book: Lizard Radio

Lizard Radio, Pat Schmatz, co-won the 2015 Tiptree. So I'm a giant hypocrite: this book is totally a YA dystopia with Authorities with Secrets, a genre I usually claim to be quite sick of, and yet I loved it. Maybe it's not that I'm a hypocrite, maybe this one is really that unusually good? It's more character-driven, smaller in scope, more of the important drama is internal instead of societal. Also I'm a huge sucker for a nonbinary protagonist, and while the book's world is sfnal in how it deals with gender, the nbness felt like real-world nbness in that sfnal setting, which I liked. It was just really good teen-coming-of-age-in-conflict-with-their-society, plus some neatly-handled worldbuilding of being very concrete and specific in its details (a lot of fun invented slang) and entirely blank on anything it doesn't actually *need* to mention, so, we get this very narrow intriguing glimpse of this world, without anything like a backstory dump.

You-might-like-it-if: The Giver, the Stranger/Hostage series? Uglies? I almost want to say Clockwork Orange, although it's been a million years since I reread that, and Lizard Radio has a super likeable protagonist so it's not a great parallel? Oh, that brilliant Samatar story, "How to Get Back to the Forest", I thought about that a lot.

Lords of Misrule

So I think there's something to this idea that I've seen, that the attraction of Brexit or Trump is not the actual policies, but just the opportunity to express forbidden racism (& misogyny, in the Trump case) in a public, validated way, and that plenty of these people would actually like to continue to have sensible policies and responsible governance along with their chance to howl their hate and have other haters howl back. I... don't really know what to do with that. On the one hand, I believe pretty devoutly that condemnation of bigotry is the only moral option, that the very real lives and safety of Muslim/Latinx/Black/Jewish/etc people are at risk whenever white supremacy is allowed to flourish, that the only way this evil is ever actually going to diminish and become a rare perversion is if we just keep banging away on it being completely unacceptable. On the other hand I feel like maybe in history there are societies that have experimented with outlets for the forbidden, inversion festivals, licentious release of what is suppressed the rest of the time for the good of society, and, I don't know, if all of these jackasses could do their disgusting howling somewhere where it *didn't actually threaten sensible policy for the rest of us*, would that be worth something? If you could uncouple the hate from actual political power at the cost of even marginally legitimizing it? I mean, I think history says no, I think history says that people who get to go wear white sheets on the weekend just get more emboldened to wear white sheets in their daily lives, and the kind of people inclined to be Nazis are not going to be satisfied to be performative Nazis, they want real-world power. But. I don't know. If "posture and lose" is the actual best-case scenario for a lot of these people, I wish there was more the rest of us could do to help them do that.