The Fulcrum selectively “breeds” orogenes to produce ever more powerful children, lobotomizes the orogenes they put to work as node maintainers, etc.

The position of orogenes, however, is simply an extreme example of the social stratification that characterizes all of Sanzed society. Although Sanze is no longer an empire in name, it still operates by racist and imperialist norms; ethnic groups that were once conquered and subjected to forced “admixture” (i.e. genocidal rape) are still “measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean” (112).