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Apr. 12th, 2015 10:10 amSo Ramez Naam does this thing in his novel Nexus where he genderflips the roles of his protagonists. The male protag is physically weak, emotionally available, a scientist. The female protag is strong, emotionally repressed, a law enforcement officer. This is, these days, pretty common.
A few comments about Naam's implementation:
1)The female protag, as befits the strong silent law enforcement officer, has dark secrets in her past, a female loved one whose death created repressed memories that inspire her. This is better than when it's done for a male protag, but women in refrigerators are still obnoxious when they're done for the sake of a female protagonist's pain.
2)There's a complaint I saw about Jupiter Ascending, I don't remember where, that whereas in the Matrix, Neo started out not knowing anything and he gets a crowning moment of fighting badassery at the end of the film, in the climax of Jupiter Ascending cedes that moment from Jupiter to Caine.
There comes a time in Nexus where you think Kade is going to pull a Neo and turn on his magic fighting powers... It's been set up all book that this will happen, he literally has a computer program in his head that makes him fight like Bruce Lee, so it wouldn't have been bad writing in a technical sense, just a reinforcement of a misogynistic trope. But instead, Kade tries to pull a Neo and it fails because even though he has the muscle memory of Bruce Lee, he doesn't have the weight or strength or power of Bruce Lee, and therefore Samantha needs to save him. It's awesome.
Otherwise, I felt that Nexus was a really fun novel with a rather anticlimactic conclusion. The novel's turning point is a choice Kade makes that he could literally have made anywhere in the novel, from page 1, to page 450, and the events that followed it in the narrative would have been the same. So the novel is about how Kade gets to the emotional place where he can make the choice that he does. The moment where it does happen felt reasonably earned, but not any more earned than about five other moments in the novel where it could have happened, and everything after the choice is kind of narratively unsatisfying. But I still enjoyed the book, overall.
Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings, now, I have a lot of thoughts about. I want to say first of all that I was wrong when I said that there was only one named female character in the first hundred pages. There were many named female characters in the first hundred pages, Liu just didn't mention them. Once we get to that 300 page mark that Kat Howard mentioned, the other shoe drops. Liu's narration reveals, slowly and cleverly, that of course female characters were influencing the story in the first 300 pages. Of course there were female characters everywhere, and of course they mattered, and yet somehow the male characters and the narration were able to pretend that they weren't.
I'm still not convinced this was the best approach for a male author to take in a fantasy epic. There's a whole Poe's Law-adjacent thing about how if you try to write a subversive narrative by making your writing fully epitomize the trope you're about to subvert, you run the risk of making it look just like the thing you're trying to subvert. For a significant chunk of The Grace of Kings, the book looks like a typically sexist fantasy epic, and like I said in my previous comment, that means it feels kind of empty because there need to be female characters for the story to make sense.
But Liu's recovery from this problematic start is astonishing. The female characters he tells stories about in the latter part of the book, beginning with Princess Kikomi (man, Princess Kikomi's narrative = all the feels), are given incredibly interesting and complicated and meaningful choices until the book revolves around them just as much as it revolves around the ostensible main characters, Kuni and Mata. Jia and Mira and Risana and Gin and Soto are extraordinary characters, and Liu's amazing storytelling style lets him bring them in not merely as new characters, intersecting the quest, but as characters who were actually there all along, moving events forward even as Kuni and Mata and the many other male characters thought they were shaping history by themselves.
But having said all that in mitigation of my initial complaint, what's most extraordinary about The Grace of Kings is the way Liu uses pacing as a storytelling device. I kept recalling the Kim Stanley Robinson lecture I attended at this past Worldcon about how expository writing is a device that speculative fiction has developed as a tool for manipulating the pace of fiction. The Grace of Kings is one of the best, if not the best, examples I've ever seen of the power of those techniques. Liu moves backward and forward in time to tell the backstories and side stories of characters who intersect the narrative. He speeds up, skipping months or years at a time at will, trusting that when events from the skipped time become necessary, he can quickly bring the reader up to speed with a few well-placed words. I have never read a book that does these things quite like Liu does, and the closest comparison I would make to this novel is not to A Song of Ice and Fire, as the marketing copy has tried, but to the Iliad. I cannot recall ever reading a contemporary fantasy novel that so merited a comparison to Homer, in its epic sweep, majestic poetry, and comprehension of human motivation and aspiration. The sheer number of interesting characters in The Grace of Kings is mesmerizing and intoxicating. The emotional journeys Liu gives to them are astonishingly cathartic.
Liu's literary palette is also sweepingly broad. I caught quotations from Milton and allusions to Shakespeare, alongside a variety of quotes and pastiches of classical Chinese poetry. And as much as there are deep and crucial references and inspirations from the Homeric epics and early European epics, I gather the book is much more closely inspired by Chinese epics like the Romance of the Three Kings, which I am sadly not familiar with. Despite this dense and complicated East/West mashup, nothing feels out of place. A strange word that nonetheless feels right for The Grace of Kings, a word I'm not sure I have ever applied to a novel before, is 'harmonious'. It is a noisy, messy, morally complicated book with an uncertain ending, and yet everything is in the right place, making the right sound to build the narrative Liu was trying to build.
READ THIS BOOK
A few comments about Naam's implementation:
1)The female protag, as befits the strong silent law enforcement officer, has dark secrets in her past, a female loved one whose death created repressed memories that inspire her. This is better than when it's done for a male protag, but women in refrigerators are still obnoxious when they're done for the sake of a female protagonist's pain.
2)There's a complaint I saw about Jupiter Ascending, I don't remember where, that whereas in the Matrix, Neo started out not knowing anything and he gets a crowning moment of fighting badassery at the end of the film, in the climax of Jupiter Ascending cedes that moment from Jupiter to Caine.
There comes a time in Nexus where you think Kade is going to pull a Neo and turn on his magic fighting powers... It's been set up all book that this will happen, he literally has a computer program in his head that makes him fight like Bruce Lee, so it wouldn't have been bad writing in a technical sense, just a reinforcement of a misogynistic trope. But instead, Kade tries to pull a Neo and it fails because even though he has the muscle memory of Bruce Lee, he doesn't have the weight or strength or power of Bruce Lee, and therefore Samantha needs to save him. It's awesome.
Otherwise, I felt that Nexus was a really fun novel with a rather anticlimactic conclusion. The novel's turning point is a choice Kade makes that he could literally have made anywhere in the novel, from page 1, to page 450, and the events that followed it in the narrative would have been the same. So the novel is about how Kade gets to the emotional place where he can make the choice that he does. The moment where it does happen felt reasonably earned, but not any more earned than about five other moments in the novel where it could have happened, and everything after the choice is kind of narratively unsatisfying. But I still enjoyed the book, overall.
Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings, now, I have a lot of thoughts about. I want to say first of all that I was wrong when I said that there was only one named female character in the first hundred pages. There were many named female characters in the first hundred pages, Liu just didn't mention them. Once we get to that 300 page mark that Kat Howard mentioned, the other shoe drops. Liu's narration reveals, slowly and cleverly, that of course female characters were influencing the story in the first 300 pages. Of course there were female characters everywhere, and of course they mattered, and yet somehow the male characters and the narration were able to pretend that they weren't.
I'm still not convinced this was the best approach for a male author to take in a fantasy epic. There's a whole Poe's Law-adjacent thing about how if you try to write a subversive narrative by making your writing fully epitomize the trope you're about to subvert, you run the risk of making it look just like the thing you're trying to subvert. For a significant chunk of The Grace of Kings, the book looks like a typically sexist fantasy epic, and like I said in my previous comment, that means it feels kind of empty because there need to be female characters for the story to make sense.
But Liu's recovery from this problematic start is astonishing. The female characters he tells stories about in the latter part of the book, beginning with Princess Kikomi (man, Princess Kikomi's narrative = all the feels), are given incredibly interesting and complicated and meaningful choices until the book revolves around them just as much as it revolves around the ostensible main characters, Kuni and Mata. Jia and Mira and Risana and Gin and Soto are extraordinary characters, and Liu's amazing storytelling style lets him bring them in not merely as new characters, intersecting the quest, but as characters who were actually there all along, moving events forward even as Kuni and Mata and the many other male characters thought they were shaping history by themselves.
But having said all that in mitigation of my initial complaint, what's most extraordinary about The Grace of Kings is the way Liu uses pacing as a storytelling device. I kept recalling the Kim Stanley Robinson lecture I attended at this past Worldcon about how expository writing is a device that speculative fiction has developed as a tool for manipulating the pace of fiction. The Grace of Kings is one of the best, if not the best, examples I've ever seen of the power of those techniques. Liu moves backward and forward in time to tell the backstories and side stories of characters who intersect the narrative. He speeds up, skipping months or years at a time at will, trusting that when events from the skipped time become necessary, he can quickly bring the reader up to speed with a few well-placed words. I have never read a book that does these things quite like Liu does, and the closest comparison I would make to this novel is not to A Song of Ice and Fire, as the marketing copy has tried, but to the Iliad. I cannot recall ever reading a contemporary fantasy novel that so merited a comparison to Homer, in its epic sweep, majestic poetry, and comprehension of human motivation and aspiration. The sheer number of interesting characters in The Grace of Kings is mesmerizing and intoxicating. The emotional journeys Liu gives to them are astonishingly cathartic.
Liu's literary palette is also sweepingly broad. I caught quotations from Milton and allusions to Shakespeare, alongside a variety of quotes and pastiches of classical Chinese poetry. And as much as there are deep and crucial references and inspirations from the Homeric epics and early European epics, I gather the book is much more closely inspired by Chinese epics like the Romance of the Three Kings, which I am sadly not familiar with. Despite this dense and complicated East/West mashup, nothing feels out of place. A strange word that nonetheless feels right for The Grace of Kings, a word I'm not sure I have ever applied to a novel before, is 'harmonious'. It is a noisy, messy, morally complicated book with an uncertain ending, and yet everything is in the right place, making the right sound to build the narrative Liu was trying to build.
READ THIS BOOK