Seven Tiny Essays On The 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel
The Hugo Awards remain fascinating as a sort of collective divination ritual over the path of SF/F, whatever it turns out that SF/F might mean—it is, obviously, a moving target and always has been. Here, then, is my ranked preference, with accompanying tiny essays to comment on what this particular set of entrails have to say and offer some thoughts on the state of the art in the genre.
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She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan
In an uncommonly weak year of nominees, She Who Became the Sun stands out as the only novel on the list to offer something genuinely new, innovative, and vital-feeling. At its heart, Parker-Chan’s novel takes the genre of courtly politics and layers on two elements that significantly transform it. The first is a queer lens. The novel retells the rise of the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming Dynasty, as a transmasculine story, imagining that the documented story of a peasant boy rising to be emperor was in fact a destiny seized by a peasant girl who impersonated her dead brother and his foretold destiny.
To state the obvious, this is transformative. The tropes of courtly politics and seduction all change when you have a transmasculine lead, especially one who does not have the simple, convenient framework of transition—Zhu Chongba uses feminine pronouns in her internal monologues, but bristles furiously for much of the book at any suggestion that she is anything other than her brother, understanding her ruse as a ruse to fool heaven itself. Nothing is certain here,.
The second element is the Chineseness of it. This is a book that tangibly follows different logic than anglophone civalric fantasy, not in the deconstructionist sense of George R.R. Martin’s obviously popular novels, but in the sense of something where the basic ways in which expectations are set up and fulfilled or subverted has changed—a structure built around patterns and slightly varying iterations of specific archetypes. Pleasantly, the book makes few concessions for this—it is relatively disinterested in teaching its new expectations. Instead it does its thing and leaves the reader to catch up.
The result is breathlessly strange in all the best ways. At times one wonders why this is SF/F at all—its tone is much closer to magical realism, and the fantastic could probably have been picked out of it adequately to leave an interesting bit of queer literary fiction, at least until the end, when it suddenly snaps into perspective and reveals in full the novel it’s been all along. Perhaps it still could have been literary fiction, but instead we get it here, and its presence transforms the genre around it in fascinating ways, just as the one stunningly explicit sex scene roughly 90% of the way through the book transforms the narrative in a key way.
I do not, generally speaking, want to denigrate the state of the art in SF/F literature, which I broadly think is in rude health, even if it has an increasingly evident dominant mode.…