In the Watchful City
Nov. 4th, 2021 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraIn the Watchful City, S. Qiouyi Lu. Novella consisting of a frame story and four short stories in varying genres and styles (five if you count the protagonist in the frame story relating aer own story). I had mixed feelings about it - I thought the frame story was very strong, a lot of vivid imagery and interesting ideas, and two of the four stories I would probably rec as short stories, and in general I liked the idea of using sub-stories to illuminate a world from different angles, and to have a conversation with the protag. But the connections between it all were pretty oblique, and I had to keep going back and rereading things to be sure they were even meant to all be from the same world at all, and my overall feeling was more like, "well, huh" than anything stronger. I will recommend it, but mostly to people who like "difficult" stories, or maybe people who thought Hyperion was the coolest thing in sff storytelling ever.
Two more specific things. It was neat to get to read something again that used a bunch of different pronouns beyond just singular they (æ/aer for the protag, which are also Lu's pronouns; se/ser and e/eir for secondary characters, and then also he, she, and they for some of the characters in the sub-stories). I mean, the rise and spread of "they" has been a delightful thing, and I love getting to read something like "Psalm for the Wild-Built" and not even find a "they" protagonist who specifically clarifies that they don't have a gender one of the more interesting things about the book. But my personal moments of illumination ("oh my god someone just opened a window letting light and air into this dark and stifling gender-binary room!") have come more from encounters with neopronouns, first in fiction and then in real life, and, I don't know. I like all the potential of a richer pronoun space! Pronouns not just being about gender! Gender not mapping consistently/completely to pronouns! The increasing mainstreaming of "they" is clearly one of the coolest gender developments of my lifetime but I have sometimes felt a little bit of "they means exactly this one other thing", which is not quite the liberatory genderfuckery of my dreams. I mean, that is probably mostly just my own neurosis (or to put it more positively, maybe, willingness to prioritize solidarity with the "they" vanguard over those of us trailing along with murky statuses), but, I don't know, props to Lu for keeping the windows open.
And then, also, this is very tentative and also awkward, but I wonder if there are possibly some interesting deliberate choices going on here with the author's note, which ties into my ongoing interest in how tags and content notes and "trigger warnings" are part of how a work is presented and how they can be deliberate bids to shape how a story is read. (I mean, I know my own fic tagging and fic notes are - I don't think this is anything "bad", any more than using things like cover art or blurbs or marketing genres to signal or shape expectations.) Lu flags the novella for depicting suicide, and links to a hotline-list resource, and flags two of the short stories specifically for imagery possibly triggering to self-harm survivors - which all seems entirely reasonable, like, yes, those are things someone might find it helpful to know about in advance! But it kind of made it stand out to me that for me the by-far most upsetting scene in the book was something different in one of the stories that didn't get mentioned at all. Which of course could just be a coincidence - nobody is going to warn for everything, nor would I expect them to... but, I don't know. Let me go behind a cut here. The specific scene has to do with a child choosing foot-binding, and for me it was way more graphic and nauseating than the depictions of cutting that got flagged. I think Lu was very clearly trying to challenge the Western view of footbinding by portraying it as an active choice and linking it to choice and expression of gender and gender-affirming medical practices. And I think the decision not to warn can be read as a deliberate part of that challenge, a sort of "this doesn't need a note because it isn't self-harm" declaration by the absence of declaration among other declarations. (Just to be clear, I am personally fine with Lu making that choice! I think being disturbing is a legitimate motive of adult art (I am only interested in "disturbing with a point", which is why I stay away from the "disturbing with no point" side of horror), and the scene was in keeping with the tone and themes of the work - we had a warning right up front for other kinds of difficult content, after all. I don't hold back from saying so if an author does something that makes me angry. I am interested in what Lu might be doing here, not criticizing.)
Two more specific things. It was neat to get to read something again that used a bunch of different pronouns beyond just singular they (æ/aer for the protag, which are also Lu's pronouns; se/ser and e/eir for secondary characters, and then also he, she, and they for some of the characters in the sub-stories). I mean, the rise and spread of "they" has been a delightful thing, and I love getting to read something like "Psalm for the Wild-Built" and not even find a "they" protagonist who specifically clarifies that they don't have a gender one of the more interesting things about the book. But my personal moments of illumination ("oh my god someone just opened a window letting light and air into this dark and stifling gender-binary room!") have come more from encounters with neopronouns, first in fiction and then in real life, and, I don't know. I like all the potential of a richer pronoun space! Pronouns not just being about gender! Gender not mapping consistently/completely to pronouns! The increasing mainstreaming of "they" is clearly one of the coolest gender developments of my lifetime but I have sometimes felt a little bit of "they means exactly this one other thing", which is not quite the liberatory genderfuckery of my dreams. I mean, that is probably mostly just my own neurosis (or to put it more positively, maybe, willingness to prioritize solidarity with the "they" vanguard over those of us trailing along with murky statuses), but, I don't know, props to Lu for keeping the windows open.
And then, also, this is very tentative and also awkward, but I wonder if there are possibly some interesting deliberate choices going on here with the author's note, which ties into my ongoing interest in how tags and content notes and "trigger warnings" are part of how a work is presented and how they can be deliberate bids to shape how a story is read. (I mean, I know my own fic tagging and fic notes are - I don't think this is anything "bad", any more than using things like cover art or blurbs or marketing genres to signal or shape expectations.) Lu flags the novella for depicting suicide, and links to a hotline-list resource, and flags two of the short stories specifically for imagery possibly triggering to self-harm survivors - which all seems entirely reasonable, like, yes, those are things someone might find it helpful to know about in advance! But it kind of made it stand out to me that for me the by-far most upsetting scene in the book was something different in one of the stories that didn't get mentioned at all. Which of course could just be a coincidence - nobody is going to warn for everything, nor would I expect them to... but, I don't know. Let me go behind a cut here. The specific scene has to do with a child choosing foot-binding, and for me it was way more graphic and nauseating than the depictions of cutting that got flagged. I think Lu was very clearly trying to challenge the Western view of footbinding by portraying it as an active choice and linking it to choice and expression of gender and gender-affirming medical practices. And I think the decision not to warn can be read as a deliberate part of that challenge, a sort of "this doesn't need a note because it isn't self-harm" declaration by the absence of declaration among other declarations. (Just to be clear, I am personally fine with Lu making that choice! I think being disturbing is a legitimate motive of adult art (I am only interested in "disturbing with a point", which is why I stay away from the "disturbing with no point" side of horror), and the scene was in keeping with the tone and themes of the work - we had a warning right up front for other kinds of difficult content, after all. I don't hold back from saying so if an author does something that makes me angry. I am interested in what Lu might be doing here, not criticizing.)
