“The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.'”
We start with the the head abbot of the Grand Monastery, climbing the eight hundred steps to the Great High Palace of the Protectorate. He thinks the Protector is finally going to honor her promise to send one of her children to apprentice at the Great Monastery, possibly Sonomi, the Protector’s youngest and spectacularly gifted child.
It turns out the monk is right and wrong. His mistake was giving the Protector too much leeway with the phrase “one of her children”.
J.Y. Yang’s Hugo-nominated novella is only a couple hundred pages long, but it’s epic in scope. The story takes place over the course of decades, featuring members of a royal dynasty who are trying to find their own place in a struggle between the monarchy and the monastery, and between new technology and old magic.
Many stories throw you into the middle of an unfamiliar world – the action already in progress – and let you figure things out on the fly. JY Yang does something similar here, but gently. It’s like dropping a pebble into a pool; the Asian fantasy setting is very gradually revealed, with quiet but stunning images of “slackcraft”, the elemental-based magic some of the more fortunate characters can use.
The cart was approaching a marvel of slackcraft: a massive square of water that stood unsupported, enveloping the center of the Grand Palace. A hundred yards high and a thousand yards in length and breadth, the moat-cube was large enough to swallow fifty houses. Golden fish bigger than a child’s head sluiced through crystalline turquoise.
The breaks between the chapters can sometimes jump a decade at once, so there’s not much time to go into detail about all the characters and where they fit into a growing rebellion between the Tensorate (technology-based) and the Protectorate (mostly magic, although the Protector will use pretty much any method to stay in power.) For the most part we focus on the lives of the royal twins who were created for the sole purpose of paying off a debt.
Neither Mokoya nor Akeha like living under someone else’s control, being used for someone else’s agenda. Then one sibling finds out their magical talent is seeing the future, and their lives become simultaneously more complicated and even less free. Seeing what’s going to happen doesn’t necessarily mean being able to change it, although the twins’ mother is ruthless enough to do a lot of damage to anyone who looks like they might be a problem. Eventually one of the twins realizes they can’t remain the “spare” child for the rest of their life, they have to try to find their own life outside of their mother’s control.
One element of this book that’s been getting a lot of attention is the fact that children in this world are born genderless; they only become either male or female when they reach adulthood and undergo a ceremony that’s partly ritual and partly surgical. Characters who haven’t made the change yet are referred to as “they”, and the author does a good job of keeping that from being confusing.
I keep seeing people describing this as the characters “choosing” their gender, but I feel like this misses the point a little. People choose when to make the change (and sometimes how much of it to make), but the way the story is written their gender is less of a choice and more of a realization. It’s a discovery, overwhelming and beautiful sometimes, of something that they never considered before, but which has somehow always been a part of themselves.
A new horizon unfolded, shining with ten thousand unnamed stars. New possibilities, new understandings, new ways of being. They should have thought of this earlier. Why hadn’t they thought of this earlier? It was like cutting themselves open and finding another creature living inside, nested in their blood and bones and guts.
I was expecting a tale of a plucky band of rebels fighting to overthrow a tyrant, but the story is much more subtle than that, and a lot more convoluted. Even though the story lasts a few decades, the ending echos the beginning and it feels in some way like nothing has changed, even though everything about how the characters see the world now has changed.
And one thing that made the ending feel a little incomplete: this first book of the Tensorate series only tells half the story. This is where we learn the story of the “spare” twin, Akeha. We don’t get to hear Mokoya’s story until book two.
Yuko Shimizu did the lovely cover art. In fact, she’s doing the covers for the entire series. Check out some of her award-winning illustrations at yukoart.com