Bookpost: My Brother’s Husband, The Killing Moon, and a short

Gengoroh Tagame — My Brother’s Husband vol. 1 (comics)

Apr 22

This was decent and I enjoyed it (although this first volume ends in a really odd and arbitrary spot). Yaichi’s confusion about why he and his brother drifted apart feels super uncomfortable and real. When I’ve drifted away from people I cared about, it has sort of that texture; not a big clear break, but a sort of smoky forgetting.

I'm real curious about the intended audience, all up and down the chain. Like who was Tagame writing it for, who was his editor and Japanese publisher hoping to sell it to, who is the English translation aimed at, etc. Because the level of sophistication kind of veers all over the place! There's all this incredibly basic stuff strewn around throughout, like the dramatic realization that there's no "wife" in a gay marriage, but the art marks it as being for a gay male audience,* who I don’t think need the remedial material. And then there’s the jacket blurbs?!

I know this was a bit of a departure for Tagame. I wonder if it was a bit of a departure for the Japanese literary comics publishing market, too. I wonder how much mid-stream editorial input there was.

Well, I wonder a lot of things, it’s kind of my whole deal. That's all mostly beside the point; this is a pretty good comic.

* Yaichi is the most implausibly jacked work-from-home sad-sack dad I’ve ever seen in fiction. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.

N.K. Jemisin — The Killing Moon

May 9

Once upon a time I bounced off this, but on a second attempt I liked it quite a lot. This is half of a duology, and it looks like it’s a two-book-shaped-books series, because this one came to a pretty comprehensive end. TBH I'm not sure where it goes from here! Guess I'll find out.

What this reminds me of most isn’t Jemisin’s other work, but Kate Elliot’s Spirit Gate, which was another series-starter I bounced off of years ago and have been meaning to revisit. They’re both doing this sort of hyper-intellectual system-model mode of high fantasy, where they set up this society that seems just way too balanced and static to be plausible, then reveal the instability at the core so we can watch what the engine does when you drop a handful of pop-rocks in the tank. A top-down highly-plotted approach that’s sort of the antithesis of the rambling character-driven fat fantasy mode (e.g. Song of Ice and Fire); it can yield very satisfying outcomes, but it can sometimes feel a little sterile, especially at the start.

In both cases, I think I initially bounced off because 1: I couldn’t quite believe in their initial steady state, and 2: the system-driven plot was making me worry that the characters were going to be bullshit. When I started this again, I immediately saw why I'd bounced; chapter one asks you to stipulate that people in this country are generally happy to be visited by a euthanasia incubus, way before showing any of the material benefits of having euthanasia incubii around, and the next few chapters mostly avoid that whole question in favor of quadrupling the cast and introducing like four more plot threads.

Anyway, I pushed through that this time, and I’m glad I did. The characters filled in a bit — they're still kind of flat if you compare them to the Broken Earth or Inheritance trilogies, and you can kind of tell that she wrote this before either of those, but they were perfectly serviceable. The texture of the world is real good; a variety of sorta-related but very distinct cultures and nations in long-term low-key conflict, and a cool and very detailed ancient Africa setting (it's Egypt, I gather, but not the Egypt you generally see around in fantasy; very B-side, brings in a lot of... I think ancient southern Nile geography and culture? NOT AN EXPERT HERE).

So yeah, it's very systematic, and it's somewhat more interested in the plot and the world than it is in the characters, but if you're in a good headspace for that, this is pretty great.

Sarah Pinsker — “And Then There Were n-1” (long-ish short story)

May 16

Available online, and it looks like it's also part of this recent collection.

A murder mystery where all the characters are alternate-universe versions of the same person. Hilariously, because of the way Instapaper displayed this and because I wasn't already familiar with Pinsker, I didn't realize until the end that said person was literally the author.

Anyway, I liked this quite a bit. I later read another of her stories, and I liked that too.