Isolation in patriarchy

It’s a memorable collection of scenarios that possesses that enviable quality of the best short stories, that certain je-ne-sais-quoi sense of lingering disquiet. Yet I personally found it difficult to get through the collection, which I attribute to not being given enough interiority or motivation on the characters’ parts to really want to examine why they do the things they do. The characters seem largely driven by impulse, the result of which can be generalised to selfish and destructive actions that change the nature of their existing relationships, something which, while no doubt reflective of a certain part of human nature, doesn’t naturally draw me in.

The titular story probably has the most introspection: two couples sit around a table at one of the couples’ houses, drinking gin in the afternoon and having a conversation on what love is. Being completely driven by dialogue, it has that quality of a modern play, following a familiar arc where what begins as a casual conversation topic grows in tension as it touches upon increasingly personal triggers. The tension of the topic derives from Terri’s proposition that the actions of her abusive ex-boyfriend, whose threats extended to her current boyfriend, seated at the same table, and who eventually committed suicide over Terri’s departure, came from a place of love. Afternoon fades into evening and the reader feels a certain hush enveloping the characters as it becomes dark, but none of the characters make a move for a change in surroundings even as it is proposed. It’s tightly edited and is one of my favourite stories from the collection.

There’s a trend of a masculine assertion of dominance in the book over women: Terri’s ex-boyfriend we’ve heard of; Tell the Women We Are Going has two middle-aged men having a boys’ afternoon out, stalking two young women biking along the road on their way back and finally killing them; So Much Water So Close to Home features yet another boys’ day out where they allegedly encounter the naked body of a dead woman on their camping trip but decide to continue with the trip instead of reporting it. One of the men’s wives suspects their role in her death. A Serious Talk simmers with the threat of violence as Burt surprises his estranged wife and daughter with a visit and uses a knife to cut the phone cord when he suspects that the caller is a wooer, stalking off when the wife orders him to leave but intending to return again. The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off has a simpleton killing his wife after having had enough of her philandering ways; the narrator pins the blame on the wife. The stories bring with them all the usual things you’d associate with such an attitude: the objectification of women, sexualisation or otherwise, the treatment of them as possessions, and the idea that women exist to accommodate the male characters’ needs rather than independent entities. The premise that each story builds on is striking, but the archetypes are old and tired.

In line with that then is the sense that no real communication takes place between characters. Characters are restless and unhappy with their situations, but their recourse is either violence or an extramarital affair. In that kind of American suburban environment that Carver’s stories are set in, with gender dynamics so clearly influenced by the patriarchy, it is no surprise that illumination or happiness never comes to any character, trapped so firmly as they are in their assigned roles and mental space.

Rating: 3.5/5

— What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver, 1981)

A war against ghosts of dead planets

Was anyone expecting that I would go on to read anything else after the mindblowing start that was Gideon the Ninth?

Harrow the Ninth is the second book in the Locked Tomb series, and most of the book follows the perspective of the Ninth House’s necromancer heiress, Harrowhark. The first book was powered by the mysteries of lyctorhood and murders, with some revelations of the Ninth House’s dark past to forge the start of true partnership between Gideon and Harrow. The plot flowed linearly, and the reader learned information at the pace of Gideon’s understanding; our lovable narrator was more or less a straight arrow, very considerate in providing flashbacks when we needed context. Not so for Harrow: the book lurches back and forth timelines, and what makes it even more disorienting is the presence of some of the cast we got to know in the first book, but with a different version of events and even personalities.

I can’t talk about this book without slightly spoiling what happens in the first book, so do yourself a favour and read the first book before coming back, but if you’re just here to see if it’s worth following or not: it is, and I still love the series.

BYE

So Harrow has gained lyctorhood at a cost she was not willing to pay, and is now on a spaceship with the Emperor, along with three of the original lyctors and the only other necromancer who ascended with her during the trial. So far so continuous, except why does Harrow not make reference to the events in the first book? Why does she keep passing out in a pool of her own vomit whenever she tries to wield a sword? Why does the narrative switch between second- and third-person perspectives, and when it’s in third, we see an alternate reality of the lyctorhood trials at Caanan house, with characters who were supposed to be dead? What is the meaning behind the letters she read, written by herself, when she came to on the spaceship? Friggin’ heck, why is everyone on the spaceship so gloomy, and why does one of them keep trying to murder Harrow?

Not gonna lie, I missed Gideon absurdly; the pace of the second book was decidedly slower, more tense, and less fun. The actual objective of lyctorhood is to fight a war against Resurrection beasts, ghosts of the nine planets which were murdered in the ascension of the Emperor and the creation of the dead solar system with the nine houses. The trials in the second book are decidedly more metaphysical: whereas the first book contained more swordplay, the second uses so many metaphors to explain the mechanics of the war, the most important being the River, analagous to purgatory and lethal to lyctors in a matter of minutes. After the slow pace of most of the book, the last part of the book, where all the revelations are, is a crazy supersonic ride that takes a couple of rereads in some sections to process, and even then I’m not confident I understand the mechanics behind the bubble world in the River. Nevertheless, it does answer all the questions above, plus the lingering one from Gideon regarding her origins, and the appearance of Matthias Nonius, legendary swordsman of the Ninth House from some ancient time ago and subject of eighteen books of epic poetry, The Noniad, almost makes all the doom and gloom worth it.

Like any self-respecting movie that expects to be continued, it leaves a tantalizing after-credits scene with characters whose identities we are not sure of, and unfortunately for me the third and last book is not out yet. Fortunately for you that means you still have time to finish the first two books. But if you’ve read till here, then I assume we’re in the same agonising boat of waiting. Or submarine, if our intention is to dive into the River.

Rating: 4.5/5

— Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir, 2020)

Swordfighting, mysterious deaths, necromancy, badass women, hot women

I love this book to bits honestly, and think it is the most refreshing fantasy book I’ve read in a long time.

The story follows Gideon, badass swordswoman of the Ninth planet of this weird dying solar system, although the dying part is the point, because the solar system is powered by the energy of death, hereby termed thanergy, and there are these mages who specialise in different schools of necromancy such as spirit, flesh, and bone, to channel this energy in different ways. Gideon was airdropped as a baby from space and has no clue as to her parentage; she is also not a mage, and was treated rather coldbloodedly by the other inhabitants of the Ninth for her childhood. At least she’s alive, which is more than we can say for the other 200 odd children who used to grace the Ninth, sans the only necromancer heiress, Harrow. They hate each other’s guts.

Gideon tries to escape the planet but fails, and when the First calls for a Lyctor trial (Lyctors are basically immortal and serve the Emperor), Gideon has to go with Harrow as her cavalier aka personal bodyguard. The necromancer-cavalier thing is a requirement, they even have a motto to go with it. The trial occurs at this gothic house with endless levels at Canaan House on the First and is deliciously cryptic, until people start dropping dead, then it becomes fast-paced cryptic. From hereon the eight houses (Second to Ninth) have to solve both questions: who or what is responsible for the deaths, and how the heck do you become a Lyctor? Along the way Gideon sees other young people for the first time in her life, including two very attractive women, whom she definitely has the hots for.

Expect lots of irreverant exclamations by our potty-mouthed Gideon, who is very far from the silent nuns that cult Ninth is expected to produce, side-by-side with Serious Necromancy Theory, by which I mean legit schools of thought for how to convert thanergy into skeletons, or siphon another’s soul, or cast your consciousness into your cavalier’s body, etc. There are memes. There is a ridiculous number of anatomical terms for the bones you never knew had names, and so many dismemberings. There are characters to root for with distinct personalities. There are swordfights and showdowns that are some of the best physical conflict scenes I’ve seen described. There are bonds developed. It is, in short, a buttload of fun, and legitly has everything I want in a fantasy tome. (Some people say scifi because space, but genres are so yesterday anyway.) Muir is a genius.

Rating: 5/5

— Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir, 2019)

Asian-American speculative fiction

The Paper Menagerie is a collection of speculative short stories in a similar vein as Ted Chiang’s, by which I mean it’s scifi/fantasy with a philosophical slant as well as more focus on the specific humanity of its characters, which is something I can definitely get behind as a mainstay. While there were stories that stuck with me or literally made me cry in the middle of a food court, I think Liu could have been more nuanced with his speculative process and characterisation. 

The titular piece, about a son with an American father and a Chinese mother, in retrospect unfolded the way you would expect: ashamed of his difference from his American peers, he distances himself from his mother, who never manages to make a home in America with her inadequate grasp of English and the absence of anyone who wants to understand her. You would have been able to make a story with the same essence without the magical animal origami; yet their presence, I think, was what made my reaction even more poignant — I had thought that magic would engender a more positive turn of events, and was devastated when it did not. I connect to the story on all these levels: for parents who do their best but are rejected by their children; for language’s propensity to isolate, even as we tout its ability to connect; for the loneliness of the immigrant woman who hopes for connection with another person through her son; for the difficulty of parent-children relationships.

I enjoyed the technology in The Perfect Match, which comprises of an AI assistant who, by virtue of the data it has on you, constantly recommends food, deals, dating matches, and even conversation prompts when the silence gets too lengthy. It’s thrilling because it feels like we’re on the cusp of it, and of course disturbing in implication to consider the nature of identity if we are reduced to choice machines from recommendations that float up. I’m not too impressed however with the way the story itself unfolded — it failed to explore the philosophical implications, chose the big-corp conspiracy path which didn’t yield any surprises, and finally resigned to its destiny under bigcorp with its ending.

The Waves is a thought experiment on immortality, or specifically making the choice to become a different form of human in order to prolong and propagate the species in outer space. I liked considering the evolution of the idea of a human, taking the path of abstraction to its logical conclusion, where we transition from flesh and blood to deconstructable inorganic meshes, and then to energy fields, scattering across the empty universe.

The theme of historical erasure of pain haunts Liu, as he borrows Ted Chiang’s documentary format from Liking What You See: a Documentary for the story that ends the collection, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, which examines the different perspectives from countries involved in the Sino-Japanese war, specifically the war crimes carried out by Unit 731, based in Pingfang in Harbin, with regards to the prospect of sending relatives of the victims back in time to achieve closure for the mysteries of their disappearance. The quantum technology involved makes it so that the visit can only happen once, which means only one person can witness that specific path they take for that one time, effectively “destroying” the past once she effects to take the journey. The scientists who came up with the technology have chosen to send the relatives back, which throws into question the objectivity of their eyewitness accounts; countries fight over whether this technology should be allowed, to the degree that they still feel like part of the same sovereign entities which were responsible for or victims of said crimes. Should the exposure of history be decided by political entities who would rather treat each new political era as a blank slate, and have their own agendas in supporting or protesting the use of this technology? Liu makes it a point to go into detail the atrocities suffered; this propensity to depict torture also comes up in The Literomancer, where a little girl inadvertantly outs her new Chinese friends to her father, and causes their brutal interrogation at the hands of the American military who believed they were communist agents. It could be my general attitude towards pain and suffering, but I couldn’t help but feel that there was an excess of information of the mechanics of torture that did not advance the story or the reader’s understanding of the political situation. 

While on the whole a competent collection with some enjoyable speculative mechanics, Liu’s characters have a tendency to lapse into certain tired archetypes, especially when it comes to the mixing of Asian and American cultures. Liu likes to use children as plot devices via their role as uncomprehending witnesses of racism or accounts of political events, resulting in rather ham-fisted portrayals of other characters through a child’s supposedly blunted understanding. The Asian context, while still fresh in Paper Menagerie, which occurs midway through the collection, became tired as the collection wore on; I even started to feel the hint of Orientalism, from the point of view of a Singaporean reader allergic to stories blatantly advertised as Asian.

Rating: 4/5

–The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Ken Liu, 2015)