Who Goes There?

Rachel Swirsky has been around for nearly the past twenty years, as a writer but also as an important figure in modern SF fandom. She was the founding editor of PodCastle back in 2008. She has also been open about issues of disability, cultural Judaism, and feminism, which are some of many topics permeating 21st century SFF that were not as prominent (except for feminism) half a century ago. The irony is that her social media presence seems to be oddly miniscule for a modern SFF writer. She won two Nebulas early in her career, for the 2013 prose poem “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” and earlier for the 2010 fantasy novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window.” Maybe not the win, but for my money the nomination was certainly warranted. When it comes to choosing what fiction to review I sometimes fear that I might not have enough to say about the work to warrant its own post (a fear that has come to fruition a few times before), but thankfully this is a meaty novella that almost begs to be given the analysis treatment.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online, which nowadays you can only access via the Wayback Machine. It’s been reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (ed. Jonathan Stran), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2011 Edition (ed. Rich Horton), Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (ed. Steve Berman and JoSelle Vanderhooft), and the Swirsky collection How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future.

Enhancing Image

In the Land of Flowered Hills, Naeva is a sorceress and also Queen Rayneh’s favorite—as both a sorceress and a lover. This is not cause for scandal at all; on the contrary, lesbianism is treated as compulsory in this land. The Land of Flowered Hills, from Naeva’s view, is virtually paradise, being a matriarchal society where women rule and men are treated as an underclass, even being called “worms” regularly. Childbirth is so frowned upon that women who get stuck with the thankless job of having kids are also treated rather with disdain, being called “broods.” There’s a stringent hierarchy based on gender, and to a lesser extent on class, this being a kind of Social Darwinist nightmare in which the strong abuse the weak without hesitation or regret. This all sounds dystopian, and also ridiculous, like how a misogynist would imagine a matriarchal society in a work of satire, so as to take the piss out of feminism’s more unsavory notions, namely political lesbianism. For women, heterosexuality is universally frowned on, to the point where women who have children willingly with men are labeled perverts. I’m not sure how such a society is supposed to survive in the long run; but then again, given what happens in this story, it doesn’t.

Naeve, for all her loyalty to the crown, gets caught in the crossfire between Rayneh and her daughter Tryce, the latter wanting to take the throne as she believes her mother is unfit to defend the land against an oncoming army of barbarians. The barbarians are, of course, male, which is perhaps the biggest slight for these women, on top of the fact that they breed naturally and have been building their numbers with frightening speed. To make a long story short, Naeve is convinced to turn her back on Rayneh, but this costs her dearly, in that she is hit with a magic arrow and is thus put in a state where she is both alive and dead. She is rendered effectively immortal, but this is on the condition that someone is able to summon her from her coma, and also to provide a vessel for her soul to inhabit, on account of her original body being very much dead. People’s souls in the world of the story can be swapped to other bodies, with the caveat that the owner of that body will die when the new soul departs. That’s the original method transferring souls, anyway. So while the feud with Rayneh and Tryce takes up the first section of the novella, Naeve’s life-death state lasts from years to decades to centuries, so that before long she starts jumping (or rather she is summoned by different people periodically) ahead long after Tryce has died and the Land of Flowered Hills has fallen. Naeve becomes one of a small group of people, called “Insomniacs,” who are stuck in a perpetual state of magic-induced hibernation and revival.

The basic challenge of this novella (whose full title I don’t feel like repeating) is that Naeve herself is rather a horrible person, and the story is told exclusively through her perspective. I’m always kind of intrigued by the thought experiment of knowingly telling a story through the eyes and voice of someone who is thoroughly unlikable; it’s really a tightrope act, which for the most part I think Swirsky pulls off here. This is a story about bigotry and future shock, and I think Swirsky does something ambitious here in that she tries to put us in the mindset of someone who is an active bigot. Naeve’s fierce misandry ends up causing problems for herself and virtually everyone she meets, yet throughout the story she doesn’t change so much as come to the conclusion that she hasn’t changed. Normally in a narrative that’s at least novella-length, such as this, we expect the protagonist to go through some kind of change, to have a revelation or some epiphany, so that something about their character has altered by the end. They had learned a valuable lesson, or have suffered a certain trauma that makes them reevaluate how they understand the world. Yet despite being highly knowledgeable about magic and being considered one of the wisest members of her society, Naeve refuses to change her opinion on the status of men throughout the story, even when she befriends a man named Pasha briefly (and I do mean briefly, he’s barely in it before being killed off), a friendship that she writes off as being an exception that proves the rule. By the time Naeve gets resurrected for the last time, at the hands of a nerdy but cute scholar named Misa, she has not really aged or even changed as a person at all while literal centuries have passed by her.

Swirsky plays with fantasy conventions quite a bit here, mostly to good effect, although I have to admit I don’t really care for the whimsical-poetic prose style she goes for. After having read and reviewed a decent amount of fantasy over the years I can say that when it comes to English-language literature there are basically only two schools of fantasy writing: British and American. These are not mutually exclusive, and indeed someone who is British or American will not necessarily write in their respective nation’s school of writing; this is especially true with American writers, who to this day have a bad habit of copping notes from the British. In the British school the key forerunners are J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, William Morris, and Lord Dunsany. In the US you have Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fritz Leiber. One of these clearly has more of a stranglehold on modern fantasy writing, even among Americans, than the other. The Land of Flowered Hills itself even has a vaguely Lord Dunsany-esque ring to its name. With all due respect to Swirsky, because her issue is by no means unique to her (if anything it’s far too common), trying to capture Dunsany’s exquisiteness of style is a bit of a fool’s errand; too often it comes off as cutesy and cloying.

There Be Spoilers Here

Naeve is summoned in the body of a straw dummy, which makes things awkward when she and Misa inevitably have a sexual/romantic relationship. Misa lives in and for academia, and being a scholar she is naturally taken by Naeve’s antiquity and knowledge regarding magic, although she’s disgusted by Naeve’s misandry. There’s that joke where you have a seemingly liberal white woman and her disgustingly racist boyfriend whose bigotry she just kind of, ignores? Enables? I think we’re supposed to sympathize with Misa here, but it’s hard to sympathize with someone who, perhaps against their better judgment, falls for someone as unlikable and toxic as Naeve. Generally, and this could be because we’re stuck in Naeve’s shoes the whole time, Swirsky seems to think that we out to at least take pity on Our Anti-Heroine™ for her inability to become a decent person adapt with the changing times. One might take pity on Naeve the same way one might take pity on an older family member whose brain has clearly been fried from watching Fox News nonstop and utterly failing to question the basic evils of our society, but personally I don’t feel sorry for these people. I simply can’t. Why? Because bigotry kills. Bigotry is as much a tool used in the violence and tyranny that terrorizes marginalized groups, except because it’s invisible and immaterial it’s something that people are willing to give a pass. But this mindset is put to the test when the academy and its environs are threatened by a plague, which is apparently magic-induced, and (surprise, surprise) Naeve just so happens to be the only one who knows a way to cure it. But, aha, she refuses to give this cure to the male members, condemning about half the populace to a painful death.

This is abhorrent. I mean there’s really no excuse made for why Naeve should have the right to condemn hundreds and even thousands because of her stupid and childish prejudices, but Misa and her colleagues fail to question Naeve’s stupidity seriously before basically mind-raping her for the cure. The results are disastrous. Everyone around Naeve is horrifically injured and even having gotten the cure, they come to the conclusion that she’s too dangerous to keep awake. The whole back half of the story is quite interesting, as much for what isn’t said (or maybe what Swirky did not intend) as what is. The idea is that you have a conservative who is quite literally ancient, thrust into a small society of liberals, the result being that neither side is willing to budge, nor is anybody willing to articulate their own position without coming off as an asshole. I see this as a critique of the kind of liberalism that takes hold in academia, in that these scholars take pride in the idea of multiculturalism, but are unwilling to challenge positions that are tangibly harmful for society, especially for those who are in some kind of second-class position. For reasons that are never given, Misa and her colleagues are totally incapable of explaining to Naeve just why it is that egalitarianism is important for a society to survive, which might be the point. Unfortunately the climax gets the wind knocked out of its sails by virtue of the ending, or rather the lack of an ending. Naeve is put into hibernation, before being awakened by some god-like entity. We’re told that we have reached the end of this universe, and that Naeve and her fellow Insomniacs will be carried over to the new universe—only as what is not made clear.

What the fuck is this? Nothing is resolved, Naeve’s character hasn’t changed much at all, and now I’m wondering, since she will apparently lose her consciousness in this new universe, how she is even telling this story to us. It’s a fallacy of first-person narration that even seasoned professionals are prone to making, but still it’s annoying. Why and especially how is Naeve telling us this story? Who is she talking to? We never get an answer to these questions, and they’re questions that didn’t need to be asked in the first place, only I couldn’t help but wonder about them.

A Step Farther Out

Its pacing is a bit lopsided, its ending comes off like a wet fart, and I did not fall in love with the style like I’ve seen some other reviewers do; but with that said, this is a fascinating and even harrowing read. It has a few obvious flaws, which seem to come from someone still being early in her writing career (Swirsky would’ve only been 26 or 27 when she wrote it), but it’s impressive enough on its face that I understand the awards attention. Hell, I appreciate that people actually paid attention to a novella that was published in a magazine and not as a chapbook, in the year 2010. This was before Tor Books (by that I really mean Macmillan) started monopolizing on chapbooks, so that virtually every SFF novella that hopes to find a decent readership nowadays will have to come to us in the form of a flimsy and overpriced chapbook. For $15 you can buy a slim hardcover that you can read through in a couple hours, compared to $10 for a magazine issue that has at least twice as much fiction between its covers! Sorry, I’m a little bitter. Point is I do recommend Swirky’s story.

See you next time.