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.
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Date: 2025-05-14 07:48 pm (UTC)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.