JY Yang novellas

[psocoptera]

The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, two 2017 novellas. I read them in the (chronological) order Black Tides and then Red Threads, having read somewhere you should definitely do that, but Yang themself says that they can be read in either order, and they actually wrote Red Threads first and then Black Tides to fill in some certain backstory. Also they apparently have ideas for two more novellas and a novel, so this may just be the beginning of the Tensorate series. I *definitely* want two more novellas and a novel, yes please! I really loved these. The world and magic system, the characters and their relationships, the writing - so much good. Gender as an adulthood choice! Gravity and momentum manipulation! Dinosaurs *and* dragons! One warning, I ended up sobbing in a semi-public place when finishing Black Tides, it is not necessarily the book you want to bring to your kid's karate class in that respect.

Comments

[glassonion]

Hmm. So i usually don't disagree with you this much, so i am interested in discussing this further if you are. There is no "right" or "wrong" and people should like what they like, but i will say that i imagine you are probably right, in the sense that your impression is probably of more use to people who are trying to decide whether to read this.

And note that i've only read "Black Tides" and not the other one because i came here from the Hugo ballot. And that i'm not going to be shy about spoilers as needed, since i'm in a comment to this post from four months ago.

So: first off, and this is an invitation to tell me i need to reread a bit because i'm wrong: pretty much page one, the first time the twins did something other than be infants, i thought to myself, "Yeah, okay, so the one with interiority is going to choose to be the boy, right?" And, i mean, on the one hand, i had a 50/50 chance of being right. On the other hand, they could both have had interiority, it's not that damn hard. All of the POV characters were men (red flag for me), most of the miscellaneous schmoe characters were men (red flag for me), and we very very rarely had one of the female secondary characters report on the state of her thoughts by saying words, as opposed to by having a primary character make superficial guesses. I don't think having an interesting societal model of gender gives a book a free pass.

I also didn't feel like any of the characterization or worldbuilding was all that deep. Like, i never understood why the main character left or why he came back or why he fell for the other guy or why the Christianity thing was important or why much of anything. And the benders-vs-guns thing is interesting, but i guess i recently sunk a bunch of time into reading it as a Korrasami s5/fixit that i thought did a more interesting job of hitting the implications?

I mean, i am clearly conceding here that the author raised interesting topics, and i just thought they talked about them in an uninteresting way, and i did not have a good time reading about it.

Hopefully that is not too obnoxious? I mean, different people like different things and that's what makes the world interesting.

[psocoptera]

This might sound weird but one of the things I am really enjoying about the Hugos this year is that it's a place where people can wildly disagree but still be friends who are talking to each other? I was laughing in delight last night every time Jed posted another one of his ballots completely inverting my ranking of something (contemplating telling Jed this, would appreciate any insight on whether he'd take it the wrong way) because it's such a contrast to the real world where the big disagreement is, like, pro- and con- child traumatization and one of those sides is actually actively evil, or even the online fandom world where if we disagree about Check Please or Knights/Caps we probably try to avoid each other in the *best* case. So this comment actually makes me really happy, because, like, here we are, I loved this thing, you totally did not, and here we are and it's awesome! ::hugs you::

All that said I'm mostly failing to have an interesting substantive response to your comments - I'm sure I was more willing to give Yang a pass on who got to be characters genderwise because a) I first became of fan of them as a then-woman-identified author and b) they came out as nonbinary, so, like, I assume they have actually *thought* about gender and aren't just doing it by default? I had not really thought about the representation of secondary characters... I *think* almost everyone in Red Threads who isn't introduced in Black Tides are women or nonbinary, and I wonder if there was a sort of deliberate gender echoing around the protagonists. I don't think you would have found the worldbuilding any more compelling in Red Threads though so I won't feel bad about not having told you to read that one first. :) And I'm amused about the Korrasami thing... I'm definitely familiar with the difference of "oh, I haven't seen any of this in awhile, yay" vs "I've had plenty of this lately" - if I just happened to read these right at the right time for me, it's not always easy to realize that from the inside. :)