2022 Hugo Award Reviews: Tangles/The Sin of America

Featured Image for 2019 Hugo Award

Welcome to the second part of WWAC’s 2022 Hugo Award review series. This instalment shall be covering two more Best Short Story finalists: Seanan McGuire’s “Tangles” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Sin of America”…

Fantasy illustration showing a white-skinned dryad emerging from a gnarled tree, with whisps of green smoke emerging.

“Tangles” by Seanan McGuire

Wrenn, a dryad, makes her way through the land of Innistrad in the body of an ambulant tree that she calls Six (on the grounds that it is the sixth that she has inhabited in such a manner). Their journey reaches a point where Six must settle his roots, and Wrenn sets off in search of her Seven.

But the land is not welcoming. The local church hears reports of a “white witch” seen in the forest, and sends a hunting party of cathars to track her down. Accompanying them is Teferi, a travelling mage who has ambivalent feelings towards his present hosts, and who happens to be the one who runs into the alleged white witch, Wrenn:

Teferi walked toward her, hands out and open, fingers spread to show that he was shaping no arcane symbols, readying no spells. Given her coloring, she was likely to be the cathars’ “white witch,” but she seemed more like a gift from the wood, for none could understand the natural world like a dryad could, even as there was space for misunderstanding between those of flesh and bone and those of sap. His foot, placed without looking, snapped the smallest of fallen twigs, and she whirled, eyes gone wide, pressing her back to the bark of the tree she had been speaking with. As she did not meld into it, he thought himself safe to continue approaching, and moved closer, stopping at a respectful distance and offering her a shallow bow.

“Forgive me the intrusion, but you seemed unwell,” he said. “May I offer aid?”

“Stay back, mage,” she said, voice sharp as a broken branch, but still soft, as if half the heart had been cut out of it. “I can defend myself.”

As a story set in the universe of Magic: The Gathering, “Tangles” is something of a rarity: a work of media tie-in fiction that has earned a spot in one of the Hugo Awards’ prose categories. The only other tie-in to have done so is Dan Wells’ Iron Kingdoms novella The Butcher of Khardov, and that book’s presence on the ballot was one of many oddities stirred up by the Puppy campaigns. “Tangles” needed no such campaigning: the star-power of author Seanan McGuire, a Hugo Award regular, doubtless assured that it would receive attention.

As is typically the case with such tie-ins, the story is a straightforward example of its genre. While SF/F awards place great value on works of intertextuality and genre deconstruction, “Tangles” is, quite simply, a fantasy story that drops us into a never-never land of dryads, ghosts, mages and walking tees. That said, McGuire understands that a story built from such familiar material will need a touch of freshness in its execution to succeed.

In the short period that comprises its first half, “Tangles” has sketched out a richly-textured fantasy creation in its tree-riding dryad. We learn that Wrenn is a survivor of a great fire who now lives by hopping from tree to tree, but who is also confined to specific trees that can hear her song. We read that the relationship between dryad and tree is a delicate one, and that Wrenn must treat her arboreal hosts as partners rather than as beasts of burden. We even find that a tree which has been inhabited by a Dryad is introduced to o the concept of gender, something not typically found among their kind (Six decides to be masculine).

McGuire’s prose, meanwhile, conveys the physical aspects of such concepts:

Wrenn and Six took a step—one of their last together—and put their massive foot down on the soil of Innistrad, deep within the Kessig forest. This was near the place where they had met for the first time. Here? Wrenn inquired, asking without opening her mouth. How the question ached and burned at her, how it ached. This part was always painful.

Somehow, it hurt more this time than it had when she was parted from Four, who had been injured so badly in battle that they had barely been able to complete their last steps together before the valiant old tree had shuddered and expelled her from its heart, sending her to sprawl, bare-limbed and exposed, on the earth of Innistrad.

Roughly halfway through the story, the two protagonists encounter a supernatural being, initially implied to be a ghost of some sort (as Wrenn says: “The soil does not encourage the dead to rest”) and eventually manifesting as “a warped and twisted parody of a humanoid, caught somewhere at the intersection between man, beast, and tree”.

Teferi is able to make short work of the monster, but at a cost. The magic that he uses to overcome the attacker also turns the surrounding path into a chaotic mess:

Teferi looked over his shoulder. The path was gone, or rather, the path was replicated, transformed from a reasonably straight line cut through the trees to a tangled ball of identical paths, each one branching off in a different direction, until it seemed they must run out of separate ways for them to go. The distinctive crackle of time magic hung over it all.

“. . . Oh,” said Teferi, faintly.

“Yes,” said Wrenn. “Oh.” Then, with more anger in her voice, she said, “The tree that called me is gone. I can’t hear it anymore. Do you know what you’ve done?”

And so Teferi must help Wrenn to find another tree for herself before her inner fire burns her away to nothing. As the two work together, the story contrasts not only their personalities but also their differing magical techniques: Wrenn’s elemental earth-focused practice against Teferi’s spells, which are more mechanical in nature (described in terms of cogs and casements) and prone to backfiring when the pieces go astray.

Two central characters, two forms of magic, and an intriguing fantasy world, all conjured up in a single short story: ”Tangles” is a testament to the continued value of even the most traditional fantasy forms. Somebody familiar with Magic: The Gathering may get a little extra out of it, but crucially, it also has plenty to offer a reader who has never touched a Magic card in their life.

Cover of Uncanny Magazine issue 39. Illustration shows a figure wearing an elaborate headdress with plant life and feathers.

“The Sin of America” by Catherynne M. Valente

Outside the town of Sheridan, Wyoming is the Blue Bison Diner and Souvenir Shoppe. One of the customers at this establishment is Ruby-Rose Martineau, daughter to a pair of butterfly farmers. As the omniscient narrator repeatedly tells us, the Blue Bison is serving the sin of America – and Ruby-Rose is eating the sin of America. But what, exactly, does this mean…?

“The Sin of America” is a story that uses its oddball smalltown setting to deliberately enigmatic ends. It is in no hurry to clear up its mysteries, as should be clear from the repetition that runs through the narrative. This begins right at the start of the story, which resembles a folksy American mutation of the famous opening to J. Milton Hayes’ “The Green Eye of the Yellow God”:

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

The tale spends its early stretches painting in the history of its setting and principal characters, and it does so with a colourful palette – so colouful, in fact, that it is easy to lose sight of the subject matter being anything but whimsical. We read of how Ruby-Rose ran away from the butterfly farm as soon as she had enough money, tried to make it as a dancer only to ruin her feet, had a short marriage and birthed a baby with half a heart, was preyed upon by a film producer who fathered her second child.

We also learn the history of the diner and its staff. Its founder was Linda Gage, “who opened the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe in 1981 and got T-boned by the biggest horse-trailer you ever saw in 1982. Nothing left but hooves and hair and Linda and all her dear little plans smeared up and down I-90 for half a mile in each direction.” Her husband Herb Gage now runs the business, and waitress Emmeline is pregnant with his child.

While this past is related to us, the story’s present is surrounded by a mounting unease. Something strange is clearly going on in this tale of “the sin of America”. Waitress Emmeline, although filled with anxiety over her own pregnancy, also has room for discomfort about “this great and frightening thing happening right now today in her place of business”. Ruby-Rose’s arrival is clearly a special occasion, to the extent that she is served alcohol despite the diner having no liquor license, yet there is not a speck of joy about her:

Ruby-Rose Martineau takes three short, sharp breaths and crushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she stops shaking. “Am I allowed to drink?” she whispers, still hiding like a child in the dark behind her hands. “I don’t know how this works.”
“Me neither, but…” Her voice drops to a whisper, like she’s getting away with something lovely and wicked. “I say you should treat yourself, Ruby.”
“Okay,” Ruby sniffles like a kid.

Meanwhile, a diner television shows news reports about a man named Charles Salazar and his involvement in a Ponzi scheme; the announcements are repeated – rather like the repeated line about the woman eating the sin of America – but Salazar’s full relevance does not become clear until the very end.

Just as the story’s setting has a cosy surface that masks something sinister going on below, “The Sin of America” is itself able to vary its tone in almost imperceptible shifts. The emotions and sensations that Ruby-Rose goes through as she eats her meal range from the poignant (“It tastes like Christmas and for a moment Ruby-Rose Martineau just savors it… the memory of all the milkshakes she’s drunk so thoughtlessly”) to the pungent (“The ribeye is so rare it just tastes like blood, like biting somehow into blood as solid as stone”). One of the sharpest turns comes during a flashback to the previous day, where the long-awaited revelation as to what is going on is set against the quirkily sentimental backdrop of Ruby-Rose’s family butterfly farm (”the ultimate butterfly experience!”).

Once we learn the true nature of “eating the sin of America”, the story turns out to be a calculated satire. Its premise is not entirely original – Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” from 1948 has a similar central concept. But while the themes are familiar, the story provides some novel perspectives.

A number of the recurring images and details serve as analogies for the final twist: Ruby-Rose’s child that was born with half a heart; the boy wrapped up in a mock-cocoon at the butterfly farm; and the predatory men in the lives of both Ruby-Rose and Emmeline. “The Sin of America” is a story made up of curious, often enigmatic pieces that all come together to form a visceral and harrowing picture.

Series Navigation<< 2022 Hugo Awards: That Story isn’t the Story/Bots of the Lost Ark2022 Hugo Awards: Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather/Unknown Number >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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