The politics of gender and questions of identity are enormous subjects. And certainly not ones I’m going to even begin to do justice to. Most of the time, discussion of gender politics dissects an audience, and focuses on what separates and differentiates. Tonight my thesis runs firmly toward the inclusive side of the question. I’m on the side of the writers, acknowledging marginalization even as they emphasize common humanity.
Being a writer on the hustle, trying to find representation, trying to level up, trying to find a home for my work, I live in a space most readers don’t inhabit: that is, I read agent blogs and manuscript wish lists. If you want entry into this extremely useful liminal space, get on Twitter, exercise abundant caution to avoid political trolls, and acquaint yourself with #mswl. If you do, you ‘ll get a sense of what’s coming in publishing, not in specifics of course, but in wide trends. And something that has been on the way for more than a year has been fantasies, both Adult and YA, that showcase gender, gender fluidity, queerness, and non-binary sexuality.
Now before anybody gets all “I read for fun and not for politics,” I get you. You don’t read fantasy that deals with deep social/political criticism. Except you do, or at least you read books that are steeped in social and political critique. You can choose not to engage with it, but it’s in the subtext, from Heinlein to Tolkien to Le Guin, from Forgotten Realms to the Malazan Empire and all the way to Butler, Wells, Jemison, and the couple of relatively new authors I’m going to start talking about tonight. The books that stick with you are the ones that say something profound and important. It’s what justifies the massive investment of time and attention that comes with writing a book, and answers the old question about having a soapbox: what good is one if you’re not going to say something worth saying?
I would argue that Fantasy (along with its sibling Science Fiction) is among all literature perhaps the best suited to address social and political questions. It is what Le Guin called “the literature of the imagination”; where better to explore what it means to be human in all its constructs, including sexuality? Fantasy, after all, speaks in a language of subversion, one of dream, of metaphor, of possibility. It’s not constrained the way realistic fiction is (although realism is also engaging with the politics of gender—just not as imaginatively).
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin was first to explore implications of gender or rather, lack of gender, (since gender politics have always been embedded in the literary canon — read fantasy author Joanna Russ’ first non-fiction publication How to Suppress Women’s Writing if you don’t believe me) and blazed a trail for others for navigate. Le Guin was in the vanguard of feminist writers who questioned the default to white male Eurocentric gaze as the norm. And when you read The Left Hand of Darkness you thought you were reading an adventure story about Genly Ai! Well, you were. But you were also reading a deep critique of the necessity of gender.
Get ready for the next wave.
Last year I wrote about Martha Wells’ Murderbot novellas as, not just cracking good stories with an unforgettable narrator, but as political texts. Gay, trans, and non-binary, as well as other marginalized readers took the SecUnit character as their own:
It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity. (All Systems Red, Chap. 6)
Look through reviews of All Systems Red and what will strike you is the sheer number of reviewers who are gay, trans, gender-fluid or non-binary writing in palpable relief: Finally! Someone who gets it!
Now Murderbot doesn’t take marginalization as its plot, of course. But the narrative voice is one of an outsider, and marginalization — questions of identity and belonging — are woven into the text. You can read the novellas, and the forthcoming novel Network Effect, due to drop this May, without regard to the subtext. But you cannot deny that it’s there. And subtext is a sneaky thing — it’ll grab you by the imagination when you’re not expecting it.
Of course, this observation leaves us open to the all-too familiar accusation of sneaking politics into books for some nefarious reason. If examining the common humanity as well as the differences that make up the human experience is nefarious, I’m happy to be a villain. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t grown by questioning their own received assumptions, by stepping outside their own perspective.
So too with the four novellas published as a single volume by Tor, edited by Carl Engle-Laird and titled In Our Own Worlds. Each novella deserves separate consideration, as each one deals with a different aspect of marginalization. But to start with, Engle-Laird’s own argument for inclusion, that despite “[finding] myself in fantasy...I was missing a piece of the puzzle,” one he found reading
[w]hen a young man’s breath caught at the sight of another man, something twanged in me, and I expanded...I named the hunger that had been chewing on my spine, the hunger to know who I was, to see queerness and accept it as part of me. And as fantasy taught me, naming is power. 1)
In each of the novellas in In Our Own Worlds, questions of identity and the social pressures to deny one’s one essential reality play out in different ways. Each one deserves its own consideration, so tonight I want to look at the last of the four, The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang.
The Black Tides of Heaven is the first of four novellas that form The Tensorate Series: The Black Tides of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, and The Ascent to Godhood. Collectively, these leanly-written novellas unwind the threads of power, ambition, and betrayal that cause a ruler to become a tyrant, and cause a tyrant to be assailed from within and without. But tonight, just the first of series.
Twins, borne by the Protector (the empress in this Asian-tinged world whose subgenre has been dubbed Silkpunk) in fulfillment of a political bargain are given to the Head Abbot of the Grand Monastery to be raised as monks. Akeha and Mokoya, like all children, have no gender. They choose their gender either early in childhood, around puberty, or sometimes not at all.
My description, which is entirely accurate, might lead you to think the book is about gender. It’s not. It’s about the difficult, painful, and loving relationship that binds siblings, a bond that holds through adolescence, rivalries, jealousies, and the pain and joy of finding love in the world. Mokoya is born with the gift/curse of prophecy; Akeha is a “spare” child. Although Mokoya is the more politically powerful (and exploitable) child, the narrative centers on Akeha and their feelings of resentment, of worthlessness, of unbelonging — the story is Akeha’s journey toward becoming whole, becoming who they are.
When Mokoya chooses to become female and falls in love, Akeha feels both betrayed and cut adrift, no longer the essential counterpart to their twin. Their alienation leads them to a long solitary act of reflection:
Akeha bit their lip. A thought occurred to them. In all honesty, it had been occurring to them for some time, and occurring with much greater frequency since Mokoya’s announcement two nights ago. It was a thought that took hold in the back of their mind whenever they looked at Thennjay, at the shape of his body underneath his clothes. A thought they had been trying to drown out, to ignore.
Slowly, as if stepping into the unilluminated edge of a lake, Akeha switched to using masculine pronouns.
I am. I want. I will.
Their heart quickened in their chest.. The words rolled and clicked in their mind, sharp and electric.
I want. I want. I want.
The Black Tides of Heaven, chapter 10
What Akeha wants, what Akeha needs, drives the narrative, through a story of intrigue, political oppression, a powerful force called the Slack, and always, the bonds that hold the twins together, that define them, separate them, set them at odds, and reconcile them.
Not all the novellas in this collection are uniformly excellent; each one rather defines itself, and some of them are stronger than others. Each is unique. Each is well worth reading
Tor is one of the primary publishers of Fantasy in English, and what Tor’s editors think is important will appear in your “to read” lists. This collection is better than most in its variety, its imaginative clarity, and its call to the human nature that bridges all differences. Engle-Laird says of the four stories,
each holds the capacity to fill a hungry soul, to unlock a mystery of the self.
Fantasy is a capacious form. It encompasses worlds. In the subversive vein of fantasy literature, its insistence on wholeness is something that slips in through the subtext, the leitmotif you half-listen for without realizing you’re listening at all. The new wave of gender-curious books expand the canon, open new doors, and welcome us in.
Note
I own In Our Own Worlds in electronic form. Very difficult to reference, so take my word for it. But then, I think it’s available only in electronic form, so there’s that.
Postscript:
Yesterday I received news that one of my oldest and best friends, Bill Cullum, died. Bill and I grew up together. He was my brother, and we both loved and drove each other crazy, became estranged, reconciled after years apart, and grew close again as adults. A gifted musician, Bill was raped by his choir director as a child and rejected by his father. His early trauma sent him across the country and back in a life that took him through hell and out the other side. He hustled, did drugs, got HIV, went to prison, got clean, and came out an artist of rare vision. He learned more about life than most people who reach a great age. He died peacefully in bed, his laptop open on his lap. I want to believe it was sudden and painless.
Bill has been very much on my mind as I wrote this diary today. One reason that queerness has never been exotic to me is because of Bill, who was always his inimitable self — funny, wisecracking, fearless, and always, even during the depths of his worst experiences, true to himself. I regret now that I never asked him for a piece of his art, but then, I thought we had years. I was wrong.
I’ve never dedicated a diary before. But this one seems appropriate. So it’s for Bill, who was my dear friend, my brother, Akeha to my Mokoya.