City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

[renay]

I've been driving everyone around me up the wall with my complicated reactions to City of Stairs, a fantasy novel that dropped last September. I'm still a little angry about it, but less so now that I have some distance from my immediate reaction of "NO!!!", followed by ugly crying, followed by fuming for hours. When I meet a story that's so wonderful, and I love all the characters, the adventure is fun, the setting is fascinating, and there's a rich sense of history to the world, I want it to be perfect so I can recommend it without reservation. This is another good example of what happens when a book you love just hauls off and socks you in the jaw. Not maliciously, but as we all know, we don't read stories in a vacuum!

City of Stairs is doing so many things right that I'm crushed over the fact that I came away from the book so conflicted. I went through this with God's War by Kameron Hurley, too, where I had to leave the book alone for awhile because I was just so utterly disappointed that everything I loved also existed with one story element that made me so unhappy. Everything we love is problematic, the saying goes, so what's the right balance? What do we do with otherwise excellent books that repeat troubling patterns? Because obviously burning them in a pile while crying bitterly isn't cost effective or a good way to not smell like dead, burned books. Also, you just burned all those other parts you loved. Crap.

Years ago, the city of Bulikov wielded the powers of the Gods to conquer the world. But after its divine protectors were mysteriously killed, the conqueror has become the conquered; the city's proud history has been erased and censored, progress has left it behind, and it is just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power. Into this musty, backward city steps Shara Thiivani. Officially, the quiet mousy woman is just another lowly diplomat sent by Bulikov's oppressors. Unofficially, Shara is one of her country's most accomplished spymasters-dispatched to investigate the brutal murder of a seemingly harmless historian. As Shara pursues the mystery through the ever-shifting physical and political geography of the city, she begins to suspect that the beings who once protected Bulikov may not be as dead as they seem-and that her own abilities might be touched by the divine as well. (source)

Shara Thivani, who comes to Bulikov with her secretary, Sigrud, to investigate the murder of historian Efrem Pangyui, is so wonderful. I loved her immediately after her first scene with her Aunt Vinya, a politician of note in Shara's home country of Saypur. She's intelligent and clever, but a little bit arrogant and condescending, too. In a scene very early on she talks about jingoism and is rather holier-than-thou about it, which is fascinating as the story that follows dismantles her self-satisfaction over being better than the people who engage in the sort of overt patriotism versus her own, more shadowy version. She's compassionate and kind, but she has important things to learn about the policies she's been enforcing, and it's a treat to go along with her as she unravels the mystery of what's happening in Bulikov and on the Continent itself. Her companion, Sigrud, is interesting on an interpersonal level because how are these people, of all the people in the world, partners? But he's also delightful — he got some of the best action sequences. There's multiple professional and personal relationships here between women like Mulaghesh and Vinya, as well, which is so wonderful. The top Saypuri leaders we get to know are all women, which was extremely satisfying. If they cut each other down or challenged each other, it wasn't because they were women, it was because they were politicians.

But to me the heart of the novel is about history — both personal and national — and how history can shape so much of what we do and who we are, and what the consequences are if we learn new things about history and misuse that information. What kind of people do we become when we learn new truths or have what we think we knew challenged? We often have a choice, and that choice has far-reaching consequences much longer and more influential than we can see. What's more important: the truth or our egos? People or power?

City of Stairs is lively in its writing, canny with its revelations, and boasts a crunchy critique about colonialism that unfolds until the very end, all wrapped up in an intriguing spy narrative package. Even in dark moments there is hope, friendship, love, and compassion. I enjoyed it so much. A summary:

PEOPLE IN POWER: Shara, don't do it.
SHARA: I did it.

and

SHARA: Vohannes, no.
VOHANNES: Vohannes YES.

and

BAD GUYS: *terrible actions*
SIGRUD: *silent decision to beat some guys down*
SHARA: Oh, not again...

But I have some caveats. Although, when don't I? 10,000 points to the person who can name the last book I didn't have caveats over.

Spoilers.

My journey with this novel was a comical romp via an outpouring of emotions on Twitter, via IM, and email. I love this book. That's not a strong enough statement! I love this book. I was convinced that I had just found another book that would show up on my 2015 favorites list. Who knows? It still might, because I'm so used to swallowing troubling parts of narratives and the sting may fade in time. My relationship status with this book for the first 75% was "MARRIED WITH 2 KIDS, FOUR CATS, AN IGUANA AND TWO GOATS."



Even when The Event went down, I still wasn't mad. No, no, anger wasn't my first emotion. First, I cried about it: gross, snot-drenched crying because I'm a sensitive person who got really invested in a book and its characters. I forgot, I suppose, that happy endings don't just happen because you want them to, and I should have been on guard against shenanigans. I was never on guard. I was, in fact, completely unprepared. Plus side: it's a mark of good storytelling that I never saw it coming, even when it was right on top of me, and reacted with Semi-Inappropriate Sadness Levels (twenty minute crying jags not required to read this book; I am just a wimp). Cons: everything else about the development.



Once I was so longer sad, I got angry. I was so mad. On a scale to "stubbed toe" to "the sun going supernova", I was around a "global thermal nuclear war".



In this novel Shara's childhood ex-boyfriend, Vohannes, is a Continental (as opposed to Saypuri like Shara) and an important political figure in Bulikov. This isn't a Romeo and Juliet story (I was thankful for this), but their sexual relationship as young adults makes Shara's work in Bulikov more intriguing as she interacts with him as someone challenging the status quo. Bulikov is Vo's home, and his family and family's political allies worshipped a god that had a fairly poisonous view of sexuality, homosexuality in particular. Vo is a complicated character; he loves his nation, but he's reviled and abused. He wants to see things changed so people can live happier lives, with less fear, and so his country can start recovering. He's closeted, with good reason, and he and Shara hurt each other dreadfully over it as children. These are all very well done things; I have no beef with them. Vo is an explicitly queer character (shades of bisexuality abound in the minor flashbacks we get), visibly disabled (another intersection which I find depressing), and for some reason I didn't worry about him at all. The novel told me, multiple times: he's not safe, he's in danger, and still for some reason I didn't worry.

I have trouble talking about the patterns and tropes I see regarding queer characters because I am under-read in the language more experienced critics have to unpack these concepts. It's hard to contextualize and speak with appropriate nuance, because reading is so personal. When you read in a path that no other human being on the planet may ever read on again — your reading footprint — it becomes difficult to unsee certain patterns and have them not matter for whatever reason: the book does X right, and we rarely see Y done well so let's just excuse Z. What are we supposed to do in these situations?

City of Stairs did not have multiple queer characters that were as explicitly defined as queer by the text. There were warning signs everywhere. I'm not comfortable enough to say one way or another about Mulaghesh or Pitry, and Shara read as heterosexual, so Vo is all I have, the only one coded to me as queer.

And he dies. He's murdered.

I don't need to go into an in-depth explanation of Bury Your Gays or Gayngst, because they've been talked about to death. I don't think it's a niche topic. But I somehow trusted this book not to do that for some reason I can't even fathom now (my unfortunate idealism?). I'm also troubled because the community has been singing the praises of this novel for months, since before it was available to the plebeian non-reviewing masses. I never heard a peep that this pattern might be in this book. Initially, I figured this was because of spoilers (a character death late in the book? Sure, that's a spoiler.) But looking into it afterward, digging through reviews, searching for any reference, made me feel crazy, because no one called it out. I couldn't find anything and I started to feel like I had made it up, that I had missed an explicit reference to another queer character, that would make this, if not okay, then at least less shocking. Because I didn't think, culturally, we were over the historical storytelling habit of icing the lone, tragic queer. Have we moved on? If so, I'm not ready.

After sitting on it and thinking, I don't think I missed anything and I think what happened was that this pattern that is so painfully obvious to me is invisible to other people who aren't queer, and maybe even people who are who've just accepted the reality of this trope being with us for awhile. This is just a pattern that gets repeated because our culture is sick and queer people can often only affect some types of narratives and their remaining (often straight) characters by dying. This is just a pattern that gets repeated because not everyone sees the pattern because perhaps they haven't ever read or watched enough queer media to be able to see it. My experience of the novel up until this point was 150% positive. It's such an excellent book. But when this happened it broke my heart, even as I understand why for so many other people it was just sad, and not really that notable.

Horrible things happening to queer people aren't verboten. I'm not the Queer Character Literature Police, but there are patterns and tropes that keep getting used that gut me. I'm tired of stumbling into them like a giant story version of a bear trap. I don't want us to be untouchable, but we're already so rare in mainstream genre literature that I'm not ready for stories where we die when there's only one of us — not yet. I'm not there, and I don't think as a genre we're there yet, either, when queer SF is still niche. I'm not sure what else I should take away from that but the same things I took away from it as a kid. Should I go, "Oh, well, I was given a fantastic and complicated female MC who is utterly brilliant, I guess that's fine that queer dude is dead?" and ignore the fact that the lone queer character set up to be bitterly closeted and oppressed ends in his death by the original source of his oppression? And maybe I shouldn't be disappointed that in my initial search I couldn't find a peep of this development among the praise that went, "Hey, wait a minute…"

Bad things happen to good people, but we're writing stories that don't require people who get the shaft in reality getting it in our fiction, too. I internalized this toxic waste my entire young adulthood, writing queer characters like me (only one per story — don't get cocky!) and killing them off because that's what you were supposed to do. That's what happens to those people; they die. The queers have to be dead, safely partitioned from the rest of the world by the curtain of their mortality to have the correct amount of narrative impact or to be tolerated as part of the story at all. And I regurgitated that nonsense until a writing teacher took me aside and challenged my "Because." to their "Why?"

I'm tired of seeing people like me be dead. I've killed enough of myself in my own writing and I've seen enough of people like young queer me — alone and marginalized — killed in fiction to be utterly heartsick over it whenever it crops up to follow the same tired ruts in the storytelling road. I'm not afraid of us dying, but when we're marginalized in our own lives, and come to fantastic narratives only to watch our people die, where, exactly, is the escapism for us? Where's the entertainment? If none of us survive to go on more adventures, if there's only one of us, instead of three or four, so the death might actually mean something other than repetition of a terrible narrative pattern, how is this a positive?

I'm no literary historian or very well-read on issues of sexuality, but I know my reading past and I know that I expect more from my fiction than what I sometimes get on the axis of gender and sexuality representation. A choice was made in this book to do what it did, and so now it's left to me to figure out how to compartmentalize both my pleasure with the book and my dismay with the way it ended for its queer character. I'm practiced at doing this, unfortunately — less practiced with talking about it, obviously, but an old hand at living with the resolution.

But I desperately hope for a time when I can stop having to step back and go through this process at all. I look forward to being sad only because I liked the character and wanted them to live, instead of being sad about the implications of the death itself. That will be excellent.

Special Thanks!

To Sunil (ghostwritingcow) for assuring me I wasn't a jerk, and providing excellent edits. ♥

Other Reviews

The Book Smugglers, A Fantastical Librarian, Books and Pieces, Pornokitsch, Fantasy Review Barn, nerds of a feather, flock together, yours?

Comments

[rosefox]

You're not alone. I had the exact same reaction--not the crying, but the rage. I had it strongly enough that I wrote to the author about it, which is a thing I really do not do even when I have very big feels. But I make an exception for explaining to straight authors why it's not okay to make particular shitty things happen exclusively to queer characters. (I wrote to Jim Hines about the ending of The Stepsister Scheme for the same reason.)

Robert did write back, but I don't feel comfortable excerpting our conversation here, except to say that I think it was very educational for him. Too late for Vohannes, though.

It is really hard to talk about this in places like Twitter because spoilers. :( I did write about it, but that was months before the book came out, so I'm not surprised you didn't see it.

I'm tired of seeing people like me be dead.

Yes, a thousand times yes.

[renay]

I gave up writing authors about it years ago, after one too many bad reactions. I'm sure it's gotten better in the four years since I stopped attempting to tell authors, "wow, this makes me feel like crap!" so it's nice to hear he knows this is an issue. Too late for Vo, but maybe not too late for future characters...

And yes, I exploded on Twitter (unfortunately) and then utterly failed to keep it vague, and then decided I would just write about it. But I only checked in on reviews of this book after finishing it, and mostly more recent ones, so I did miss anyone who might have mentioned it before its release. :( I wish I hadn't. I wouldn't have not read it with the number of positive reviews it got, but I would've been prepared emotionally. I just...I really liked Vo. I thought the resolution of the book would have been perfect for him to start to rebuild. :(

re icing the gay character

[rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com]

I just finished this book, and while I hated that Vo was eliminated because I loved him as a character, I felt it was a statement about the horrible shittiness and reactionary nature of the religion and resulting society, and that his death should help us understand just how abhorrent are such beliefs, especially since reader sympathy would be so pro-Vo. So I guess I saw it as making more of a positive than a negative statement. However, I definitely agree that in most movies or books about, say, zombies, you pretty much can count on the black and/or gay characters not going to be the ones not to survive. In this instance I did not see it as a kill-off-the-Other situation. But I could be wrong, certainly, and in any event, I wanted so much for it not to be true.

Re: re icing the gay character

[renay]

Yep, I'm sure that is a interpretation of the choice the author made, even if I disagree with it and find it gross, irresponsible, and bad writing. But the thing is, we don't read in a vacuum. We should already understand the nature of the religion and society, and we're all, as English readers, fully aware of societal implications of being queer in certain religions. The book doesn't skimp on this at all. It's implicit in many ways about Vo's life, but it also gets really explicit, too. We don't need queer characters to die to make a point. The fact that queer characters have to die to make a point about the worldbuilding is exactly the problem. I'm tired of people like myself being an object destroyed to help the straight people reading something realize what a horrible situation the society is in. It's not about just this once instance: it's that this one instance is a long line in a series of instances, which other people have the privilege not to see, because they're not queer.

Re: re icing the gay character

[rosefox]

his death should help us understand

Who is "us" in this sentence? Because it's not me. I already understand how abhorrent it is when someone thinks I don't deserve to live my life freely and openly the way I choose--or thinks I don't deserve to live, period.

This is the heart of it, right here, this ostensible "us", the unspoken truth that this is a book written not only by a straight person but for straight people. When authors do shitty things to marginalized characters--there's only one fill-in-the-blank, the black guy dies, the gay guy dies, the lesbian is locked in an asylum, the mentally ill person is evil and deserves their eventual terrible demise, etc. etc. etc. etc.--they're telling marginalized people, "You're not part of this book's 'us'. This book isn't for you."

I sure am glad you got to learn some important moral truths because a gay character died (in a "positive" way!) to show you them. Oh wait, no, actually that sounds like a terrible bargain to me. For my "us" that is all loss and no gain. But you go take your "positive" statement (fuck, I cannot even write that without my face twisting into a snarl) and enjoy your increased understanding that somehow still has not led you to actually understand any fucking thing about why some of us are really, really angry.

Re: re icing the gay character

[winterkoninkje]

But it's completely unnecessary to kill Vo in order to get that point across. By the time we get there we've already seen how damaging his religious upbringing has been to him. We've already seen how it has traumatized him and how this trauma has molded him into the person he's become. The point is already amply demonstrated; killing him off does nothing to further emphasize the message, nor to qualify or draw into question the message we've received.

His death is a cop-out. It's lazy writing. In fact, his death serves to trivialize and erase his pain; and hence, it undermines the very message it's supposedly delivering. People don't just suffer in a vacuum. Not all pain leads to tragic and (ig)noble death. Such romanticization of suffering is a method to avoid acknowledging and responding to that suffering. When everyone dies, it's sad, but we aren't called upon to answer for how we or our society has contributed to their suffering. We mourn and move on. Nothing we do can change the fact that they are dead, and we have no impetus to change our ways because that impetus has ceased breathing. But when there's a living person staring you in the face, you are forced to acknowledge and come to terms with the reality of that person and how their suffering takes place in your world.

[samjohnsson]

Oh. That's what you were talking about. Okay, now the decision to read it or not.

[renay]

I do think it's an excellent book? *waves flag for first 75%*

[samjohnsson]

See, 75% is "a passing grade, strictly average performance". So I dunno.

[renay]

It's hard to quantify because I was so torn up, but I do think the resolution of the rest of the book delivers on the set up and it is pretty good urban fantasy. If you have other, more positive books to read, I'd do those first, and consider this one another time. :)

[bookgazing]

You've added something to my understanding of my own feelings about this trope. It's not just the lack of stories about LGBTQ characters who make it to the end that's a problem, it can be the loneness of these characters in a single story that can be a problem. Or sometimes the fact that there are a couple of LGBTQ characters in a story but that story is still setting them up as exceptions or a minority. When stories have an LGBTQ main character and LGBTQ secondary characters and the background to the world also contains LGBTQ people as a norm then maybe it stings a little less (although sometimes not because context is important).

[renay]

Well, first we have to figure out how to get multiple queer characters in a mainstream genre narrative, then we can explore the contexts where it helps or doesn't help. But of course that will inevitably create its own tropes and patterns, too, if...it ever...happens...

[rosefox]

Tanya Huff did it! Diane Duane did it! In books from major publishers! In the 1990s! And then I guess publishers just stopped buying those books, because I'm sure queer writers didn't stop writing them.

[renay]

I have some of Tanya Huff's books! I should move them up my list. What happened, though, to make major genre publishers stop considering those stories? :(

[bookgazing]

I kind of think there are still what I'd call 'SFF mainstream' stories being published that fill the world at least with lesbian, gay or bi characters. Idk I have difficulty defining SFF mainstream because there's what's mainstream to everyone who doesn't read a lot of SFF (like Guardians of the Galaxy) and there's the mainstream for people who are already in SFF. Maul, published by Orbit in 2003 is probably the best example I can pull to mind. Jo Walton's Small Change books were published by Tor in 2007 and reissued in 2014. The Summer Prince was a huge hit in 2013 and I'd say definitely SFF YA mainstream(although that contains the death of a main bi-character) is about a world where gay and bi relationships are all around. And maybe Hurley counts as mainstream - at least in the SFF web world (although again character deaths)? Maybe Nalo Hopkinson's output in the 2000's would fit here (although I haven't read anything except The Chaos yet), although I'm never sure how mainstream those books are even in SFF circles.

I don't list these books to go 'see, you're wrong'. I named, what, eight books when thousands are published each year and billions exist - come on, that is not enough or even a positive pattern. I still think these books are few and far between and that you have to dig to find them. And then you have to dig again the find the ones you'll like. And even those books I did name have their own troublesome stuff going on. I'm commenting more to offer some hope that this isn't about an impenetrable wall of modern publishing disinterest which would be pretty depressing because it's so difficult to change. Instead, I say 'sometimes people will put out stuff like this, but it's still a really hard road'. Which, I don't know if it's helpful? It's small comfort I know and it shouldn't be this way at all :(

[rosefox]

Jo Walton's Small Change books

should not be recommended to anyone who doesn't like it when queer characters die and/or are not permitted to have romantic happy endings.

Still angry about those too.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah that's kind of it - I would never rec most of these books for Renay to read because of the unhappy endings & character death but they've got worlds where there isn't just one gay, lesbian and bisexual character (also I haven't read the last book yet because I have a bad feeling). Maybe the change from the 90s is that you could get these worlds & happy endings whereas in 2000s you get these kind of worlds and still get a lot of character death & unhappy endings? I think I learned I should def bump that Tanya Huff book on my bookshelves up my list.

[bookgazing]

And that was me. And should read haven't read the last book in Small Change.

[winterkoninkje]

I was also pissed to see Vo die. I saw it coming a mile away, I knew it was inevitable, but I was still pissed when it happened.

He's such an interesting character— not merely "gay" but with a more complex and nuanced sexuality; and being disabled, yet not having that override his identity or sexuality. Summarily killing off such a complex character is a cop-out. It's the easy way to avoid resolving his complexities. Even setting aside the homophobic tropes, he deserved to have an actual resolution that lives up to the complexity of his character.

[renay]

Yes, this. :( I don't know why I didn't see it coming. I've gotten complacent for some reason.

I'm really regretful we won't get to see what Vo might have made Bulikov into with Shara's help, because it was his dream first, and she only came around to it via what she learned. So it's doubly disappointing to see a character with a lot of promise wiped out this way (I still find the whole scene where it went down gross) for pathos. I've grown tired of characters — any characters, really — dying because I primarily read in genre and its rampant.

Death is sad, sure. But a complicated life can contain sadness, too.

[winterkoninkje]

Woof, your comment just got me thinking again...

You know how lots of times when a woman comes up with an idea or argument and noone "notices" until a man repeats the exact same thing and gets the credit for it? I'm kinda feeling like this might be a flipped around version of that: the queer Vo has a dream, but it's the straight(?) Shara who gets the credit for seeing the dream through; and Vo's death is necessary to erase his contribution and ensure that Shara gets all the credit.

...It's been a while since I've read City of Stairs, so that reading might be totally off-base. But to whatever extent it holds up, it just makes the whole situation that much more disgusting.

I wonder if there's a name for this excuse for killing off a marginalized character. It's not really fridging (since it's not providing the motivational impulse to the hero), but it's certainly not a novel trope.

[rosefox]

Not to mention that Shara is a colonizer and Vo is one of the colonized. She might get credit for his vision just as she gets credit for "barbarian" Sigurd's feats of strength and cleverness.

The most basic problem with flip-the-script stories is that they tend to perpetuate the problems of the thing they're trying to critique. It is not actually any less problematic for a brown woman to be lauded for a pale man's work than vice versa.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks, Renay.

I shamefully admit to not seeing it. I'm trying to get better at seeing such things, but I am far from perfect.

Your perspective and pointing out of it is valuable to me.

[renay]

Thanks for saying so. :)

[thebaconfat]

Uggggh, thank you for the warning. I'd been interested in that book, but I'll knock it off the list now.

I'm tired of stumbling into them like a giant story version of a bear trap. I don't want us to be untouchable, but we're already so rare in mainstream genre literature that I'm not ready for stories where we die when there's only one of us — not yet.

This. At the very least I would like the queer character's death to be about something other than their sexuality. It is that much worse when the character is complex and interesting and likable -- when the author obviously cares I feel that much more betrayed. And when people sang the book's praises and nobody warned you because people didn't think that was worth warning for or they thought the book's other good points erased that betrayal somehow… that's kind of another betrayal in itself.

It would not be such a huge deal if I had the option to put this book down when I'm done and then pick up an awesome, light-hearted queer romance or adventure story. But I can't.

I struggle a lot with this kind of thing and how to deal with it when a book I otherwise enjoyed has one big blaring problem that makes me furious. Do I toss out the whole book right there or keep reading? Do I recommend it to people on the basis of its good points? How do you warn others about this kind of thing? I'm fortunate enough not to be a reviewer (haha) so generally I can just toss the thing and cry and rage and be done with it. I don't have to grapple that much with my other feelings about it. But I've invested my time and emotions and energy into reading and liking this book, and after it's stabbed me in the face, I may be able to put the book down but I can't take back my time or undo the hurt.

[renay]

I still recommend the book (although I understand why other people might choose to forgo it). Hell, if I had been warned I might have still read the book depending on my mood. But I would've saved myself the trouble of caring for the character. Strangely, once warned and knowing that the character will die, I become much less judgmental about the whole deal. Maybe because I go in knowing the author has some unexamined privileges, and it becomes less of a betrayal because I'm not invested.

I agree with the fact that there's multiple types of privilege at play here when it comes to the death of queer characters (writing, reading, recommending), but it sure is hard to talk about it, because so much of seeing that pattern is having experienced in over and over and over. Oh, do many times I've been told to "prove" my claim over this pattern, or the "if queer feelings/relationship, then physical injury/DEATH" pattern common in queer YA.

I wish I had good answers. :( If the book is otherwise telling a great story and I enjoyed my time with its other characters, I'll check with people who I rec it to. With this book I've recced it to several people after finishing and I said, "I think you'll like this but I have a warning that's a spoiler about the queer character, do you care?" because I know they care about queer characters and it's worked okay. For me it's one book at a time with a lot of comfort reading afterward (so much comfort reading).

[theliteraryomnivore.wordpress.com]

I always feel like the worst part of this is the moment where you feel torn between "okay, that's this one story…" and "this is part of the pattern!" It's the self-doubt creeping in when I should feel righteous and angry. And that is because we are so starved for consistent and diverse queer representation in mainstream SFF that this can even count as remotely positive representation. (Jodie above has listed off a handful of titles that do have queer characters, but percentage wise…)

I don't want to read a book published last year where an entire invented world boasts only one queer character and he gets killed off. I don't want to read a book where a queer character generates plot for the straight protagonist but kindly steps out of the way by shuffling off this mortal coil. I don't want to read a book that avoids the ramifications of featuring a queer character and their life by killing them off before it gets to anything discomfiting. (And discomfiting to who?)

[dolorosa_12]

I have had this reaction to certain pieces of media that were lauded and garlanded with gushing praise by my entire (fannish, progressive, concerned with issues of representation) social circle. It's worse, because you feel as if you've been let down twice: once by the work, which is like a punch to the face, and once by your community, for failing to notice things in the work which hurt you.

I haven't read the book in question, but I'm so sorry that it was such a miserable experience for you.

[odradek]

Thank you for this. I'm finding it nearly a year after the fact, but I needed to read it--in part because I've spent the last three months avoiding my audio version of City of Stairs. Some nagging suspicion had caught my mind and wouldn't let it go. Deprived of the ability to flip to the end and brace myself for the consequences, I simply stopped listening. Since then, I've made occasional forays onto the internet in search of spoilers that would either confirm or allay my anxieties, but I'd found nothing until finally stumbling on this review.

I don't think I'll be finishing the book. After a similar visceral disappointment in another recently popular SFF novel, I'm not sure where to wander next. What gives, authors! These ideas aren't brave.

[renay]

You're welcome! Although I continued to love the book despite my reservations, it's 100% understandable why you would let it drop (I am holding out hope that the sequel to this book is better, and have been told it can be read as a standalone novel, too). In mainstream epic fantasy this continues to happen, over and over and over, and I'm definitely a little weary of it. (Reading Karen Memory helped a little, but that's not epic fantasy.)

Was the popular novel you read The Traitor Baru Cormorant?

[odradek]

I'll hold out hope for the sequel as well! Although I might get that one in Kindle format, to avoid the problems I ran into this time.

Also, *taps nose*.

***BARU CORMORANT SPOILERS***

Baru Cormorant is an odd case in that I know it's not just a queer tragedy, it's a queer tragedy, but I'm generally skeptical about whether 'subversions' are possible or meaningful, and in a case where the 'subversion' of queer tragedy is still... queer tragedy, I think calling it anything else is playing a linguistic meta-game. Maybe I'm disappointed because Baru's arc isn't over, and this is the beginning low-point (I hear another book might be in the making?). Maybe I'm disappointed because now that we all know killing LGBTQ characters is a morally bad trope, authors are bored of letting LGBTQ characters live (they haven't though, actually), but think they can subvert it by... killing LGBTQ characters. Something something agency. :\

(On a final note, for all I enjoyed the Karen Memory cast, I found the world and story kind of flat. My favorite doses of LGBTQ characters in SFF have been coming from Ann Leckie and Max Gladstone.)

[renay]

I followed the discussion of Baru Cormorant when there was the argument about whether it should be called queer tragedy, which devolved into a rather circular argument about authorial identity. I started with this podcast and ended up disagreeing rather heartily with a critic I generally agree almost always agree with over semantics of all things. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...just because we love something doesn't mean it's not playing with particular toxic tropes and that it's somehow immune to those criticisms because it was attempting to subvert something.

I came down on this side of things pretty firmly, though. There is a second book that seems sort of firm (although I am basing it off the perspective of a reviewer I know who is deeper in the industry than I am, so grain of salt there) which might change things for the character and bring things around to a more hopeful resolution. But then that goes back to my problem of putting up with a book that punches you in the face just to get to content that includes you later on. That's almost worse than the scarcity issue! Anyway, I decided not to read that book based on reviews and I'm VERY glad I made that decision after dealing with City of Stairs. I'm sitting on the "call me when you stop killing the queers for ANY REASON, SF authors!" fence these days.

Karen Memory is steampunk and I've always assumed a light touch was a feature of the genre, versus other types of SF that dig deeper into the world building. But I definitely see that criticism of the narrative; I was just so hungry for positive stories where queers characters got to be happy and save the day that I found it wonderful and clung to it. I need to make Max Gladstone a priority this year for sure; he's been on my to-read list for over two years now!

[odradek]

What a good breakdown by H. R. Jones! I'm nervous about listening to that podcast on the off-chance Hurley says something I disagree with, but I suppose that's happened before--although not often, which is probably why it throws me off when it does.

For the record, I also heard about the second book TTBC from someone in the industry who seemed to think it was a given, so it does seem pretty likely from that angle.