Elevator pitch for In The Vanisher’s Palace: lesbian Beauty and the Beast and the beast is a dragon.
Although it had ME at “new book by Aliette de Bodard”— Carl Rigney (@carlrigney) October 16, 2018
That was the tweet that got me to immediately buy a copy of Aliette de Bodard’s latest book. It’s not a perfect comparison: the setting is a post-apocalyptic civilization with Vietnamese mythology, the Beauty in this case is a failed scholar who takes her mother’s place as slave to a dragon in return for a healing spell, and the Beast has zero interest in being cured or turned into a human or rescued in any way. But there is a romance and a fantasy castle, and despite wanting to go home to her family for most of the story, the Beauty eventually realizes that what she wants most in the whole world is to stay with the Beast.
In the original fairy tale, the Beast has to let the Beauty go home so she could make her own choice to come back and marry the Beast. Otherwise there would be no way to know if she was really in love, or just a prisoner following the orders of the person who had power over her. And that’s a theme that Bodard’s story keeps returning to. Sure, there’s also metaphors about colonization and how being a parent involves so many more responsibilities than just loving your children. But it’s mostly about power; who doesn’t have any, who does, and how it’s used.
The world of this story is a very dangerous place, the result of beings who had so much power and scientific knowledge that they could manipulate the building blocks of matter, and who didn’t care how badly they damaged the world while doing so. The environment is now filled with pollution, out of control constructs, and incurable viruses. The beings played with the world like a toy until they were bored and then left, never to return. Hence their name: the Vanishers.
Yên and her mother are healers in a village run by a powerful set of Elders who are constantly looking for ways to get rid of “useless” people (useless in this case meaning someone they don’t like and who isn’t directly related to an Elder). If you’re not useful, you’re constantly in fear of a painful death: sent to be taken apart by a leftover Vanisher artifact, banished into the wilderness with no food…
…or traded to the Dragon, who can sometimes cure someone who’s dying from one of a thousand different Vanisher viruses, but only for a price. Yên can’t bear the thought of her mother being sent away, and she knows her village needs a healer more than it needs a children’s teacher. So she offers to go to the Dragon’s palace in her mother’s place, even though she’s almost 100% sure the Dragon only wants her for food.
But surprisingly, the Dragon needs something quite different; a human teacher for her two children. Vu Côn is a former servant of the Vanishers, and is now doing what little she can to fix the damage they left behind. This was my favorite character, for many reasons. She’s stunningly beautiful (whether in her dragon or human form; she shifts back and forth between the two, sometimes stopping partway when she’s distracted) she’s devoted to her children (not always great at showing affection, but it’s very clear she’d die to keep them safe), she dryly amused by just about everything Yên says, and she’s very, very aware that she has total control over her captive human, so she has to be very careful to not take advantage of someone who really doesn’t have any power to refuse anything she asks for.
So it makes things complicated that both Yên and Vu Côn feel an attraction to each other from practically their first meeting.
Teeth – sharp, pointed – gleamed in her mouth, and it took no effort at all to imagine that huge maw snapping over flesh and bone, tearing chunks of meat away from arms and legs, nudging ribs open to gobble up heart and liver and lungs.
Mother had been right: she was beautiful.
Most of the action in this story takes place in Vu Côn‘s palace, which was built by Vanisher technology and is totally and entertainingly insane, as Yên finds out when she wakes up in a bedroom where geometry works differently and the walls keep pulling back into infinity. The hallways twist alarmingly, floors morph into ceilings and back again, the library is a giant sphere with living metal trees, and the many palace windows sometimes look onto the same place but at a different time of day, or year, or upside down, or onto a courtyard where everything’s being melted by lava while the window next to it shows the same courtyard in spring.
It was night in the palace, and nothing made sense anymore: courtyards with towers that became underground silos, gardens with trees on every wall and roof, endless rooms where the windows opened on a hundred, a thousand different realities, where two suns became a sun eaten by a wolf became ten crows of fire spreading burning winds amidst a hail of arrows, where the moon was encircled by the roots of a banyan tree, its leaves falling pale and lifeless over the ruins of the earth…
The growing attraction between Yên and Vu Côn feels like a ceremonial dance, carefully circling each other, stepping forward, pulling back, every gesture has a meaning, all of it with a backdrop of the impossible palace and magic that looks like flowing shadows or a scatter of words in the air. Yên is way, way out of her depth, and Vu Côn has gotten used to deciding what’s best for everyone and keeping secrets about herself and the palace and her children (especially her children), so a lot of mistakes are made. But as one of the characters points out, what matters about mistakes is how you choose to fix them.