Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Sometimes people ask me, Sabs, why do you keep reading books that you hate? When you encounter a phrase, like say, "allosexual virgins," in a passage set in a medieval fantasyland and you know you are not going to vote for this book to win the Hugo, why not DNF? Well, Dear Reader, it's so that I can rant about how Big Mad I got reading this and how it typifies why I nearly always despise cozy fiction and queernormative fantasy settings.



The basic premise is cool! What if a U-Haul lesbian was a parasitic monster that wanted to lay eggs in you. Give that to Terry Pratchett and he'd do something fun with it, and find an inventive way to a happy ending. Unfortunately he is dead and so is my blackhearted soul because despite laying on the charm thick, this was a didactic message book with a deeply fucked up message. Basically, Shesheshen, the monster, has this overwhelming reproductive urge that will kill her partner. She somehow believes that having your kids eat you is the most loving act you can do as a parent. Again! Interesting! Her mother has been killed by a monster hunter, who just happens to be the mother of the human love interest, Homily. Homily's entire family is abusive; her mother is manipulative, playing her children against each other and starting wars for no reason, and her younger sister has been slitting her throat repeatedly (wtf??? how does she survive that???) since she was a child.

You think it's going in a "humans are the real monsters" direction but no. Because it turns out that Homily's mother is actually Shesheshen's mother who has assumed a human form. Which doesn't mean, btw, that the siblings come around and realize they've been manipulated into abuse. No, they all need to die, including the one who's like, 8. Cozy!

The biggest complaint about this book that most people, myself included had, has to do with the therapyspeak that the characters use in a setting that hasn't invented therapy yet. Shesheshen starts out being one of those stand-ins for the autistic reader who just doesn't get how humans work, but she is 1) fully cognizant of family abuse dynamics and generational trauma, 2) has no problem fooling her girlfriend into thinking she's human despite being made out of goo and other people's bones, 3) knows all about consent culture circa 2015 Tumblr and it's very important to her, and 4) has a deep understanding of modern-day sexual orientations and gender identities, including being able to identify nonbinary people on sight without speaking to them.

But I guess hey. Asexual representation! Fat representation! Queer representation! Too bad the message is "your abusive family deserves death, sexuality is gross and weird, and no one in the world matters other than you and your love interest."

Also, I don't get the appeal of asexual romance personally, but I think one of the interesting points of tension that I've seen in some stories is the idea that it's a spectrum, and even if you find a fellow asexual (who just happens to be the first person you have ever met that you didn't eat for some reason), it's not a guarantee that they like the same romantic/sexual acts that you do. And that is a negotiation. Not here. They only like cuddling and holding hands and find kissing a disgusting act to have to "perform" for their past partners. Just lucky coincidence.

My big problem with cozy fantasy is that it often brings up these interesting and horrifying premises and then just refuses to deal with them at all. I can think of a million ways to resolve the plot of "my love will kill you" without both characters dying, but the author is just fundamentally uninterested in having any sort of internal or difficult conflict, and so she just. Finds another way to reproduce. And then it turns out the eggs can be disposed of in a way that only harms bad people and she never has to deal with her monstrous urges again. Okay.

The author seems like a nice enough guy online so I don't want to go off on main about how much I hated this book. That said. I'd rather read a man who writes lesbians for slightly fetishy reasons than one who does this wholesome uwu stuff. It somehow feels way more gross.

Okay glad that's expelled. Onwards.

Currently reading: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. This otoh avoids all the pitfalls you would expect in a story where the main character is guided by dreams and visions, and none of the characters around her disbelieve her. Largely because it's dreamy and literary and so embedded in Cree culture, so the conflict is not "are the dreams real? Is any of this happening to her?" but "did she abandon her family in the time of their greatest need."

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. This was a very hyped book that's also up for a Hugo, and I am liking it a lot more so far. The British government somehow gets time travel technology and experiments with it by dragging people who would have otherwise died in history (a member of the Franklin Expedition, a WWI soldier, a plague victim, and someone from the French Revolution) into the present day. Each "expat" is assigned to a "bridge," someone who can explain the modern world and help them assimilate. Our heroine is a Cambodian-British civil servant assigned to the Franklin Expedition guy, who falls in love with him. There's a lot about race and colonialism here, as well as the kind of baseline British bureaucracy satire that I tend to enjoy; this one is pretty good so far. Even though I'm annoyed b/c I started writing a story like this and thought the concept was too silly to continue.

Comments

[ursula]

Thank you for validating my decision to skip Nest!

(In Tumblr terms I am actually too aro for ace romance, the idea that you would do all that holding hands stuff when you weren't getting laid about it kind of weirds me out.)

[sabotabby]

See, I am a little like the protagonist of Extraordinary Attorney Woo, who hates holding hands but will put up with it for someone she likes.

[rydra_wong]

I suspect you might enjoy the Wizards vs Lesbians ep on Someone You Can Build a Nest In; they felt very much the same way you did (includng singling out "allosexual virgins" as an example of something it makes zero sense for the characters to say; it's there purely as a reflexive gesture to ward off the possibility that some reader could possibly conclude that a remark about "virgins" without qualification might be somehow aphobic).

[sabotabby]

Oh I bet I'll love it. That's going in the queue.

It's not even that, in context. The line is “In all the mess of recent days, she had forgotten that human people kissed. This was not how she’d imagined their first kiss. She’d overheard enough allosexual virgins gab about the lightning strike at the touch of lips, and the fever rush of blood that reminded them how much of themselves were alive.” Which doesn't even make sense (Homily is the first human she's spent a significant amount of time with, let alone enough time to discuss kissing). It's just in there to scoff at people who have sexual urges.

[rydra_wong]

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. This was a very hyped book that's also up for a Hugo, and I am liking it a lot more so far.

Oh, also! Once you've finished it and are safe from spoilers, there's another Wizards vs Lesbians ep with Vajra Chandrasekera talking about The Ministry of Time (in keeping with their new thing of having authors they've covered on to talk about other people's books).

[sabotabby]

God they are so much nicer about it than I'd be.

[dissectionist]

I really enjoyed The Ministry of Time after coming across it randomly a few months back. I’m glad you’re reading it and will be curious to see your final thoughts on it!

[sabotabby]

I'm definitely enjoying it so far. I was kind of confusing it with Ministry For the Future but that's an entirely different thing.

[moon_custafer]

knows all about consent culture circa 2015 Tumblr and it's very important to her

Pity it wasn't handled well, because the idea of a parasitic monster who's *also* all about consent is comedy and/or horror gold. Like, I can imagine something like that happening in the universe of "The Cabbage Patch" or "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death."

[sovay]

Pity it wasn't handled well, because the idea of a parasitic monster who's *also* all about consent is comedy and/or horror gold.

+1. The consent-focused monster coming from an abusive family also feels like it just crosses the wires.

Like, I can imagine something like that happening in the universe of "The Cabbage Patch" or "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death."

(I thought of Theodore Sturgeon and Octavia Butler.)

[sabotabby]

You could go either route, but you couldn't split the difference.

[ioplokon]

Honestly, I'm not sure if you can do a cozy romance when your premise is basically 3 homophobic stereotypes in a trenchcoat. You'll have to work for it, at any rate. (I suspect this is where the language comes in. The author can see the baggage that comes with this premise but is scared to deal with it, so tries to keep it at arm's length...)

This does remind me that I still want to see Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person.

[minoanmiss]

I was going to try to say your first point but you said it way better.

And now I want Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person too.

[sabotabby]

IMO a trans woman who's into monsterfucking could have made this work, though it might not have had a happy ending.

[snickfic]

Okay, just to be clear, does this also mean the two main women are half-siblings?

I've heard vague bad things about that book, but omfg that sounds absolutely infuriating. And THAT horror novel about the lesbians is the one that got nominated for a Hugo? 🙃🙃🙃

[sabotabby]

NO BUT THAT CONFUSED ME TOO BECAUSE IT WASN'T EXACTLY EXPLAINED and then when I figured it out it's actually worse

It's sort of implied that Shesheshen is super old but she can't be. The timeline as far as I can tell is:

1. The Baron and Baroness have their four children, including Homily. The youngest of these is like 8-10 years old, small enough to be mistaken for a doll. They are all human children from two human parents.
2. The Mother kills the Baron and Baroness. She lays eggs in the Baron, one of whom becomes Shesheshen (who eats all her other siblings). The Mother then assumes the form of the Baronness.

Which means that while at least for some of her life, Homily was parented by Shesheshen's mother, they are not actually related. But in order for the timeline to work out, Shesheshen is younger than Homily's youngest sister, who is a tiny child.

I am sure that like 1000000 lesbians wrote better horror novels last year.

[aflatmirror]

Glad those other books are good at least 😅

We salute your sacrifice in finishing that trainwreck in order to relay the details to us. Just that highlights reel both took ten years off my lifespan and made me feel like Lev fucking Tolstoy in comparison. My god, they could have done literally *anything* else with their infinite powers of human imagination, and they chose to write this 2015 Steven Universe fandom ass hate crime

[sabotabby]

AHAHAHAHA yes that's exactly what it is

(to be clear, it's very short for a novel)

[naomikritzer]

I also started a story on a similar premise to Ministry of Time, but couldn't figure out where to go with it. (In my case it was "what if you could grab doomed people whose death was a little mysterious and bring them to the future, and a wealthy older woman started collecting people from the past, and one of the people she collected was the Italian painter Caravaggio?" (Brilliant artist, profoundly terrible person.) Never really progressed beyond the idea stage.)

[sabotabby]

Oh, I love Caravaggio. I would read the shit out of that.

Mine was based on "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" and takes as its premise that the line "I never died, said he" is absolutely literal and it wasn't a dream. A group of future revolutionaries have time travel and pluck doomed comrades from across the timeline to fight future fascists.

[julian]

I liked the recovery parts (like, the last 10 pages) enough that I didn't feel taken in by the endless splatting grossness, but it was pretty endless and I didn't enjoy it.

I took the kissing scene as its own form of seeking consent, and its own form of saying "no, you don't have to do something just because everyone else does," in a far less Tumblr 2015 Leftist Culture than some of the other parts of it. (Like, yeah, allosexual virgins.)

But the absolutist thinking on abuse never got addressed, and the failure to really engage, in the end, with the fact that Homily and Shesheshen are from very different cultures and ways of thinking, and that should *mean* something other than "oh, we were both abuse survivors," well. It was a nice attempt? But didn't go far enough.

I guess some of this could be, "It wasn't the book Wiswell wanted to write," but the thing is, it did bring up the *issues*, so it should *deal* with them.

(Also, Shesheshen might well have that kind of black-and-white thinking. It's just the *book* shouldn't.)

[sovay]

the failure to really engage, in the end, with the fact that Homily and Shesheshen are from very different cultures and ways of thinking

Have you read C.M. Waggoner's Unnatural Magic (2019)? It suffers as a novel from an unwieldily dovetailing plot half of which is basically the author's visible imprinting on Mercedes Lackey and Diana Wynne Jones, but I wished the other half had been a novel in its own right because it could have been nominated for the Otherwise for its cross-cultural romance negotiated through a fictional gender system which works about as well as the kind we get in our world, i.e. it is possible to be gender-non-conforming within it and it is not presented as an social-media-minted progressive ideal even though it is more fluid and self-directed than the local alternatives: the character who was born into this culture has spent most of her* life fighting to be recognized as her gender assigned at birth and has deeply ambivalent feelings about the whole business, the character with whom she has become entangled finds it much more personally attractive than the options on offer in his home culture**, they actually have to talk in a rather granular way about what they are doing together and none of it directly reproduces the twenty-first-century American trans/queer experience. There are clunks in the novel's worldbuilding, but not in their relationship. Obviously I got here because of the cultural negotiations rather than parasitic egg-laying, but the negotiations struck me as impressive enough at the time that I have been recommending the book for them ever since. I still need to read the sequel.

* Because it is a binary system, her gender is textually translated female, but it's socially rather than biologically determined and has little to do with culturally adjacent concepts of womanhood. Unnatural Magic may therefore be the only secondary-world fantasy I have read where I was fine with one character flanicking about not knowing another's pronouns, because it was explicitly kind of the wrong question.

** Regency-ish analogue, but queer-friendlier, which makes it less deterministic for him to move toward another culture's societal-sexual norms, which I really appreciated.

[sovay]

Which doesn't mean, btw, that the siblings come around and realize they've been manipulated into abuse. No, they all need to die, including the one who's like, 8. Cozy!

By what logic is that supposed to be cute and cool?

(This novel sounds like it completely misses the point of monsterfucking.)

[sabotabby]

I am just way too allosexual to get the point of monsterfucking without the fucking. I mean. Not my thing. But if you're gonna do it, why do it like this?

I guess a large part of my hatred of cozy is also that no one outside of the main couple or found family ever seems to matter in these books. To the point where a mother (not the child's real mother but at this point everyone thinks she is) is demonized for mourning the death of her 8-year-old.

[oracne]

The Ministry of Time sounds interesting! I, of course, would rather read about WWI Person.

[sabotabby]

The WWI person is cool. We don't see him as much as the Franklin Expedition person but I really like his character.

[rydra_wong]

Also, I don't get the appeal of asexual romance personally, but I think one of the interesting points of tension that I've seen in some stories is the idea that it's a spectrum, and even if you find a fellow asexual (who just happens to be the first person you have ever met that you didn't eat for some reason), it's not a guarantee that they like the same romantic/sexual acts that you do. And that is a negotiation. Not here. They only like cuddling and holding hands and find kissing a disgusting act to have to "perform" for their past partners. Just lucky coincidence.

I guess it's essentially the asexual version of the fantasy where fortuitously your partner is into exactly the things that you are and magically knows how to get you off and it all happens without anyone having to negotiate or communicate in any way.

Which I recognize is an incredibly popular fantasy!

It's just that personally I have a kink for the opposite in fiction. Like, give me characters who are ultimately compatible but don't actually have perfectly symmetrical romantic and sexual desires! Make the fuckers negotiate! Make them communicate a bit! It's interesting!

[sabotabby]

I mean, I also don't want to read Millennial consent dances. But I like tension. This sets up something that feels like it should be a source of tension, and then it just...isn't. Which is irritating.