Introduction

Humanity has gone feral. In bands and villages, they now inhabit a lush, abundant world that has grown up out of the ruins of drowned cities and broken asphalt. The massive appropriation of the world's former biomass for the lumber that built the ancestors' sprawling suburbs has become the rich, black humus for thick forests that have only just become ancient enough in some places to call old growth. The translucent sand of millions of tons of plastic bottles that broke down in the sunlight now covers the new beaches, where the rising seas and the polluted land renegotiated their boundaries.

The world has changed, and humanity has changed with it. The old ways could not survive in this new world. Some live in bands and hunt animals for their food. They burn the fields to give them good grazing, and in return for their services, take a few lives to feed themselves and their families. Others cultivate food forests, vast gardens that blend into the wild and provide them with everything they need.

The specifics vary from one river valley to the next, from the west side of the mountain to the east. The ancestors could speak of a single history for their world, but the history of the Fifth World tells the tale of how that single narrative unraveled into a thousand thousand stories. The world changed, and humanity could no longer survive as an invasive species. Only those who became native have survived.

The people of the Fifth World live lives defined by bonds of kinship. That may sound idyllic, but those bonds pull each person in different directions, forcing them to decide, each day, which bonds they will nurture, and which they will risk. In a world defined by such bonds, that means nothing less than the ongoing work of creation.