Notes from a Regicide
Apr. 18th, 2026 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraNotes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman, 2026 novel. I did not think much of the other of Fellman's books I've read, the 2022 novella The Two Doctors Gorski, but I'd seen this one recommended highly by people whose opinions I respect, so figured it was worth a try. And I'm glad I did: I didn't completely love it, but I definitely liked it more than Two Doctors. It is a very slow book and low on plot; mostly a lot of very detailed character study. Closest comparison maybe something like Malafrena, a nineteenth-century Romantic novel being written in the modern day, in this case set in the medium-far future and principally concerned with (what seemed to me like) a very now-specific experience of transness, and secondarily alcoholism and/or being an artist.
Me being me I was most interested in the speculative elements, and since my ebook expires at midnight let me put a bunch of quotes behind the cut and talk a little about some worldbuilding choices.
Here are some things we learn about the setting.
"New York, the eternal city, which five hundred years ago was called New York and a thousand years ago was called New York, and in another thousand years will be called New York still." (I guess "even Old New York was once New Amsterdam" is lost knowledge.)
"... the ancient world... centuries ago, this was a very different city. Electricity was cheap, and the whole world was washed with it. You could make an elevator that could go up ten, twenty, eighty stories, and so all the buildings in the city came to be very tall, and to be made of glass in green or blue or brown - I've seen some fragments of them in the archives. They're all pitted and opaque now because they came out of the sea." (This does so much in telling us what kind of post-collapse world this is.)
"He cackled and quoted, "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. that's his." Then he waited for me to quote the next line, but unfortunately, I am completely illiterate." (So, that's Oscar Wilde, from Importance of Being Earnest, implying a world where Wilde is still known with some expectation of recognition, maybe a thousand years later, which is maybe comparable to someone now quoting Beowulf - not impossible but a pretty big cultural gap ago.)
""A certain kind of butch artist whose problems are romantic. Like Jackson Pollock. Or Vincent van Gogh." "Who were they?" "Oh, van Gogh was an eighteenth - or let's say a nineteenth-century artist, I think. Had mental illness. Supremely talented, they say, and probably the most famous artist in the world for awhile after he died, but of course there's almost no surviving art from a thousand years ago, so we have to rely on descriptions." (So, I feel like there's a little bit of a Ready Player One problem here, with these cultural references that just happen to be to a particular time period that means something to the reader, without much sense of a culture of the future history of the setting.)
"A shower-mounted drying rack, universal among even the richest households of New York" (This feels so specifically this-century to me (like mid-late 20th to now) but maybe it is more universal and permanent than I'm giving it credit for. I suppose people will always be doing laundry somehow.)
"the Sisters of Ste. Dorothée Day" (I thought this was more science fictional than it is - apparently there actually is an open beatification/canonization process for her.)
"a glass of water from the cistern... it was icy and good, just bought the other day and still with the faintly chemical tang of the water purifier" (Another fascinating detail about life and technology in this world.)
"Gothics, fantasy, trans memoir... On the radio she listened to the advice shows." (Genre hasn't changed much in a thousand years I see.)
"In the ancient world, [gender] surgery was brought to a much higher standard... But they had techniques we can't do now - they required electronics, computers, things we're just starting to *imagine* reinventing." (I think one of the things that interests me here is how much this is *not* a "the past has become mythical" scenario.)
"I sat on the toilet and howled big American sobs." (Not just New York, but still America, and a cultural identification as American! Undermines the suspension of disbelief for me. I feel like it must have been really important to Fellman to keep this line despite how jarring it is and I wonder why.)
"Because I could not stop for Death, Death kindly stopped for me." (I was maybe willing to buy Importance of Being Earnest as the Antigone of this setting - an ancient work that has survived that is reasonably well known - but also Dickenson? Hmmm.)
"The GDP's for shit" (GDP feels like *such* a contemporary framing, are people in a thousand years going to talk about GDP?)
"run to New York or January Bay" (One of the few attempts at inventing something that isn't straight out of the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries, or at least I've never heard of January Bay.)
"The stone yard must have emitted its bass hum for two thousand years uninterrupted" (So, either we're further into the future than was stated with Van Gogh, or this world diverged from ours a thousand years ago when this suspended animation technology was invented??)
"foaming chemical lamps" and "this bath... I had dropped only one packet of chemical heat into it" (More great details of a pretty different material culture or technological basis.)
So... why set this in ~3000, if what Fellman really wants is a world of contemporary transness, 20th century material culture, and 19th century literary references? Maybe to be able to mix those things without anachronism, maybe for Ruritanian reasons (if you invent Orsinia you don't have to be burdened with the actual history of any real revolution), maybe because the little bits of more original worldbuilding stand out nicely against this collage. Maybe for "potatoes in China" reasons, like, Fellman just not being very interested in the project of translating references to something more consistent to the nominal setting when Wilde and GDP are his natural idiom. Maybe to make the claim that 21st century transness is in fact pretty universal and a good model for how transness will look in a distant time, unlike a lot of gender scifi that speculates pretty different models of gender and transition. It's an interesting choice that I think mostly works - even the most ill-fitting moments ("American" and "GDP") are memorable for being jarring.
Me being me I was most interested in the speculative elements, and since my ebook expires at midnight let me put a bunch of quotes behind the cut and talk a little about some worldbuilding choices.
Here are some things we learn about the setting.
"New York, the eternal city, which five hundred years ago was called New York and a thousand years ago was called New York, and in another thousand years will be called New York still." (I guess "even Old New York was once New Amsterdam" is lost knowledge.)
"... the ancient world... centuries ago, this was a very different city. Electricity was cheap, and the whole world was washed with it. You could make an elevator that could go up ten, twenty, eighty stories, and so all the buildings in the city came to be very tall, and to be made of glass in green or blue or brown - I've seen some fragments of them in the archives. They're all pitted and opaque now because they came out of the sea." (This does so much in telling us what kind of post-collapse world this is.)
"He cackled and quoted, "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. that's his." Then he waited for me to quote the next line, but unfortunately, I am completely illiterate." (So, that's Oscar Wilde, from Importance of Being Earnest, implying a world where Wilde is still known with some expectation of recognition, maybe a thousand years later, which is maybe comparable to someone now quoting Beowulf - not impossible but a pretty big cultural gap ago.)
""A certain kind of butch artist whose problems are romantic. Like Jackson Pollock. Or Vincent van Gogh." "Who were they?" "Oh, van Gogh was an eighteenth - or let's say a nineteenth-century artist, I think. Had mental illness. Supremely talented, they say, and probably the most famous artist in the world for awhile after he died, but of course there's almost no surviving art from a thousand years ago, so we have to rely on descriptions." (So, I feel like there's a little bit of a Ready Player One problem here, with these cultural references that just happen to be to a particular time period that means something to the reader, without much sense of a culture of the future history of the setting.)
"A shower-mounted drying rack, universal among even the richest households of New York" (This feels so specifically this-century to me (like mid-late 20th to now) but maybe it is more universal and permanent than I'm giving it credit for. I suppose people will always be doing laundry somehow.)
"the Sisters of Ste. Dorothée Day" (I thought this was more science fictional than it is - apparently there actually is an open beatification/canonization process for her.)
"a glass of water from the cistern... it was icy and good, just bought the other day and still with the faintly chemical tang of the water purifier" (Another fascinating detail about life and technology in this world.)
"Gothics, fantasy, trans memoir... On the radio she listened to the advice shows." (Genre hasn't changed much in a thousand years I see.)
"In the ancient world, [gender] surgery was brought to a much higher standard... But they had techniques we can't do now - they required electronics, computers, things we're just starting to *imagine* reinventing." (I think one of the things that interests me here is how much this is *not* a "the past has become mythical" scenario.)
"I sat on the toilet and howled big American sobs." (Not just New York, but still America, and a cultural identification as American! Undermines the suspension of disbelief for me. I feel like it must have been really important to Fellman to keep this line despite how jarring it is and I wonder why.)
"Because I could not stop for Death, Death kindly stopped for me." (I was maybe willing to buy Importance of Being Earnest as the Antigone of this setting - an ancient work that has survived that is reasonably well known - but also Dickenson? Hmmm.)
"The GDP's for shit" (GDP feels like *such* a contemporary framing, are people in a thousand years going to talk about GDP?)
"run to New York or January Bay" (One of the few attempts at inventing something that isn't straight out of the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries, or at least I've never heard of January Bay.)
"The stone yard must have emitted its bass hum for two thousand years uninterrupted" (So, either we're further into the future than was stated with Van Gogh, or this world diverged from ours a thousand years ago when this suspended animation technology was invented??)
"foaming chemical lamps" and "this bath... I had dropped only one packet of chemical heat into it" (More great details of a pretty different material culture or technological basis.)
So... why set this in ~3000, if what Fellman really wants is a world of contemporary transness, 20th century material culture, and 19th century literary references? Maybe to be able to mix those things without anachronism, maybe for Ruritanian reasons (if you invent Orsinia you don't have to be burdened with the actual history of any real revolution), maybe because the little bits of more original worldbuilding stand out nicely against this collage. Maybe for "potatoes in China" reasons, like, Fellman just not being very interested in the project of translating references to something more consistent to the nominal setting when Wilde and GDP are his natural idiom. Maybe to make the claim that 21st century transness is in fact pretty universal and a good model for how transness will look in a distant time, unlike a lot of gender scifi that speculates pretty different models of gender and transition. It's an interesting choice that I think mostly works - even the most ill-fitting moments ("American" and "GDP") are memorable for being jarring.
