You Should Read This: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy

This year I’ve been reading for the Andre Norton Award, which has been great in that a ton of books have arrived and insane in that a TON of books have arrived and need to be read. I wanted to call out some of my favorites so far.

• The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black: Vampires, yes. But an interesting twist on them, and a protagonist who drags us along to Coldtown to find its secrets.
• The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea M. Campbell: This is listed as Jan 2014 for the paperback edition, but I believe the e-version was self-published in 2013. It’s a terrific teen superhero adventure, featuring a protagonist trying to figure out if he’s a hero or a villain. IT has a sequel as well, The Trials of Renegade X.
• Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst: I don’t usually like protagonists who wake up with amnesia, but here Eve and her situation grabbed me and made me care much faster than such narratives usually do. The book managed to surprise me, and did so in a really engaging way.
• Contanimated by Em Garner: This is a zombie story, so I didn’t expect to like it much. But the zombies are caused by a diet drink, and the challenge is integrating the contaminated into society. When that contaminated is your mother, it’s a whole new issue. The ending is not as satisfying as it could be – things feel a bit too easy — but overall this was a gripping, hard to put down book.
• Control by Lydia Kang: Plenty of corporate-controlled futures in the YA I read this year, and this was one of the more interesting ones. The ensemble of teen characters are engaging, entertaining, and above all believable.
• The Color of Rain by Cori McCarthy: This features a fairly adult theme, in that the protagonist prostitutes herself to get herself and her brother off planet. But the sex is fairly low-key and not depicted in the thorough way it might be for adults. It’s a good story with a charismatic main character in desperate straits.
• Twinmaker by Sean Williams: This book is an extended exploration of the implications of matter transporters. It’s a lot of fun, fast-paced, and ingenious.

#sfwapro

So I read a book recently and I loved some parts of it and other parts…not so much. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since because there was one part of it I just adored but I don’t feel like I could tell anyone to read the book without a big “hey and you should watch out for this” addendum. I’d bounced off a previous book by this author with what was supposed to be grimdark but had a big ol’ weirdly ungrimdark gendered cliché early on that made me think so hard about it that I couldn’t pay attention to the rest of the book, so I was already a little cautious, yet optimistic because I knew the author to be a good writer.

I’ve talked before about reading when the protagonist is markedly not you, and how used to it women — and other members of the vast majority the mainstream media calls Other — become. And this was a good example of a very young, very male, very heterosexual book. Which God knows I’m not opposed to. I remain a huge fan of the Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir Destroyer series and Doc Savage was a big influence on me, growing up.

So why did this book hit me so hard in an unhappy place? Because it was so smart and funny and beautifully written and involved connected stories about a favorite city and magic, which are three of my favorite things. And because it had a chapter that was one of the best short stories about addiction that I’ve read, and that left me thinking about it in a way that will probably shape at least one future story.

And yet. And yet. And yet. Women were either powerful and unfuckable for one reason or another or else fell into the category marked “women the protagonist sleeps with”, who usually didn’t even get a name. Moments of homophobic rape humor, marked by a repeated insistence on the sanctity of the hero’s anus, and a scene in which he embraces being thought gay in order to save himself from a terrible fate, ha ha, isn’t that amusing. And I’m like…jesus, there is so much to love about this book but it’s like the author reaches out and slaps me away once a chapter or so.

Why? Because representation matters. At one point or another a writer needs to look at representation in their book, try to perceive what it is saying to readers, and make a choice about that. Authors may choose to offend or shock, sometimes in the name of social change, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Or they may do so by pushing up against the boundaries of art, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The list of books challenged for one reason or another is long and full of wonderful writers. But — in my opinion — stirring the shit isn’t a good reason.

Books shouldn’t be banned. Books should be discussed, argued about, and used to learn and advance. Certainly there are books to exist to offend and use it as a marketing technique. This is not a new phenomenon, and it’s something that some authors use to good financial effect, like the authors who promise not just that the reader will find themselves in the book but that by some strange alchemy they are sticking pins in SJW voodoo dolls and then something about salty tears blah blah blah. It’s interesting that in such cases, reading is unnecessary – it’s the act of financial consumption that matters, and whether or not one tweets to signal one’s virtue.

Those are border cases, though. Most books just want people to read them and prefer to entertain over outrage. I’m about 95% sure the book that provoked this piece wasn’t intended to be edgy in its reinforcement of 1960s upper-middle-class American gender norms. It’s simply its take, a particular point of view that is not universally inherently tiresome except that it’s been a facet of the mainstream narrative for so long.

With the development of indie publishing, perhaps we’ll see a continued splintering of that narrative as well as a move to look backward in order to find the neglected, hidden, alternate texts that show an alternative viewpoint. As more and more readers look for the works that reflect their lives or at least don’t use their experiences for derogatory humor, those works emerge: G. Willow Wilson’s version of Ms. Marvel as an American Muslim teen, Charles Saunders or Steven Barnes‘ reimagining of traditional stories, Octavia Butler’s deeply uncomfortable and compelling Kindred, Yoss’s vision of a Spanglish-speaking universe. And more: stories that feature protagonists who are mentally ill, outside traditional body norms, or outside the narrow straight/cis arc of the gender spectrum. Here’s hoping, at least, for more and different lands in which we can all find ourselves.