Meta on Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit
Sep. 21st, 2023 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI’ve been conflicted about posting this because I’m aware it’s harsh, and it violates the Buddhist instinct I’m trying to cultivate to not use my words negatively. I guess you could say I’m having a battle between my internal Vash and my internal Knives, where my internal Vash says, “Leave the poor woman alone. She’s put a lot of work into writing a book reflecting good social values,” and my internal Knives says, “But there are injustices here that need to be exposed.” And I’m compromising by locking this post, which feels like a lose/lose: still negative and not circulating real points I’d like to put out into the world. Ah well.
Everina Maxwell’s far-future, m/m romantic science fiction novel, Winter’s Orbit, is, I think, trying to “give the people what they want.” It seems to have succeeded in that it has been well received, but I wanted to like it more than I did. (This is my typical response to 95% of recent SF, as I’ve mentioned before, so put much of this down to taste.) Some aspects of this book I really do like. Early on, I thought I might even become a fan. For reference, I don’t think I’ve really fanned over a new (to me) book since 2017, so that’s a high compliment. But I think as a work cultural fiction it fails, and the characters and romance ultimately suffer as a result. Massive spoilers lie ahead and warnings for discussion of abuse
Brief Summary
In a far-future, galactic empire, sociable and high-spirited prince Kiem is put in an arranged marriage with taciturn and serious Count Jainan, whose previous (arranged) husband, Kiem’s countryman Taam, has died in an accident, which ends up being murder. Throughout the book, the two uncover a plot to sabotage an important, upcoming treaty renewal in order to launch a war for more territory/power. Meanwhile, we learn that Taam (part of that plot) abused Jainan during their five years together, and as Jainan and Kiem work through all this, they fall in love and emerged as a happy couple, having foiled the plot and been rewarded in a rather Bildungsroman-like way.
What Worked for Me
This story engages in detail with what it’s like to survive an abusive relationship, and a lot of its beats feel painfully real: the gaslighting, the loss of trust in oneself, the internalized self-blame for any conflict, the constant walking on eggshells, the headaches. Early on, there are quite a few bits that effectively tugged my heartstrings where Jainan and Kiem badly miscommunicate because Jainan is convinced everything he does is wrong and that Kiem is angry when Kiem is not.
For my taste, the political intrigue, which occupies much of the page count, is plausible and well developed, with good setup and payoff. This is not a type of storytelling that I’m especially interested in and is not an area where I’m astute, so others’ mileage may vary, but it seemed very competently handled to me (except for the villain delivering the “here is my villainous plan” speech near the climax, which felt clunky).
The story also has an interesting concept around gender, which is that everyone chooses their gender and identifies it (in Kiem’s society) by the kind of jewelry they wear: wood for men, metal for women, no adornment for non-binary people. Jainan’s people appear to do exactly the same thing but with different markers, mainly dress, more as in our society. Physical sex seems utterly socially irrelevant, which the book drives home by scrupulously avoiding any mention of anyone’s physical sexual characteristics (except, I think there’s one walk-on woman was a low, gravelly voice). I say I like this because it’s different and a good brain tease. However, I also think this is one key area where the worldbuilding fails and takes some casualties with it...
Gender Didacticism over Worldbuilding
I feel like this story is prioritizing a didactic point about how our world should view gender over its own worldbuilding at the cost of a rich and plausible SF universe. (In so doing, it seems in keeping with the Zeitgeist, as I’ve written about elsewhere.)
It feels to me like the lack of any physical sexual description is a sort of “gotcha” designed to make the reader question their own gender expectations. Are Kiem and Jainain (two men by gender) physically men? women? a man and woman? Is their whole population physically androgynous? We don’t know—and the point seems to be it shouldn’t matter. Get it? People should be able to freely choose their gender and all be treated equally.
As etiquette for our current social moment on Earth, sure. But as a broader sociocultural observation, physical sex does matter, even explicitly within Maxwell’s book. Kiem and Jainan are sexually attracted to each other. Jainan even has a (slightly divergent from the worldbuilding?) thought that Kiem has had both male and female partners, which in the context of pondering if someone wants to sleep with him, does seem a statement about bodies. Otherwise, why is it worth noting at all? As long as physical sexual attraction is a thing, physical sexual appearance will matter. And I will put forward that, unless the population is all one sex (ex. androgynous), any culture will have norms around navigating physical sex difference. That this culture seems not to—that it seems not to notice bodies, except when already in bed—is not plausible, unless we are meant to read everyone as physically androgynous.
And that could work, but if it’s the intent, I think it’s a failure in worldbuilding responsibility not to tell us. For one thing, this is a romance, and it has (soft) sex scenes. A story that is inviting the reader to care about the sexual love of the two leads has some responsibility, I think, to give the reader some sort of picture of this couple. That the whole book goes by without my being able to form any mental image of them in bed feels odd and distancing.
One could say, well, but the reader is invited to form whatever image they want of our leads. Okay. But that still leaves giant gaps in the worldbuilding. Like how does childbearing work? The text is explicit and tantalizing that it’s not like us. Parents, of course, can have any gender marker, but children can also have DNA from several different parents. Intriguing! How does that work? The book never says. Does pregnancy exist at all? Are people grown in bottles? Either? Can physical men get pregnant? Is there any chance that either Kiem or Jainan will (someday) get pregnant in their relationship? None of this is touched on, and it makes for a very shallow surface scrape at how this society addresses all the issues related to human physical sexuality and reproduction.
Finally, I feel this construct around gender does not make internal sense. On the one hand, this society seems to have no gender roles. Any gender can be in any job, with equal respect, treated exactly the same way. (All titles are masculine, which is interesting—and unexplained: ex. a female child of a monarch is a “prince.”) Yet which gender one identifies as is so important that a whole system of signification is built around it and everyone follows it with dogged sense that doing so is vital to everyday respect.
Why? Why would a society with effectively no gender roles have these rigid gender markers? Why isn’t everyone “they,” for example, if it matters so very little? Or if this society inherited “he/she” from a more gender binary past, why isn’t it sufficient in most cases to just use “he/she” based on physical appearance (since it makes no difference to how people are treated) with a minority who identify themselves as something else (a bit as we do today)?
Since this is a far-future, interstellar world, trans people could certainly change physical sex if they wanted (totally or partially, hormonally, etc.). (I’m assuming now the population is not all androgynous.) Thus, it seems almost the only people who wouldn’t be “accurately” represented by “he/she” based on their physical characteristics would be those who feel non-binary. And in a society that treats all genders exactly the same anyway, what does “non-binary” mean? It seems like it would (almost) only apply to people who want to occupy a physical/sexual middle ground, as everyone is already on the same footing socially. So wouldn’t that put (most) non-binary people in the same situation as (most) trans people, in wanting to physically alter their bodies to look/be more androgynous? And if so, why wouldn’t this be largely physically evident? Why would it be indicated by no jewelry?
Or even it that were helpful (different sexes with clothes on can look quite similar, especially in a middle ground), what is it helpful for? Because the only place I can see it mattering is sex/dating and only for people who are physically sexually ambiguous, if clothed. That could be interesting, but it’s not pursued.
Finally, how did this evolve? What history is it a response to? What question is it answering (in-universe)?
Basically, it’s incoherent. It’s undercooked, underthought. And that’s a real missed opportunity to do some genuine, imaginative probing into how sex and gender work, with implications for how we can better understand them in real life.
A Shallow Look at Abuse
I feel similarly that the book’s discourse around abuse is overly simplistic. As I noted above, in some ways it’s excellent, so bitingly real that it makes me guess the author or someone close to her has experienced abuse and/or that she’s worked with this population extensively.
It’s less real on the level of whole characters. (This is partly down to taste.) This is a story about black hats and white hats. There are a few morally gray characters, but they’re all tertiary politicians, diplomats, etc. Maxwell conveys them well as jaded civil servants doing their best, but they’re not intended to be a focus. The focal characters are all either good (Kiem; Jainan; Kiem’s aide, Bel; etc.) or bad (Taam and the main villain I won’t spoil). Taam has a couple shades of not wholly horrible: a mention of regret, an “are you okay?” but he’s very, very dark gray at best—and not in an interesting, anti-hero way; in a clueless, immature bully way. So as to the abusive relationship between Jainan and Taam, it’s bad abuser vs. good victim, and I think this is both unrealistic and potentially damaging to real-world work to address abuse.
Lots of people commit abuse (sadly), and everything I know about human nature says that most of them are not as one-note as Taam. Indeed, one of the things that often makes domestic abuse so traumatic is the push-and-pull between hateful and loving behavior, not just being badly, repeatedly harmed but being badly repeatedly harmed by someone who is also loving and you may, in fact, love.* I’m not saying Taam and Jainan have to have that kind of relationship, but, boy, is the relationship they have simplistic for five years of marriage.
(*Side bar: One of the best representations of living in a badly abusive relationship I’ve ever seen is in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Spoilers follow: in this case, Laura’s father is literally possessed by an evil spirit, but the effect is much the same as having a badly abusive parent who has another side is a normal, caring dad, and never knowing which you’re going to get. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in seeing this sort of thing represented painfully well, go watch it.)
For his part, Jainan is a bit of a “perfect victim.” He’s kind, moral, responsible, smart, non-confrontational, forgiving, and rarely (consciously) angry. As a result, he essentially never does anything really objectionable. The acts he’s blamed for are virtually all ridiculous overreactions and evasions of responsibility by Taam. The only exception—and most interesting part about Jainan—is some unclear communication patterns he has with Kiem, which do sometimes put a small wrench in their relationship, but this is minor and always well intentioned.
Because Jainan is never objectionable, he’s always safe to sympathize with as the victim. The trouble with this is that it’s not a good representation of real life. In real life, people are sometimes unpleasant; we sometimes do things that harm others (a lot or a little), and that basic fact is as true of the abused as the abusers. (NB, these are often the same people in different relationships or at different points in their lives.) By implying that Jainan must be nigh perfect to be sympathetic, the story unfortunately somewhat validates Taam’s view, not of specifics about Jainan, but of the premise that a person who’s not always measuring up to “good” is, by default, “bad” and should lose our sympathy. Sadly, this view is epidemic in our society. It prevents abusers and the abused from getting help.
The paradigmatic literary example of the damage the “perfect victim” narrative can do is Lolita. (Spoilers follow.) The character of Lolita has borne decades of pop cultural representation as a child femme fatale, a preternaturally mature nymphette against whose seductions men are helpless. Lolita is a child who is sexually abused by her stepfather for years. Why has this been so hard to grok? Okay, partly because her abuser is the only POV character, but also because she’s not a perfect victim. She behaves like a real kid. She is seductive, emotionally closed off, and manipulative as hell because, like any kid in her situation, she wants to survive with minimal pain and punishment, and if she can get some stuff she wants along the way (like a trip to the zoo), great. Why would she not manipulate to get this? In short, she behaves like a real person, and because she behaves like a real person, not an angel, she is saddled with being the “bad girl.”
Characters like Jainan are part of the reason characters like Lolita get read the way they do, and why real human beings too often get read that way too.
On a purely in-universe level, I also don’t feel that Jainan’s behavior adds up. He’s internalized his own culpability for Taam’s abuse to an almost total degree, yet he first met Taam when he was 22, a grown man with all his formative years behind him. I find it hard to believe that a person with a solid, fairly healthy upbringing would fall so readily into being so utterly gaslit. I’m not saying five years with Taam wouldn’t badly mess him up, but I don’t think it would take away all sense of proportion. In moments, at least, I’d expect frank anger and indignation (at least internally), an agonized sense of “this isn’t fair.” So did Jainan come from an abusive family? That would explain his patterns. But there’s no indication he did. The one relative we see is his sister he gets along fine with. She’s older and maybe dominated him a bit, but she’s presented as a decent person. So where did he come from psychologically? I have no idea.
Kiem is also a little hard for me to figure out, but with him, it’s really more about my confusions about his culture...
A Shallow Look at Culture/Character (Sorta?)
Kiem and Taam are both from a society called Iskat, and it’s hard for me to figure it out. Certainly, societies can have very diverse members: there are people more or less like Kiem and Taam in American society. But I don’t feel given enough cultural background to fully get where their various responses are coming from. I’m going to try to figure it out:
Abuse seems a problem in Iskat society. I infer that from (a) Taam being obviously abusive and no one doing anything; (b) the undiscussed but probable idea that Taam was also abused, since he is such a stunted, wrathful person; (c) the currency of the word “abuse,” in the sense that our (very abusive) society uses it, and the immediate knee-jerk horror it arouses in the press, which suggests it’s a problem under fairly common discussion.
Yet Kiem seems both immediately aware of the concept of abuse and totally clueless about the idea it actually happens. He’s horrified when he learns of Taam’s abuse, which is rather late in the day, after missing a lot of signals. This could indicate that Kiem has just been very sheltered from abuse himself, which he might be as a prince. If his own family happens to be not abusive (and they don’t seem to be, though a bit weird), then others might just hide hard truths from him owing to his standing. So far, so good.
Kiem himself is an odd egg. He’s a paragon of virtue and seems to represent the text’s editorial stance on good values. That is to say, he never does anything coded as “wrong,” unless it be a slight misunderstanding or a bit of self-doubt/blame that actually feels a bit more like Jainan.
He was a rambunctious risk-taker as a kid, which he explains as acting out after one of his parents’ death from an illness. That’s all fine, as far as it goes; it just doesn’t go very far. Kiem’s remaining parent is a stern military mother he’s not close to. He has no siblings we know of, and though he has many friends, no one who seems intimately important in his life, except his aide, Bel, who hasn’t actually been with him very long. This suggests that the main support in his early life was the parent who died, and given that level of emotional importance, his lack to negative response (beyond some adolescent hijinks) feels... unlikely. I’d expect more psychological scarring: loneliness, isolation (emotional, though not social), a perhaps excessive desire to bond.
That could have created some interesting push-pull in his relationship with Jainan, who’s initially afraid to show anything other than decorum. But instead, we get Kiem as the model partner: caring, kind, and scrupulous about respecting the slightest hint of boundaries. If Jainan is a perfect victim, Kiem is a bit of a perfect savior, and neither feels really human in all the messy complexity of humanity.
To ramble back to culture, though, Kiem’s scrupulous care for boundaries also seems indicative of his culture. Iskat is a surveillance state: there are cameras, digital records of “online” conversation, a massive intelligence network, etc., as well as tabloid press. Kiem is, if anything, hypersensitive about (Jainan’s) privacy. I say hypersensitive not because I disagree with his views, like one shouldn’t read someone else’s mail, but because it all seems so dire to him. That fits with a surveillance state. Intense concern over privacy is a natural pushback against surveillance.
My difficulty is that I can’t tell if this is intentional worldbuilding or just an incidental (or “allegorical”?) reflection of our own society, which also has all these characteristics. I can’t tell because (a) no one actually talks about it, and (b) Kiem’s views are rarely situated as cultural (contextual, contingent); they are more naturalized as just universal “goods.”
It doesn’t help that Jainan’s society, Thea, is not much of a contrast. It’s smaller than Iskat and colonized by it, which pisses the Theans off. Fair enough. It also has clan affiliations that Thea lacks and different etiquette around disclosing one’s genetics, but why this matters or, indeed, exists is not really discussed, which makes it feel like window dressing. As I’ve mentioned, views of gender seem very similar, and day-to-day standards of behavior seem similar too: both societies are very hierarchical and managed by an inherited, aristocratic class that seems to have little to do with the common people. (The whole book actually has little to do with the common people.) Both societies are conventionally politicized. It doesn’t help that Jainan rarely thinks of Thea, no longer considers it his home, and shows next-to-no homesickness. There’s just not enough contrast between the societies or the main characters’ thoughts about them to throw either society into perspective and give much of a sense of what Maxwell was going for in terms of cultural entities.
There are some interesting possibilities (see above), so I wish we had seen more.
Cutoff Corner
Disclosure: Readers of this journal may know that I’m working on a book on relationship cutoff (severing contact), and that I have been cut off by a once dear friend and still grapple with that cutoff trauma, nine years later. So this particular rant comes of out of that context.
Early in the book, Jainan’s sister calls Kiem and says she “expects” Jainan to contact her within two weeks. She seems tense and testy, and Kiem considers the possibility that Jainan has cut her off and doesn’t want to talk to her. He decides, therefore, not to tell him his sister called unless he asks, because he doesn’t want to violate his boundaries if he has cut her off.
This is classic cutoff culture: one of the tenets is that bystanders should rigorously uphold any cutoff for any reason, and, as one of my interviewees aptly put it (in the context of ghosting), there’s a sense that you should assume a cutoff has happened if there’s any hint there might have, and treat it as a cutoff: a hard wall no contact can get through.
The book presents this as virtuous. (All Kiem’s beliefs are virtuous.) But it can do a lot of harm. Here’s how.
Kiem knows nothing about the context of this situation. That means any one of dozens of scenarios could be true. Let’s look at just a few:
1. The actual truth in the book: Jainan’s abusive former husband cut off his access to his family and his understandably frustrated sister is desperately trying to get through. (This could have been a great moment of real cultural conflict: Kiem’s omission of her call logically does prolong the tragedy of errors about Taam’s abuse, which might have come out sooner if the issue of Jainan’s contacting his family were brought up right away. However, the book never revisits this, seemingly unaware of this irony.)
2. Jainan has cut off his sister because she is abusive and Kiem’s reinforcing the wall saves him some distress (the cutoff culture standard narrative).
3. Jainan has cut off his sister because they had some falling out, which she is trying to repair, and it could be that breaking through the silence, giving her a chance to explain, apologize, etc. might heal the relationship, in which case, Kiem has forestalled/delayed that healing.
4. Jainan has cut off his sister, maybe for very good reasons, but something important has happened, like a death in the family or a political disaster in the offing, which he really needs to know about. Kiem has prevented him from getting vital information.
5. Jainan is just bad at staying in touch (not wholly untrue) and needs a sharp nudge to keep in appropriate touch with his family, in which case, Kiem has prolonged a communication problem.
6. Thea has different standards of family duty than Iskat, perhaps more Confucian, according to which it is, indeed, Jainan’s duty to stay in touch with his sister, even if he doesn’t really want to, and by his insensitivity to this deep-seated cultural standard, Kiem reinforces Iskat’s role as an oppressive colonial power, imposing its own values on its colony with no regard for their own culture and heritage. (This one, our own history demands we really look at hard.)
7. Jainan did cut off his sister, but he has long ago started to regret it and would like to mend fences. However, as is often the case with ostracizers (I can find a scholarly citation if anyone wants), he feels he cannot face resuming contact: it’s too scary, she’ll be too mad, etc. He won’t even talk about it (would never ask if she called, because he’s sure she won’t and it hurts too much.) Kiem’s refusal to tell him that she called eliminates an invitation to restore family harmony.
8. Jainan’s sister cut him off and now regrets it and wants to mend fences but doesn’t want to disclose all this to a foreign stranger. Kiem’s refusal to tell Jainan robs him of the chance to know that his sister forgives him and wants him back.
I could go on, and I’m sure one could think up other scenarios where Kiem’s choice does the least harm. But fundamentally, it’s infantilizing. No one is saying Jainan should be forced to call his sister, but not to tell him she called unless he asks because it might hurt the poor, wounded soul is like 19th-century protectionism of the poor, weak, little women. It’s like “for the sake of Cosette,” she must never know that her mother was a poor single mom and her adoptive dad an ex-con, etc. I mean, it might break her poor little girl head. This is not healthy respect for boundaries; this is reactionary prioritization of protectionist disconnection over communication and free decision making.
And the way that this slips through unnoticed in this book is facilitated by its general lack of concern with interrogation of its own chosen cultural positionality. It feels self-righteous at the expense of discernment.
In Conclusion
I wanted to like it. I did like it (in spite of some frustrations) for about the first half. There’s much to like about Kiem and Jainan’s initial tragedy of errors. They’re likeable as people, and their fumblings pulled well at my heart strings. I do agree with a lot of the text’s “good values,” and it was nice to see a lot of that sensitivity on display as Kiem tries to set Jainan at ease (and basically succeeds). The intrigue seems well written—and the creepy tau field is a great gimmick for fan-ficcy-type angst. I just wish the book has actually explored its world and characters more deeply and astutely. It could have been more.
Everina Maxwell’s far-future, m/m romantic science fiction novel, Winter’s Orbit, is, I think, trying to “give the people what they want.” It seems to have succeeded in that it has been well received, but I wanted to like it more than I did. (This is my typical response to 95% of recent SF, as I’ve mentioned before, so put much of this down to taste.) Some aspects of this book I really do like. Early on, I thought I might even become a fan. For reference, I don’t think I’ve really fanned over a new (to me) book since 2017, so that’s a high compliment. But I think as a work cultural fiction it fails, and the characters and romance ultimately suffer as a result. Massive spoilers lie ahead and warnings for discussion of abuse
Brief Summary
In a far-future, galactic empire, sociable and high-spirited prince Kiem is put in an arranged marriage with taciturn and serious Count Jainan, whose previous (arranged) husband, Kiem’s countryman Taam, has died in an accident, which ends up being murder. Throughout the book, the two uncover a plot to sabotage an important, upcoming treaty renewal in order to launch a war for more territory/power. Meanwhile, we learn that Taam (part of that plot) abused Jainan during their five years together, and as Jainan and Kiem work through all this, they fall in love and emerged as a happy couple, having foiled the plot and been rewarded in a rather Bildungsroman-like way.
What Worked for Me
This story engages in detail with what it’s like to survive an abusive relationship, and a lot of its beats feel painfully real: the gaslighting, the loss of trust in oneself, the internalized self-blame for any conflict, the constant walking on eggshells, the headaches. Early on, there are quite a few bits that effectively tugged my heartstrings where Jainan and Kiem badly miscommunicate because Jainan is convinced everything he does is wrong and that Kiem is angry when Kiem is not.
For my taste, the political intrigue, which occupies much of the page count, is plausible and well developed, with good setup and payoff. This is not a type of storytelling that I’m especially interested in and is not an area where I’m astute, so others’ mileage may vary, but it seemed very competently handled to me (except for the villain delivering the “here is my villainous plan” speech near the climax, which felt clunky).
The story also has an interesting concept around gender, which is that everyone chooses their gender and identifies it (in Kiem’s society) by the kind of jewelry they wear: wood for men, metal for women, no adornment for non-binary people. Jainan’s people appear to do exactly the same thing but with different markers, mainly dress, more as in our society. Physical sex seems utterly socially irrelevant, which the book drives home by scrupulously avoiding any mention of anyone’s physical sexual characteristics (except, I think there’s one walk-on woman was a low, gravelly voice). I say I like this because it’s different and a good brain tease. However, I also think this is one key area where the worldbuilding fails and takes some casualties with it...
Gender Didacticism over Worldbuilding
I feel like this story is prioritizing a didactic point about how our world should view gender over its own worldbuilding at the cost of a rich and plausible SF universe. (In so doing, it seems in keeping with the Zeitgeist, as I’ve written about elsewhere.)
It feels to me like the lack of any physical sexual description is a sort of “gotcha” designed to make the reader question their own gender expectations. Are Kiem and Jainain (two men by gender) physically men? women? a man and woman? Is their whole population physically androgynous? We don’t know—and the point seems to be it shouldn’t matter. Get it? People should be able to freely choose their gender and all be treated equally.
As etiquette for our current social moment on Earth, sure. But as a broader sociocultural observation, physical sex does matter, even explicitly within Maxwell’s book. Kiem and Jainan are sexually attracted to each other. Jainan even has a (slightly divergent from the worldbuilding?) thought that Kiem has had both male and female partners, which in the context of pondering if someone wants to sleep with him, does seem a statement about bodies. Otherwise, why is it worth noting at all? As long as physical sexual attraction is a thing, physical sexual appearance will matter. And I will put forward that, unless the population is all one sex (ex. androgynous), any culture will have norms around navigating physical sex difference. That this culture seems not to—that it seems not to notice bodies, except when already in bed—is not plausible, unless we are meant to read everyone as physically androgynous.
And that could work, but if it’s the intent, I think it’s a failure in worldbuilding responsibility not to tell us. For one thing, this is a romance, and it has (soft) sex scenes. A story that is inviting the reader to care about the sexual love of the two leads has some responsibility, I think, to give the reader some sort of picture of this couple. That the whole book goes by without my being able to form any mental image of them in bed feels odd and distancing.
One could say, well, but the reader is invited to form whatever image they want of our leads. Okay. But that still leaves giant gaps in the worldbuilding. Like how does childbearing work? The text is explicit and tantalizing that it’s not like us. Parents, of course, can have any gender marker, but children can also have DNA from several different parents. Intriguing! How does that work? The book never says. Does pregnancy exist at all? Are people grown in bottles? Either? Can physical men get pregnant? Is there any chance that either Kiem or Jainan will (someday) get pregnant in their relationship? None of this is touched on, and it makes for a very shallow surface scrape at how this society addresses all the issues related to human physical sexuality and reproduction.
Finally, I feel this construct around gender does not make internal sense. On the one hand, this society seems to have no gender roles. Any gender can be in any job, with equal respect, treated exactly the same way. (All titles are masculine, which is interesting—and unexplained: ex. a female child of a monarch is a “prince.”) Yet which gender one identifies as is so important that a whole system of signification is built around it and everyone follows it with dogged sense that doing so is vital to everyday respect.
Why? Why would a society with effectively no gender roles have these rigid gender markers? Why isn’t everyone “they,” for example, if it matters so very little? Or if this society inherited “he/she” from a more gender binary past, why isn’t it sufficient in most cases to just use “he/she” based on physical appearance (since it makes no difference to how people are treated) with a minority who identify themselves as something else (a bit as we do today)?
Since this is a far-future, interstellar world, trans people could certainly change physical sex if they wanted (totally or partially, hormonally, etc.). (I’m assuming now the population is not all androgynous.) Thus, it seems almost the only people who wouldn’t be “accurately” represented by “he/she” based on their physical characteristics would be those who feel non-binary. And in a society that treats all genders exactly the same anyway, what does “non-binary” mean? It seems like it would (almost) only apply to people who want to occupy a physical/sexual middle ground, as everyone is already on the same footing socially. So wouldn’t that put (most) non-binary people in the same situation as (most) trans people, in wanting to physically alter their bodies to look/be more androgynous? And if so, why wouldn’t this be largely physically evident? Why would it be indicated by no jewelry?
Or even it that were helpful (different sexes with clothes on can look quite similar, especially in a middle ground), what is it helpful for? Because the only place I can see it mattering is sex/dating and only for people who are physically sexually ambiguous, if clothed. That could be interesting, but it’s not pursued.
Finally, how did this evolve? What history is it a response to? What question is it answering (in-universe)?
Basically, it’s incoherent. It’s undercooked, underthought. And that’s a real missed opportunity to do some genuine, imaginative probing into how sex and gender work, with implications for how we can better understand them in real life.
A Shallow Look at Abuse
I feel similarly that the book’s discourse around abuse is overly simplistic. As I noted above, in some ways it’s excellent, so bitingly real that it makes me guess the author or someone close to her has experienced abuse and/or that she’s worked with this population extensively.
It’s less real on the level of whole characters. (This is partly down to taste.) This is a story about black hats and white hats. There are a few morally gray characters, but they’re all tertiary politicians, diplomats, etc. Maxwell conveys them well as jaded civil servants doing their best, but they’re not intended to be a focus. The focal characters are all either good (Kiem; Jainan; Kiem’s aide, Bel; etc.) or bad (Taam and the main villain I won’t spoil). Taam has a couple shades of not wholly horrible: a mention of regret, an “are you okay?” but he’s very, very dark gray at best—and not in an interesting, anti-hero way; in a clueless, immature bully way. So as to the abusive relationship between Jainan and Taam, it’s bad abuser vs. good victim, and I think this is both unrealistic and potentially damaging to real-world work to address abuse.
Lots of people commit abuse (sadly), and everything I know about human nature says that most of them are not as one-note as Taam. Indeed, one of the things that often makes domestic abuse so traumatic is the push-and-pull between hateful and loving behavior, not just being badly, repeatedly harmed but being badly repeatedly harmed by someone who is also loving and you may, in fact, love.* I’m not saying Taam and Jainan have to have that kind of relationship, but, boy, is the relationship they have simplistic for five years of marriage.
(*Side bar: One of the best representations of living in a badly abusive relationship I’ve ever seen is in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Spoilers follow: in this case, Laura’s father is literally possessed by an evil spirit, but the effect is much the same as having a badly abusive parent who has another side is a normal, caring dad, and never knowing which you’re going to get. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in seeing this sort of thing represented painfully well, go watch it.)
For his part, Jainan is a bit of a “perfect victim.” He’s kind, moral, responsible, smart, non-confrontational, forgiving, and rarely (consciously) angry. As a result, he essentially never does anything really objectionable. The acts he’s blamed for are virtually all ridiculous overreactions and evasions of responsibility by Taam. The only exception—and most interesting part about Jainan—is some unclear communication patterns he has with Kiem, which do sometimes put a small wrench in their relationship, but this is minor and always well intentioned.
Because Jainan is never objectionable, he’s always safe to sympathize with as the victim. The trouble with this is that it’s not a good representation of real life. In real life, people are sometimes unpleasant; we sometimes do things that harm others (a lot or a little), and that basic fact is as true of the abused as the abusers. (NB, these are often the same people in different relationships or at different points in their lives.) By implying that Jainan must be nigh perfect to be sympathetic, the story unfortunately somewhat validates Taam’s view, not of specifics about Jainan, but of the premise that a person who’s not always measuring up to “good” is, by default, “bad” and should lose our sympathy. Sadly, this view is epidemic in our society. It prevents abusers and the abused from getting help.
The paradigmatic literary example of the damage the “perfect victim” narrative can do is Lolita. (Spoilers follow.) The character of Lolita has borne decades of pop cultural representation as a child femme fatale, a preternaturally mature nymphette against whose seductions men are helpless. Lolita is a child who is sexually abused by her stepfather for years. Why has this been so hard to grok? Okay, partly because her abuser is the only POV character, but also because she’s not a perfect victim. She behaves like a real kid. She is seductive, emotionally closed off, and manipulative as hell because, like any kid in her situation, she wants to survive with minimal pain and punishment, and if she can get some stuff she wants along the way (like a trip to the zoo), great. Why would she not manipulate to get this? In short, she behaves like a real person, and because she behaves like a real person, not an angel, she is saddled with being the “bad girl.”
Characters like Jainan are part of the reason characters like Lolita get read the way they do, and why real human beings too often get read that way too.
On a purely in-universe level, I also don’t feel that Jainan’s behavior adds up. He’s internalized his own culpability for Taam’s abuse to an almost total degree, yet he first met Taam when he was 22, a grown man with all his formative years behind him. I find it hard to believe that a person with a solid, fairly healthy upbringing would fall so readily into being so utterly gaslit. I’m not saying five years with Taam wouldn’t badly mess him up, but I don’t think it would take away all sense of proportion. In moments, at least, I’d expect frank anger and indignation (at least internally), an agonized sense of “this isn’t fair.” So did Jainan come from an abusive family? That would explain his patterns. But there’s no indication he did. The one relative we see is his sister he gets along fine with. She’s older and maybe dominated him a bit, but she’s presented as a decent person. So where did he come from psychologically? I have no idea.
Kiem is also a little hard for me to figure out, but with him, it’s really more about my confusions about his culture...
A Shallow Look at Culture/Character (Sorta?)
Kiem and Taam are both from a society called Iskat, and it’s hard for me to figure it out. Certainly, societies can have very diverse members: there are people more or less like Kiem and Taam in American society. But I don’t feel given enough cultural background to fully get where their various responses are coming from. I’m going to try to figure it out:
Abuse seems a problem in Iskat society. I infer that from (a) Taam being obviously abusive and no one doing anything; (b) the undiscussed but probable idea that Taam was also abused, since he is such a stunted, wrathful person; (c) the currency of the word “abuse,” in the sense that our (very abusive) society uses it, and the immediate knee-jerk horror it arouses in the press, which suggests it’s a problem under fairly common discussion.
Yet Kiem seems both immediately aware of the concept of abuse and totally clueless about the idea it actually happens. He’s horrified when he learns of Taam’s abuse, which is rather late in the day, after missing a lot of signals. This could indicate that Kiem has just been very sheltered from abuse himself, which he might be as a prince. If his own family happens to be not abusive (and they don’t seem to be, though a bit weird), then others might just hide hard truths from him owing to his standing. So far, so good.
Kiem himself is an odd egg. He’s a paragon of virtue and seems to represent the text’s editorial stance on good values. That is to say, he never does anything coded as “wrong,” unless it be a slight misunderstanding or a bit of self-doubt/blame that actually feels a bit more like Jainan.
He was a rambunctious risk-taker as a kid, which he explains as acting out after one of his parents’ death from an illness. That’s all fine, as far as it goes; it just doesn’t go very far. Kiem’s remaining parent is a stern military mother he’s not close to. He has no siblings we know of, and though he has many friends, no one who seems intimately important in his life, except his aide, Bel, who hasn’t actually been with him very long. This suggests that the main support in his early life was the parent who died, and given that level of emotional importance, his lack to negative response (beyond some adolescent hijinks) feels... unlikely. I’d expect more psychological scarring: loneliness, isolation (emotional, though not social), a perhaps excessive desire to bond.
That could have created some interesting push-pull in his relationship with Jainan, who’s initially afraid to show anything other than decorum. But instead, we get Kiem as the model partner: caring, kind, and scrupulous about respecting the slightest hint of boundaries. If Jainan is a perfect victim, Kiem is a bit of a perfect savior, and neither feels really human in all the messy complexity of humanity.
To ramble back to culture, though, Kiem’s scrupulous care for boundaries also seems indicative of his culture. Iskat is a surveillance state: there are cameras, digital records of “online” conversation, a massive intelligence network, etc., as well as tabloid press. Kiem is, if anything, hypersensitive about (Jainan’s) privacy. I say hypersensitive not because I disagree with his views, like one shouldn’t read someone else’s mail, but because it all seems so dire to him. That fits with a surveillance state. Intense concern over privacy is a natural pushback against surveillance.
My difficulty is that I can’t tell if this is intentional worldbuilding or just an incidental (or “allegorical”?) reflection of our own society, which also has all these characteristics. I can’t tell because (a) no one actually talks about it, and (b) Kiem’s views are rarely situated as cultural (contextual, contingent); they are more naturalized as just universal “goods.”
It doesn’t help that Jainan’s society, Thea, is not much of a contrast. It’s smaller than Iskat and colonized by it, which pisses the Theans off. Fair enough. It also has clan affiliations that Thea lacks and different etiquette around disclosing one’s genetics, but why this matters or, indeed, exists is not really discussed, which makes it feel like window dressing. As I’ve mentioned, views of gender seem very similar, and day-to-day standards of behavior seem similar too: both societies are very hierarchical and managed by an inherited, aristocratic class that seems to have little to do with the common people. (The whole book actually has little to do with the common people.) Both societies are conventionally politicized. It doesn’t help that Jainan rarely thinks of Thea, no longer considers it his home, and shows next-to-no homesickness. There’s just not enough contrast between the societies or the main characters’ thoughts about them to throw either society into perspective and give much of a sense of what Maxwell was going for in terms of cultural entities.
There are some interesting possibilities (see above), so I wish we had seen more.
Cutoff Corner
Disclosure: Readers of this journal may know that I’m working on a book on relationship cutoff (severing contact), and that I have been cut off by a once dear friend and still grapple with that cutoff trauma, nine years later. So this particular rant comes of out of that context.
Early in the book, Jainan’s sister calls Kiem and says she “expects” Jainan to contact her within two weeks. She seems tense and testy, and Kiem considers the possibility that Jainan has cut her off and doesn’t want to talk to her. He decides, therefore, not to tell him his sister called unless he asks, because he doesn’t want to violate his boundaries if he has cut her off.
This is classic cutoff culture: one of the tenets is that bystanders should rigorously uphold any cutoff for any reason, and, as one of my interviewees aptly put it (in the context of ghosting), there’s a sense that you should assume a cutoff has happened if there’s any hint there might have, and treat it as a cutoff: a hard wall no contact can get through.
The book presents this as virtuous. (All Kiem’s beliefs are virtuous.) But it can do a lot of harm. Here’s how.
Kiem knows nothing about the context of this situation. That means any one of dozens of scenarios could be true. Let’s look at just a few:
1. The actual truth in the book: Jainan’s abusive former husband cut off his access to his family and his understandably frustrated sister is desperately trying to get through. (This could have been a great moment of real cultural conflict: Kiem’s omission of her call logically does prolong the tragedy of errors about Taam’s abuse, which might have come out sooner if the issue of Jainan’s contacting his family were brought up right away. However, the book never revisits this, seemingly unaware of this irony.)
2. Jainan has cut off his sister because she is abusive and Kiem’s reinforcing the wall saves him some distress (the cutoff culture standard narrative).
3. Jainan has cut off his sister because they had some falling out, which she is trying to repair, and it could be that breaking through the silence, giving her a chance to explain, apologize, etc. might heal the relationship, in which case, Kiem has forestalled/delayed that healing.
4. Jainan has cut off his sister, maybe for very good reasons, but something important has happened, like a death in the family or a political disaster in the offing, which he really needs to know about. Kiem has prevented him from getting vital information.
5. Jainan is just bad at staying in touch (not wholly untrue) and needs a sharp nudge to keep in appropriate touch with his family, in which case, Kiem has prolonged a communication problem.
6. Thea has different standards of family duty than Iskat, perhaps more Confucian, according to which it is, indeed, Jainan’s duty to stay in touch with his sister, even if he doesn’t really want to, and by his insensitivity to this deep-seated cultural standard, Kiem reinforces Iskat’s role as an oppressive colonial power, imposing its own values on its colony with no regard for their own culture and heritage. (This one, our own history demands we really look at hard.)
7. Jainan did cut off his sister, but he has long ago started to regret it and would like to mend fences. However, as is often the case with ostracizers (I can find a scholarly citation if anyone wants), he feels he cannot face resuming contact: it’s too scary, she’ll be too mad, etc. He won’t even talk about it (would never ask if she called, because he’s sure she won’t and it hurts too much.) Kiem’s refusal to tell him that she called eliminates an invitation to restore family harmony.
8. Jainan’s sister cut him off and now regrets it and wants to mend fences but doesn’t want to disclose all this to a foreign stranger. Kiem’s refusal to tell Jainan robs him of the chance to know that his sister forgives him and wants him back.
I could go on, and I’m sure one could think up other scenarios where Kiem’s choice does the least harm. But fundamentally, it’s infantilizing. No one is saying Jainan should be forced to call his sister, but not to tell him she called unless he asks because it might hurt the poor, wounded soul is like 19th-century protectionism of the poor, weak, little women. It’s like “for the sake of Cosette,” she must never know that her mother was a poor single mom and her adoptive dad an ex-con, etc. I mean, it might break her poor little girl head. This is not healthy respect for boundaries; this is reactionary prioritization of protectionist disconnection over communication and free decision making.
And the way that this slips through unnoticed in this book is facilitated by its general lack of concern with interrogation of its own chosen cultural positionality. It feels self-righteous at the expense of discernment.
In Conclusion
I wanted to like it. I did like it (in spite of some frustrations) for about the first half. There’s much to like about Kiem and Jainan’s initial tragedy of errors. They’re likeable as people, and their fumblings pulled well at my heart strings. I do agree with a lot of the text’s “good values,” and it was nice to see a lot of that sensitivity on display as Kiem tries to set Jainan at ease (and basically succeeds). The intrigue seems well written—and the creepy tau field is a great gimmick for fan-ficcy-type angst. I just wish the book has actually explored its world and characters more deeply and astutely. It could have been more.
