The Here And Now

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Terrible things happen to people in this novel, but the novel is not about terrible things happening to people. It’s about their whole-hearted survival.

As an example of how Marks’s ethos of constructive optimism structures the text, I’ll point toward the calm pleasure I felt in realizing that, for all the violence and abuse that occurs in Shaftal, gender and sexuality exist in a space of unremarkable equity. Homophobia and sexism are not considerations or powers with which to be reckoned. While rape exists and is acknowledged—as are murder, torture, political assassination, genocide—the potential for victimization is not directed with exploitive and lavish attention toward the punitive destruction of women’s bodies, or brown bodies, or queer bodies, or all of the above.

The couples (and moresomes) featured in romantic connections throughout the book are in fact predominantly and wonderfully queer: Karis and Zanja as well as Emil and Medric pair up, out of our protagonists. Norina is a woman in a relationship with a man, but Marks has cleverly illustrated the functions of gender in Shaftal’s social order therein as well. Norina is a Truthken, a lawgiver and sometimes-soldier, while her husband is a healer—and when she becomes pregnant, the irritation of carrying a child is explicitly noted as a thing she wishes he biologically was doing. He’s also the primary caregiver for the baby once the child is born. Their approaches to their roles are individual and specific rather than gendered in the “expected” manner.

It hearkens back, in my mind, to classic feminist, queer SF. Marks has built a world in the shape that Joanna Russ wrote about critically, that Le Guin imagined and so forth, where gender is not swap-reversed or rendered implausibly invisible. Rather, questions of production, labor, time, and privilege are constructed around the presumption of creating equity. There is a subtle brilliance to that considered and thoughtful approach to a world without patriarchal oppression. And it also means that sometimes, for instance, colonial brutality is meted out as much from a woman’s hands as a man’s, as much by soldiers as politicians as citizens.