Paper Girls 5

 
 
Paper Girls 5
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2018 

 

 
In the fifth volume of Paper Girls, the girls have arrived in the future, to the time where the Old Timers, the older generation in a temporal conflict with their own descendants, are operating from. There's only one volume left after this, and the shape of the time war has become a knot.
 
From the girls' perspective, which is the order the comics take place in, the girls started out in the 1980s, where the Old Timers, led by the Grand Father, showed up and took over their neighborhood in the Cleveland suburbs by putting everyone else in suspended animation and erasing their memories of the intrusion. The Grand Father seems to be very long-lived; he still speaks contemporary English, while everyone below him speaks a dialect that has diverged so far it borders on gibberish. We didn't know the reason for this, but it seemed the Old Timers did it to capture a few far-future teens, who speak a language so different it's represented with alien script; they can only be understood with the help of translator machines. They also met a silent alien, a green sphere with many eyestalks that seemed to watch them.
 
Then the girls were accidentally transported to the 2010s. They met Erin's middle-aged self, and learned that she had no memory of time traveling as a teen ... and that Mac died of leukemia while she was still in high school. They found a message carved on KJ's field hockey stick that helped them navigate the invisible time portals around the city. They met another far-future teen, a clone of Erin, who accidentally brought some giant tardigrades with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown, and the Old Timers showed up again en masse and middle-aged Erin risked her life (maybe even died) to help the girls escape through a time portal.
 
That portal led the girls all the way back to the Stone Age. They met the first time traveler, born in the 2010s, who was shocked to already find evidence of other time trips on her maiden voyage. They also met a cavegirl their own age, Wadi, and agreed to help her rescue her son Japoh from the three cavemen who took him. Tiffany carved the message they saw earlier into the field hockey stick, and stuck it through a fold in time for her past self to find. KJ encountered the spherical green alien again and touched it; she got fragmentary visions of future events, including her and Mac kissing. The girls helped with the rescue, but then time traveled again by accident.
 
This time they arrived on New Year's Day in the year 2000. Giant robots piloted by the Old Timers and the far-future teens were fighting openly in Cleveland, although they were invisible to almost everyone except time travelers. The girls met Tiffany's post-college self. She's a goth! The far-future mechas were clearly superior to the ones piloted by the Old Timers. The newly appointed Grand Father, a relatively young man was piloting one; a bad hit killed his girlfriend, who used her dying words to beg him to abide by their principles of preserving history, rather than using time travel to save her. He tearfully agreed, and managed to kill the other mech pilot. For safety amidst the ongoing battle, the girls and college-age Tiffany clambered up into the broken mecha shell. The young Grand Father saw them and assumed they were the ones who killed his girlfriend, and then the mech sent itself forward in time.
 
Now the girls arrive in a future Cleveland, a time when everyone talks in the near-unintelligible dialect of the other Old Timers we've met so far, and the Grand Father is the old man we first saw him as. He has the green alien in his office! We also learn something I maybe should've noticed sooner - the Grand Father is Japoh, the baby born in the Stone Age, who the girls helped to reunite with his mother. I'll talk more about what the girls get up to in the future in a moment, but first, let's review events from the Old Timers' perspective.
 
The lab that invented time travel rescued the stranded first time traveler. She brought back the cavepeople Wadi and Japoh, claiming they were her children. The Old Timer faction formed, and eventually Japoh was made its leader. Among his fights with the future teens, his girlfriend died, and he thought the paper girls were responsible. When the killer mecha finally reappeared, after years of waiting, he thought he had a chance for revenge. At the same time, reports came in of the tardigrades in the 2010s. The Grand Father decided to launch the all-out offensive we saw earlier (which his staff viewed as a major over-reaction), and then to intercept the girls in the 1980s.
 
The Old Timers say their goal is to preserve the first draft of history, as unchanged by time travel as possible, but what does that even mean here? Japoh doesn't know it, but he was only brought to the future to become a leader because the girls saved him as an infant. They were only in the Stone Age to save him because he invaded their neighborhood, which he did in response to events the girls got entangled in after they got lost in time during the invasion. Plus he only thinks he's mad at them because of mistaken identity! Cause and effect aren't just reversed here, they're completely intertwined and entangled. There doesn't seem to be any pre-intervention state! Every major event in this sequence has a cause happened after its effect, and that, in turn, could only have happened because the effect came first.
 
In the future Cleveland, KJ tries to talk to Mac about her vision of them kissing, but Mac doesn't want to hear it. KJ has been coming to accept that she might be a lesbian, while Mac seems more homophobic than ever. The two go to find a doctor, while Erin and the two Tiffanys go look for Wadi, who is an old woman despite whatever anti-aging drugs she and Japoh have been taking. The good news for Mac is that the future has a cure for leukemia; the bad news is that she doesn't really have it, she has a rare disease caused by time travel. The doctor tries to turn Mac over to the Old Timers, but KJ beats the guy up and rescues her friend. After briefly thinking she could change something, Mac accepts that she'll die, accepts that KJ's visions will come true, and kisses her, surprising them both. 
 
Wadi agrees to help the girls sneak past her son and get back to the 1980s. They get joined en route to the departure point by the future-teen clone of Erin. Once again, they're cornered and only make it out because someone sacrifices their life; this time it's college-age Tiffany. The girls are paying a terrible price for getting caught up in this mess. Mac is going to die of time travel sickness in high school, Tiffany will be killed in her mid-20s, Erin will die in her early 40s. 
 
There's one volume left, and I fear KJ win't make it out alive either. What started as a mystery and then maybe a fun adventure (even if they weren't in control of how they were time traveling) has become the reason three of the four will die young, seemingly with nothing gained, nothing to show for it. Future Erin and future Tiffany have already revealed they won't even remember all this afterward! I don't know if the last volume will salvage anything positive, or if it's going to be a total downer, but I guess I'll find out soon.

The Spire

 
 
The Spire
by Simon Spurrier

art by Jeff Stokely

Boom! Comics

2016 
 
 
The Spire collects an 8 issue comic book miniseries written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely. It tells a neo-noir mystery, complete with a hardboiled investigator protagonist, set in a New Weird fantasy city. 
 
The namesake city of the comic, the Spire itself, is a towering cone of adjoining buildings, all in the same shade, like a sandcastle or a wasps' nest. It sits in a wasteland, called the 'Nothingland', and the outside air is poisonous to normal humans. The city's residents are a mix of humans and beings who are politely called 'Sculpted' but usually called by the slur 'Skew'. Their name seems to me to imply that the first sculpted were created from humans by genetic modification, probably to survive the outdoor pollution, and possibly to perform specialized work, during the 'antiki-times' where all the best tech comes from. 
 
There are various tribes of sculpted who all share the same traits, like the messengers - tiny bald men with the proportions of infants who fly on miniature wings and are propelled forward by farting. Humans resent the sculpted for taking up space in the Spire (when they could live outside), exploit them economically (giving certain low-paid jobs to the sculpted, and demanding annual tithes from the wasteland tribes), and then resent that too (because "they're taking our jobs"). The city is a multiracial society with an official policy of strength through diversity, but it's also tense. Also living in the wasteland are a religious sect who preach death to all the sculpted, and who use antiki-tech environment suits and shelters to survive the toxic air.
 
The modern-ish city, the unique nature of the humanoid residents, and the attention to race and class inequality reminds me of China Mieville's city of Bas Lag from Perdido Street Station. (I think Mieville had some babbling little flying men too, now that I think of it.) Stokely makes everyone look vaguely grotesque in a way that matches the low tone of Spurrier's writing. The city is dirty, people piss themselves in fear, mock each other for smelling like shit, swear constantly. The upper city dwellers, who get the majority of the natural sunlight, are racists and snobs, the religious are zealots who preach genocide, the cops and military are reading to beat anyone who's insufficiently respectful, and they'll actually carry out a pogrom before the book's over. But the overall tone mostly varies between ironic detachment and darkly humorous. There are only a few moments when it seems we're encouraged to feel sincere emotion.
 
Our hard-bitten investigator is Sha, the captain of the city watch. Sha is a Medusi, a sculpted person with jellyfish characteristics, including thin tentacles she can use for climbing and catching criminals, the ability to heal from injuries (except the missing eye she wears a patch over), and the ability to reshape her skin, temporarily as a disguise or more permanently if required. Sha's an amnesiac who is estranged from her tribe and never ages. She's like one "snikt, bub" away from being a female Wolverine. Sha is foul-mouthed, an overly demanding boss to her put-upon subordinant, obnoxiously rude to ever other member of the city government, and , inadvisably, is sleeping with the younger daughter of the royal family (who can't really understand that her family won't allow her to make a lesbian relationship with a racialized commoner public or official).
 
The mystery here is a series of murders of servants close to the matriarch of the royal family that start right after her husband dies of a disease of old age. The older daughter will soon take the throne ... unless the murderer ultimately plans to kill a royal and not just their staff. Sha is determined to solve the case and protect the family, even as the incoming queen prepares to undo her father's progressive reforms, make peace with the zealots, and persecute the sculpted anew. The solution to the mystery is based in events from decades earlier, shown in cryptic flashbacks, when the matriarch was young, and in the specific details of several sculpted tribes' abilities.
 
One detail we learn near the end is something Sha forgot long ago because of her amnesia - she's transgender. As a Medusi, she could fully and permanently reshape herself to become female without any outside help. That forgotten transition turns out to explain a number of things about Sha, and to be an important piece of the puzzle to finally solve the mystery by unraveling the killer's motivation. You can file The Spire next to All About My Mother as stories where a closeted trans woman gets someone pregnant, then abandons them in order to finally come out and begin living as a woman herself. I can only imagine the level of dysphoria that becoming a father might trigger in someone who was previously resigned to life as a man, but the nature of both narratives are that we see the aftermath of that decision, rather than the pain that led up to it, and the possibility that the couple could've remained together is never really considered.

DIE 4

 
 
DIE 4
Bleed
by Kieron Gillen
art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2021 
 
 
From the start, I've found myself drawn to the high-concept worldbuilding of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans' comic series DIE, but (especially after the first volume) I've been less impressed by the plot and storytelling going on there. The comic is at its best when introducing a character or idea and letting admire all the allusions and creativity on display in each one, but then less successful at setting them in motion. Which is especially a problem here in the final volume, "Bleed", because there's little left to introduce, and a lot of plot left to resolve.
 
As an example, consider the Fair. These are Die's equivalent of fairies, but they're also robots. They act fairly in the sense that they'll hear any request, and they have a 50 percent chance of granting it, so they are fair like a coin toss. The two faces of the coin are 0 for no and 1 for yes, because the binary outcome is like a computer bit, which is why they're robots as well as fairies. Also, the way that you meet them is by going to the Fair, a kind of traveling festival they run. 
 
Merging multiple inspirations like that and layering multiple meanings into one thing is kind of impressive ... but then in this volume, all we see of the Fair are their smashed bodies, because the flew to the center of the world to take part in a climactic confrontation that happened entirely off camera. We just see the ruins of the aftermath, like HG Wells's smashed time machine from whatever his role was in the decisive last battle, which Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of.
 
This is what I mean when I say that the ideas of the comic are very careful constructed, while the story itself is ultimately pretty disappointing.
 
In the 1990, a group of teenagers found some magic dice that transported them to the fantasy world of Die. There, they each had a fantastic persona and access to powerful magical abilities. They spent a couple years trapped there, battling the evil Grandmaster, before defeating him and performing the ritual to return to Earth. But in the last moment, the Grandmaster grabbed Solomon, and so only five of the six friends made it home. Since they had vanished without a trace for two years, it was a big deal when they came back, but they were magically prevented from saying anything about what had happened.
 
Then, a couple decades later, when the survivors were all in their early 40s and facing the typical (stereotypical?) problems of midlife, they were transported back to the world of Die and thrust back into the old game, only with their former friend Solomon acting as the Grandmaster this time. They defeated Sol, but then couldn't actually agree about returning home, some because they wanted to avoid an impending divorce or a cancer diagnosis, others because they felt guilty about destroying a whole city to defeat their former friend. Basically whenever someone changed their mind to return, someone else changed it the other way to stay, so that collectively they just seemed to be dithering indecisively.
 
While the heroes spent the next two volumes of the comic squabbling and sabotaging each other, we got a bit of a tour of Die. It's a planet shaped like a d20, and each face is the realm of a different Master, an echo of a real person who had some idea that contributed to the history of roleplaying. There's Eternal Prussia, based on the original German military war game, Kriegspiel. There's Little England, a mash-up of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and HG Wells's Little Wars, a war game for hobbyists to play on their living room floor. Eternal Prussia and Little England are locked in an unending war that resembles WWI. There's Angria, based on the Bronte siblings' childhood game of make-believe, a site of political intrigue, and the place our protagonists did most of their bickering. In this most recent volume, we also got to see an ocean face based on HP Lovecraft's fiction, which holds the stairway to the center of the planet. 
 
Near the end of the third volume, we got a call to action that seemed to set up an exciting conclusion. We learned that between the group's two visits, Sol had been busy working on behalf of the planet Die itself to send inspirations backward in time to ensure its creation. Supposedly Sol made the toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes' for example, and sent them to them so that they'd write their stories, so that Angria would be here waiting for teen Sol in the 80s. The friends learned that if Sol succeeded in making the dice that had transported them as teens, and sent them to himself, then the time paradox would resolve, Die would fully merge with Earth, and everyone would be trapped in a fantasy realm. To prevent this, the friends recruited the Fair, rallied Wells and the armies of Little England, plotted to entangle the plotters and schemers of Angria ... and then, as I mentioned, in this volume, Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of that.
 
Instead, we watch the six sad adults mope down the stairs to the center of the world where they don't stop anything, but also nothing bad happens. Die, suddenly now personified as a guy with a d20 for a head, explains that they're too late, he's already successfully closed the time loop to ensure his own existence, and now that they've witnessed it, he can send them home. In explaining all the steps, he even claims to have caused WWI, which would otherwise not have happened, purely so that Tolkein would be inspired to write The Hobbit, which horrifies the friends, but they're too late to do anything about it. There's no mention of the planets merging; it seems less like anyone saved the day and more like the authors forgot what the consequences were supposed to be. When they get home, it's 2020, and they arrive in the middle of a global pandemic with no idea of what they've missed.
 
Along the way down the stairs, we finally get a bit of resolution about Ash's up-to-now unspoken feelings about gender. I felt let down about this too. On Earth, Dominic is a man and seems to be fine with that; on Die she is a woman named Ash and seems to be fine with that too. As they descend, we're told that the Grandmaster only caught Sol because Ash paused during the ceremony because she didn't really want to go back to Earth. We also meet the giant fiery spirit of Ash's femininity, who blocks the way unless Ash will agree to merge with her. 
 
Ash says that on Earth, Dominic thought about being a woman at least once a day, not that he minded living as a man, just that it was a thought he had every single day. And given the chance to have a woman's body, Ash didn't want to leave Die then and doesn't want to leave now. And she merged with the spirit of herself (?) which supposedly displaced Dominic entirely. And what this means, the characters tell each other, is that Ash is gender fluid. Dominic definitely wasn't a closeted trans woman! And he'll be fine having a man's body and social identity again as soon as they all leave, even though right now Ash can't bear to give hers up. Yes, the characters repeat, this isn't being trans, its gender fluidity. 
 
This development adds DIE to my list of disappointing works where a character is seemingly portrayed as being a trans woman, only for late-in-the-game dialogue to reveal that, oh no, they're definitely not that, they certainly couldn't be that, they're just like, really sensitive and in touch with their feminine side, or maybe their gender cannot be labeled in any way at all. 
 
I would be interested in seeing more authentic portrayals of nonbinary characters in fiction; I am not interested in seeing yet more characters who are written in every way like they're trans only to make a surprise announcement of some sort of nonbinary identity at the last minute instead. I'm not interested in listening to people who seem to think that saying you're bisexual or gender nonbinary is enlightened and expansive (so long as you publicly live a conventional hetero life), but that being gay or trans is small-minded and unworthy. It's not fair to the people who are treated like their identity is unspeakable; it's also not fair to the people who are treated like the name of their identity is a cudgel to beat the unworthy, while the actual experience of what they feel or how they live is never shown.
 
But then, many things about DIE disappointed me. The first volume seemed promising, but overall, the comic has seemed more like a neat idea than like a good story, and nearly every time I've felt interested in some aspect of it, character or plot or whatever, that aspect has been ignominiously dropped or anticlimactically abandoned.

Super Late Bloomer

 
 
Super Late Bloomer
My Early Days in Transition
An Up and Out Collection

by Julia Kaye

Andrews McMeel
2018

 

 

Super Late Bloomer is a collection of autobiographical comics by Julia Kay, drawn in the 4 panel cartoon style of a daily newspaper comic. For Kaye, these comics functioned like a diary, helping her keep track of moods and events during her first summer living openly as a trans woman. Kaye was in her mid-20s at the time, and had moved back in with her parents while she started taking estrogen, getting laser hair removal, wearing women's clothes in public, changing her name and documents, and coming out to a widening circle of acquaintances.
 
Because they're so short, each comic is a little vignette of a single mood or incident. There's a mix of joy and self-acceptance with various forms of awkwardness and unpleasantness. I found a lot of Kaye's experiences really relatable, some from when I was first coming out myself, and some still today. A consistent metaphor is that taking estrogen and transitioning is like going through puberty again, with all the doubt and awkwardness that entails.
 
Kaye has a lot of self doubts - she worries that others will see her as a man playing dress-up, she frets about visible stubble, she's self-conscious about her voice. Sometimes she gets misgendered, even when she looks her most femme; other times she fears she will be, but then it's fine. Sometimes she hates her reflection. There are a few comics about public bathrooms - being afraid to come out of a stall when someone else is there, worrying what a friend will think when you're both in there at the same time. Kaye's parents are supportive, but there's one family member who's distant now, and she misses their friendship.
 
I think that for a lot of trans people, the process of figuring out what it is you're feeling and trying to decide what to do about it, is inherently isolating. You're doing a lot of introspecting, thinking about some of your most uncomfortable memories and emotions, and imagining how you might be able to feel better in the future. And you yourself might be the only trans person you know personally. It's easy to feel alone. 
 
Coming out, starting to socially and medically transition, hopefully does make you feel better. It's also different from anything you've done before, and it's new for your friends and family too. I think one of the most valuable things about a book like Super Late Bloomer is that it reminds you you're not alone, that others have felt what you're feeling, have done what you're now doing. You may be different from most of the people you know, but there are others like you, and things went mostly okay for them, and they can for you too. 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

Bad Dream

 
 
Bad Dream
A Dreamer Story

by Nicole Maines

art by Rye Hickman

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Bad Dream is an origin story for the transgender superhero Dreamer, written by the actress who played her in the Supergirl tv series. It's part of DC Comics' series of YA graphic novels, which seems to include more origin stories than ongoing adventures. The version of Dreamer we meet here is very similar to the one on Supergirl, although here she's presented as a high school student rather than a young adult like on the show.
 
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
 
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
 
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
 
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
 
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

Thieves is one of my favorite comics so far this year, and it mostly came as a pleasant surprise, because I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, just that I'd heard that it was good. It's fair to say I caught only a fraction of the buzz. In addition to being praised in basically every publication that prints reviews, Thieves won Lucie Bryon the Entente Litteraire Prize, which was presented to her by the queen of England and the first lady of France. Which is pretty impressive for a comic about two queer girls in high school going to house parties, getting drunk, and stealing things!

 

Thieves isn't quite as scandalous as I make it sound, but Bryon is willing to allow her characters to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to handle their emotions and their social relationships badly. But most of the book isn't about doing the wrong thing, its about trying to put it right again afterward. Friends and girlfriends push one another to be better, to try harder.

 

Ella is a social butterfly and a bit of a tomboy; she has a crush from a distance on Madeline, a femme girl who sits in front of her in morning class. Ella's best friend Leslie sits beside her every day, and tells her to stop longing from afar and actually just go talk to her already! But before Ella quite gets the chance, she and Leslie crash a house party, and Madeline is there. Ella is nervous, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up at home to discover that she's stolen a half dozen curios from one of the party host's closets...

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

Ella got home safe the night before hanks to Leslie, and also thanks to Leslie, Madeline comes over that morning to check on her. It turns out that Madeline's been crushing on Ella from a distance too, and now that they both know, they start dating. Ella soon realizes that the person she stole from was Madeline, but there's a twist. All the curios were things Madeline had stolen too. Not because she was drunk; more like acting out at times when she felt overwhelmed by negative emotions.

 

Ella and Madeline agree that it will feel better to stop carrying physical reminders of mistakes around with them. They spend the rest of the book returning the stolen items one by one, sneaking them into house parties and leaving them where the owner will eventually find them. Returning the items means confronting the original negative feelings, which is hard. A few times, Ella and Madeline fight. Leslie helps with a few of the reverse-burglaries, and she helps the couple work things out after arguing. She is like, the straight analogue to the 'gay best friend' character of 90s rom-coms. Like all stories set in the senior year of high school, the story ends with graduation.

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

I like Bryon's characters and her storytelling, and the emotional realism of a shy kid acting out when she gets bullied or teased, in part because she has no one she can talk to. Once Madeline has a real friend and can put her feelings into words, she's able to control her actions better.

 

I also really, really like Bryon's art. Her figures are fairly realistic, but they're also quite expressive. They're like, just the right amount of stretchy and cartoony for the story she wants to tell. Her use of color is great, too. Each scene has a single accent color that reflects to mood and time of day, to complement the black ink drawings. School is orange, outdoors at night is green, parties are red. Some background and scenery details appear solely in color and negative space, with no black outline at all. The colors are soft, and rich, like muted jewel tones. On the few occasions Bryon uses more than one, the art suddenly takes on surprising depth.

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

Belle of the Ball

 
 
Belle of the Ball

by Mari Costa

First Second

2023

 

 

Belle of the Ball is a cute little YA graphic novel about high school romance. There's a lesbian love triangle, with all the inherent conflict and heartbreak, right at the center of the story, but Mari Costa writes it all very gently, very kindly. The result is much more of a light-hearted romcom than any kind of tale of teen angst. There are no mean girls here, just three young adults trying to follow their hearts, if only they can figure out what they really want first.
 
The cast is three high school senior girls - ambitious cheerleader Regina; her girlfriend, soccer champ Chloe; and shy, nerdy Hawkins. Regina is smart and popular, the head cheerleader who's dating the star player of the soccer team, a straight A student who's already been accepted to the local college but still has her eye set on Harvard, and a future doctor with her 10-year life plan already all mapped out. Chloe is much less ambitious. She likes soccer and is good at it, she gets good-enough grades in everything but English, but prefers video games to studying, and gets bored whenever Regina's talking to her other friends about their goals for the future. It more seems like she's along for the ride than like she genuinely wants the same 10-year plan for herself.
 
And then there's Hawkins. Shy, self-conscious and awkward, nerdy, and an accidental force of chaos, who inadvertently crashed headlong into the fault lines in Regina and Chloe's relationship. Hawkins is also the school's cat-headed mascot. At the start of the story, she asks Regina to the homecoming dance, because she's had a long-time crush on her from a distance, and she mistakenly thought Regina and Chloe had broken up.
 
When Regina realizes that Chloe's recent low grades in English are going to jeopardize her soccer eligibility and her conditional college acceptance (and thus, the 10-year plan), she comes up with a strategy to put things back on track. Regina uses Hawkins's crush to convince her to tutor Chloe in exchange for a chance to hang out with them at school. Hawkins, despite knowing this is a bad idea, really does want more friends, and friendship with Regina specifically, and follows her heart and agrees.
 
Chloe is understandably not impressed with the plan to be tutored by the person who was flirting with her girlfriend, and isn't really interested in being tutored at all. She also quickly becomes suspicious that Hawkins seems to know too much about her, until suddenly, she connects two dots in her mind, and realizes that 'B Hawkins' is the same person as 'Belle,' Chloe's kindergarten classmate and first crush, Belle, who wore a princess dress to school every day, who Chloe used to follow around the playground, wishing she could be her knight. (Separate from this, there's also a running gag that from Hawkins's perspective, she and Regina have hung out several times in group settings, but Regina literally never noticed her there until she asked her out.)
 
You might be able to see where this is going. Regina and Chloe have different visions for their futures, and care about those visions with very different levels of intensity. At the same time that they might be growing apart anyway, Chloe and Hawkins suddenly start spending a lot more time together, and any feelings of attraction either of them may start to develop have a certain sort of plausible deniability to them ... right up to the end, when the feelings become so strong they're undeniable.
 
And as I said, it's all handled in a way that's fairly emotionally mature, with a minimum of raised voices or tears. Early on, it might be easy to think that Regina is controlling or manipulative, Chloe a bully, or Hawkins a pushover, but they all quickly grow beyond that. Regina tends to dominate any scene she's in, but we spend most of the book with Chloe and Hawkins. They spend a lot of time at home studying, but a highlight - narratively, visually, and emotionally - comes when Chloe buys Hawkins a ticket to the Renaissance Fair and rents her a princess dress, the first time she's worn one in years...
 
Costa's art is friendly and accessible. Aside from the black outlines and white negative space, all the tones are shades of pink. It's not just an accent color, this is a very pink book, and all the shades are different saturations of fuchsia pink (or what you might call 'Barbie pink'). Costa gives us a diverse cast, both ethnically and in terms of body types. The general absence of mean-spirited intent makes this a light read, and the art style complements that.

Ancillary Justice

 
 
Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2013 

 

 

 Ancillary Justice is a space opera about someone who once served an empire seeking revenge against it for the war crimes she was ordered to commit. It's a book that's very clearly responding to some earlier works, and that was obviously influential enough that several more recent books are responding to it. Crimes of military conquest and revenge for them drive the plot of Justice; the worldbuilding focuses on the many sources of status inequality related to ancestry, on the cultural power of empire, and on what it might look like to truly do without gender and gender-based sexuality in a context that is otherwise still very unequal.

 

Ancillary Justice is narrated in the first-person by Breq. In the novel's present day, Breq is a lone woman on a mission of revenge, but in the past, in the flashbacks that take up at least a third of the book, Breq was both the giant troop carrier ship Justice of Toren, and more specifically, the twenty-troop unit One Esk. Even more more specifically, Breq's body was One Esk Nineteen, though that doesn't matter, because the twenty-troop unit is the smallest subdivision of the spaceship's mind that has any degree of individuality whatsoever. 

 

Breq is a former ancillary soldier, one of the shock troops of the Radchaai empire. Ancillaries are AI minds in human bodies. The ship and all its ancillaries function as a single mind; Breq is separated now because the ship Justice of Toren was destroyed, and all the other bodies dead. Breq retains absolutely none of her memories or personality from before she was made an ancillary. Her mission of revenge is about the incident that destroyed her ship-body and her other ancillary soldier-bodies. Her mind and personality now are the same as the ship's were, just with less processing power.

 

Ancillaries are a bit like Borg drones from Star Trek, the troop carriers a bit like Borg cubes. They're not quite the same, Breq is no Seven of Nine, but for sure, the Borg are one of the earlier ideas Ann Leckie is engaging with. 

 

The two other most prominent touchpoints, I think, are Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Battlestar Galactica remake tv series, both of which attempt to explore war and empire in a context without gender inequality. LeGuin wrote Darkness about people who are genderless - and who indeed have no biological sex at all except when they're reproducing, and the same person can father one child and mother another. LeGuin used he/him pronouns to refer to all the characters in that book, and I suspect that some less-careful readers may have missed that they're not really supposed to be men. 

 

The Radchaai have the same range of biological sex characteristics that we do, but they have no concept for gender and make no gendered distinctions among themselves. Reversing LeGuin's choice, Leckie has Breq refer to everyone as she/her. It's a choice that makes Radchaai gender unmissable. It also dates the book, already, because I'm fairly sure that if Leckie were writing it for the first time today, she'd refer to the Radchaai using they/them. (Fairly sure, but not completely certain, because it's certainly a provocative and attention-getting artistic decision.) It's a reminder of both how recently and how successfully the current ideas of nonbinary gender and singular-they pronouns have gained mainstream recognition to describe ways of being that, even ten years ago, were harder to talk about. Not because no language for it existed, but because the words were less widely known, more specialized. For decades, some people called themselves genderqueer or used ze/hir or e/eir pronouns - some people still do! - but not as many as now call themselves nonbinary or use they. The new language is more accessible, maybe, or resonates with more people's sense of self, perhaps.

 

Anyway, Leckie writes the Radchaai not as lacking characteristics that we would think of as gender-markers, but as mixing and matching them according personal preference rather than societal norm, so that most of them would look queer to us, and to non-Radchaai people. Breq starts the present day portion of the book on a non-imperial winter planet, where the locals have binary gender, and she struggles to use that part of their language correctly. The flashbacks, to before Justice of Torren died, when Breq was still a starship and an army, take place on a recently annexed swamp world, where the locals are still reluctant to give up their own culture to become Radchaai, and are divided by a racial caste system.

 

I'm pretty sure that Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is responding to Ancillary Justice. The Teixcalaanli empire seems to build on some ideas from the Radchaai empire, though Martine focuses even more on language than Leckie does. But a few times, Leckie comments on the way that in the Radchaai language, the same word means 'a citizen of the Radch' and 'a civilized person', that they have no way, in their native tongue, to conceptualize people who are civilized, but not part of their civilization. Martine builds on that, and shows us the empire from the perspective of an about-to-be-conquered person, not a regretful former-conqueror. Martha Wells's popular Murderbot novellas also strike me as possibly being about a character who's like Breq, but who is truly portrayed as genderless because Wells doesn't use 'she' instead of 'they' or 'it'.

 

In the present-day, on the winter planet, Breq finds a recently-revived participant in a planet-wide civilian massacre from a thousand years earlier. Breq drags her along on the errand that brought her to the planet - trying to find an alien weapon, a gun that can penetrate Radchaai forcefields. 

 

In the flashbacks that alternate every-other chapter, we watch as the ancillary bodies of One Esk serve a Radchaai lieutenant who is trying to prevent a local leader from fomenting a racist lynch mob of upper caste conquered peoples to attack members of the lower caste. The lieutenant succeeds, but then she and One Esk are ordered to massacre a hundred members of the upper caste, and later, just before Justice of Torren is destroyed, One Esk is ordered to execute the lieutenant.

 

In Leckie's telling, war crimes, the execution of innocents and civilians, are catalysts of social and political change. They are moments that shock of the conscience, even of experienced soldiers, moments that force them to decide if they are most loyal to their empire or to the ideals they think their empire represents, when the two suddenly come in conflict. Leckie's soldiers almost always follow their orders, but then regret it, and try to make amends, and make things different afterward. We learn of countless reforms to the Radch in the thousand years since the planetary genocide, and Breq is set on her path of revenge because she regrets and resents the final killings she committed before almost all of her was destroyed.

 

Once Breq has her alien gun, and we've fully learned why she wants to use it, the final third of the book takes us to a Radchaai space station, to confront the person who gave the orders, the Radchaai emperor, Anaander Mianaai. Like the spaceships and ancillary soldiers, Mianaai is one mind in many bodies. Except that, just like Justice of Toren both is and is not quite the same as One Esk, Minanaai is not quite one unified mind. Parts of her support reform, parts oppose it, and every part with a secret agenda wants to keep her whole self from consciously acknowledging the split. She's even willing to kill an entire starship, or an entire space station, to keep that acknowledgment from spreading from one part of her to the rest. Guys will literally blow up a planet rather than go to therapy, amiright? Anaander Mianaai has the same problem as King Gnuff, her mind is simply too physically large, the distances her thoughts have to travel too great, for her to maintain a fully unified, singular self.

 

Ancillary Justice is the first book of a trilogy. I read it when it first came out and loved it then, but at the time I never followed up with the two sequels, I think because of how busy my life was at the time. On my first read, I also think I failed to fully understand some things about Breq and Anaander Mianaai that are more clear to me now. Back then, I didn't get that the whole of One Esk was a single mind, without any more granular individuality attached to any of the ancillary bodies. Also, the most conservative, revanchist part of Mianaai's mind accuses the most liberal, reformist part of being sabotaged by aliens. On my first read I thought this was true, but this time I think it's a lie, a self-delusion, and an excuse that justifies the killings she orders in her attempts to roll back the reforms. In the next book, I think that all of Mianaai will have learned the truth about the split within herself, and her internal conflict will probably erupt into a civil war across the Radch. 

The West Passage

 
 
The West Passage

by Jared Pechacek

Tor

2024

 

 

The West Passage is a very weird, very medieval fantasy novel. Jared Pechacek has written something bizarre and fascinating, and I'd recommend it to almost anyone who likes adventure stories. Our viewpoint characters are a pair of young people, entrusted with adult responsibility to soon, who are sent on different errands following the death of the old Guardian of the West Passage. To these two, the palace is their whole world, but they've never really seen it before, except for their own little section. As they travel, the see the sights, meet people, learn history, and accidentally become involved in the machinations of the palace rulers, and as they do, we learn things too. Almost all the worldbuilding in the book is accomplished via sight-seeing, which allows the palace and its utter strangeness to emerge at a manageable pace.

 

As a book, The West Passage is structured and decorated like a much older story. It's divided into eight parts and many chapters. Each part is named for the primary character we're following and has an illustrated frontispiece that depicts part of the palace or one of its Ladies; each chapter has a title that lists the events that will happen during it and has an illustrated header showing some characters or a scene. Pechacek's illustrations look a lot like the art from medieval illuminated manuscripts, especially the weird little guys that show up in the doodles monks used to draw in the margins of their very serious books. These illustrations are one of first clues we get to the strangeness of the world. Yes, the Ladies really are as tall as towers; yes, they have too many limbs; yes, one has the head of a bird, another has a stone building for a head. Yes, some people have spines, others rabbit ears, others various animal parts.
 
The world of West Passage is medieval in other ways as well. Not just because it's set entirely inside a city-sized palace, or because its godlike rulers are called Ladies, or because of the style of clothes or level of technology, although all those things are indeed like the Middle Ages. But what truly feels pre-modern is the crushing, stultifying weight of history and tradition, that bears down on everything, smothers everything. The palace was founded during the Rose Age, which lasted hundreds of years, as did each subsequent dynasty, for over a millennium, each Age ended by the appearance of the Beast.

Every task is performed by a guild, and adults have a Name, a title that's determined by the office the hold. (Even their adult gender is determined by their Name; a more strict and severe version of the sort of rule that made Christina the king of Sweden, rather than its queen. The palace is matriarchal, so most Names are women's.) Every little task throughout the day is performed according to tradition, there are songs and litanies to help remember them all. Certain offices receive wine or honey or other gifts from the Ladies, rewards for the deeds of office-holders generations ago. There is, seemingly, no room for self or individuality, only duty and tradition, only doing the same things as they've always been done.
 
At the start of the book, the Guardian dies, and the Women in Grey perform her funeral. We follow Pell and Kew. Pell is an apprentice to the women, who will become Yarrow, the mother of the women, when the old mother dies. Kew is the sole apprentice guardian, who wants to become the next Hawthorne now that his master is dead, but cannot, because she died without elevating him, and because old Yarrow refuses. Grey House is severely depopulated, nearly empty; the farms and villages of Grey are nearly as sparse. For generations now, there have been no doctors or tutors, for example, because the last ones died with no replacement, their tasks simply never performed again. It's a place of loss, a place that seems almost dead. All of this is contained within the palace - the gardens and orchards are courtyards, all the housing and other structures built within the circumscribing walls.
 
Kew sets off to warn Black Tower that the Beast is rising again, and to ask for his adult Name. Soon Pell will become Yarrow and set off to petition Black too, to tell them that an early winter sits over Grey, freezing their crops and risking starvation, to beg them to turn the Great Wheel that controls the seasons, and bring back the spring and summer they're owed. The simplicity of their quests, and the obvious, understandable urgency of their needs help to ground the book in reality. The palace may be a place where building-sized Ladies exude holiness that compels worship and obedience, where a lost panacea of human flesh in honey can cure any wound, where lanterns filled with liquid light travel overhead on rails, propelled by gears and the sound of whistling - it is still also a place where people grow weak and feel pain from hunger, where they faint from lack of water on long walks, where they need chamberpots because there's no plumbing.
 
A pivotal scene for me involved seeing one of the kitchens of Black Tower, seeing how much wealth could be concentrated in one place, how much waste that entails, and how that must be the cause of privation elsewhere. Pell and Kew aren't unusual within the palace for being devoted to their duty, even for risking their lives for it. But they are unusual for being kind, for being willing to defer their missions to be nice to someone else, rather than pointing to tradition as an excuse to enjoy being cruel. The pair's quests send them across the palace where they intersect with revolutionary changes afoot at the end of the Age. But Pell and Kew each change the palace, change the world, not by siding with one coup or usurpation over another, but by showing human kindness to someone in need. From those small seeds, world-changing consequences bloom.
 

The West Passage is one of the most D&D-like fantasy books I've read. The palace is like a megadungeon, complete with color-coded regions, and aside from the four great Passages between levels, it can only be navigated like a maze, detouring around locked doors and crumbled ceilings, cutting through abandoned and repurposed rooms and hallways. We learn the history of the palace much as D&D players do, finding paintings and murals, hearing several versions of the same stories, trying to piece together the truth in the overlap. The people have unusual bodies, obsessive interests, and eccentric mannerisms. Much of the magic in the place resides in ancient items whose original purpose is now obscure, like the legless automaton who walks on his hands and carries deliveries on the platform of his back. More than anything else they do, Pell and Kew explore and learn, and eventually get the chance to exercise a bit of outsized agency by being in the right place during unsettled times and making educated, unexpected actions that defy tradition. I don't mean to suggest that this is a good book because it reminds me of D&D, but it is a very good book, and also, it reminds me of D&D.

A Half-Built Garden

 
 
A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

Tor

2022

 

 

A Half-Built Garden is a recent scifi novel that, like the Star Trek film First Contact, imagines an encounter between near-future humans living after the apocalyptic collapse of our contemporary civilization, and a far-future, multi-species, apparently-utopian alien society.
 
Ruthanna Emrys imagines an Earth ravaged by greenhouse heat and extreme weather, primarily governed by a new form of human network - the Watersheds, technologically-enhanced direct democracies organized around protecting and rehabilitating regional water sources. The aliens, known as Ringers, are two species from neighboring planets who've formed a joint society they call Symbiosis, located on habitats forming a Dyson swarm around their star that's lasted a millennium so far. The Rings are home to 5 trillion alien people, and they want us to leave Earth before it's too late and we go extinct. But the Watersheds have done so much good work to repair the world; they're not eager to abandon it.
 

Garden is narrated by Judy, who by chance becomes humanity's first and primary representative to the Ringers. In the Watersheds, gender is a matter of personal choice. Most people identify with their birth gender - but kids are usually raises as nonbinary until they can express a preference, and trans health is as advanced and comprehensive as anyone else's. Judy has a trans wife and a newborn they both breastfeed. They live and co-parent with another couple (a recently transitioned trans guy and his wife) who have a toddler. Judy is on call for unusual sensor readings the night the aliens arrive, and brings her infant with her to investigate. Throughout the book, Judy breastfeeds in a rhythm that matches her child's needs, at times that are often inconvenient to the circumstances. But the Rings are matriarchal, and all diplomatic relations are conducted between nursing mothers, whose kids are present to keep both sides on their best behavior. So by accident, Judy makes a good first impression and becomes the Ringer's chosen human ambassador.
 
The Rings are home to two species. The first are green and look like pill bugs or anklyosaurs. The leader of the delegation, Cytosine, is from this group, as are half her crew / family. Her cross-species brother, Rhamentin, is from the second group, are red and furry and ten-legged, with no heads, but eyes and mouths on their knee joints. The Rings have encountered radio signals from three other industrial species, but always arrived too late, after they'd driven themselves extinct. They're thrilled to find humans alive, and also feel like 'saving' us by evacuating the planet is urgent.
 
The Watersheds use a network that's like 50% Reddit - with users' comments and votes weighted by their expertise in the subject at hand, allowing for quick and informed democratic / consensus decisions - and like 50% Internet of Things - with the natural world covered in sensors for environmental monitoring, and all manufactured objects tagged so their supply chain and carbon footprint can be tracked and minimized. The network algorithms are also supposed to give weight to values that the Watersheds agree on, but might not always act on without automated reminders. In addition there's vestigial nation states, whose governments don't seem to do much or have much power, and the remaining corporations.
 
What are called corporations in Garden's time are like, the descendants of the old billionaires and their entourages who fled to private, artificial islands when society collapsed. They do still manufacture some goods, and plot to get capitalism up and running again, but they're more like aristocratic estates than like companies of today.
 
Eventually we learn that for corporate citizens, one's actual gender identity is a wholly private matter. Gender as it is performed in public is truly a performance, a move in a status game meant to advance one's rank. They have six binary genders - prince and princess to demonstrate wealth, butch and femme for romance and seduction, and obre and tania (I'd guess named for Oberon and Titania) for asserting power and dominance. They have one nonbinary gender for people not adopting any of those roles, and another used to talk about a person whose current public gender is unknown. Like in the Watersheds, corporate citizens seem to use polycules for child-rearing, but only people at a certain level in the hierarchy are allowed to form households and have children.
 

Garden is as much about the future of gender and sexuality as it is about the future of political and economic organization, with the Watersheds resembling the success of leftist, communitarian ideals, and the corporations looking more libertarian, with self as private, public life as competition, diversity without equality, culture as costume. The Ringers believe in female power, and don't really think about gender separately from biological sex until they encounter the idea on Earth. Cytosine is annoyed that Judy won't tell her exactly who birthed her family's two children, and is scandalized when another Ringer picks up a they/them pronoun badge at the neighborhood party.
 
So, the Ringers arrive and make their offer to 'rescue' humanity, and are kind of shocked when Judy and her Watershed are less than enthusiastic. But what I like about Judy as a character is that she wants to find common ground and cooperate, not to 'win.' She also fully believes in networked decision-making, and is extremely reluctant to elevate herself or trust her sole judgment.
 
Unfortunately for her, the network crashes very early on, and remains in partial disrepair thereafter. The Watersheds suspect corporate sabotage, while the corporations suggest they should buy better equipment. The ways the network struggles closely mirror contemporary problems with social media. Like Arkady Martine did in A Memory Called Empire, Emrys makes the curious decision to introduce us to a character who starts the book with other voices in her head, then, before the reader has really had a chance to understand that, suddenly deprives the character of their internal support and forces her to become more of an individual - and sets us up to spend the rest of the book dealing with that loss.
 
After their initial meeting the Ringers visit Judy's house and neighborhood. NASA shows up to represent the US, and representatives from the corporations show up too. Cytosine wants to build an antenna to call for backup. There's a diplomatic mission to one of the corporate artificial islands. The antenna is built. A hurricane strikes. Passover is celebrated. All throughout, the characters wrestle with each others' philosophies, and with how to persuade people who have competing material interests to find a way to compromise instead of seizing everything they want. The beginning is a bit awkward somehow, but things really get cooking when we visit the corporate island, and Emrys keeps ratcheting up the social tension until we finally reach a resolution at the end. A lot of this book is characters talking in increasingly interesting locations. There's not just conflict, but also surprising alliances, friendships, even romance.
 

A Half-Built Garden was recommended to me by a friend at Underground Books, and I'm happy to recommend it in turn.

Raven Girl

 
 
Raven Girl

by Audrey Niffenegger

Harry N Abrams

2013

 

 

Although she's best known for The Time Traveler's Wife, most of Audrey Niffenegger's books are more like Raven Girl - shorter illustrated books, that tell strange fairytale-like stories, blending hope and sadness, supernatural romance with realistic concerns.
 
Raven Girl is about the daughter of a postman and a raven who fell in love. She's born from an egg and has hollow bones, but otherwise looks human. She can read and write, but can't speak, and she longs to fly, she feels there's an innate wrongness with her body because she can't.
 
The raven girl grows up and goes to college. She catches the attention of a boy - I wouldn't go so far as to say she actually meets him, at least not for awhile - who has a crush on her from afar, who thinks he knows what's best for her, and who, like so many boys, is willing to commit acts of violence that he tells himself are for her benefit, although I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
At college, the raven girl also meets a biology professor, a plastic surgeon who performs rather outré surgeries for people who want them. He listens when she tells her about her body dysmorphia, and he's willing to try to replace her arms with giant raven wings if she thinks that will reduce her discomfort in her own skin, although he warns her, they might not be fully functional, and she might never fly.
 
Yes, that means Raven Girl is kind of a fantastical transgender allegory - something I had no idea of when I picked it up, solely on the basis of the author's other works and the cover art - and a shockingly good one at that.
 
Often, when scifi or fantasy stories include trans-like characters, they can use technology or magic to fully and completely become a cis-gender person in a way that avoids the way that real-world bodily changes are slow, partial, incomplete, painful, the way that you can change your body's future but not its past, that you can become a palimpsest but never a blank page. The surgical intervention in Raven Girl is much more like reality than it is like magic.
 
I'm also usually very hesitant about metaphors that relate being transgender to feeling like another animal species. I think these comparisons are often made in bad faith, and are used to belittle the transgender experience by making it sound akin to young children being unable to distinguish their imaginative dress-up play from adult decision-making. (The kids' book Fox the Tiger for example, reads to me like it's trying to convince trans kids that it's okay to play at being another gender as a game, but that after the costumes come off, Fox will always still be a fox and will never really be a tiger.)
 
I worry that even good-faith animal metaphors might be written from a place of ignorance, or might be too easily taken up and re-used in bad faith. But again, Raven Girl is thoughtful an emotionally realistic in a way that lets its metaphor capture something real.
 
So - the raven girl sets to work with the surgeon. The boy who likes her from afar tries to stop her, because he refuses to distinguish what he wants for her and what she wants for herself, and he manages to cause some harm. The raven girl's parents are surprised, but still love and accept her. And other ravens, now that her wings help them to see what's inside her, accept her too.

I'm very impressed with what Niffenegger has managed to create here!