2022 Hugo Awards: A Spindle Splintered/Elder Race

Featured Image for 2019 Hugo Award

Having covered the Best Short Story and Best Novelette categories, WWAC’s review series on the 2022 Hugo Award finalists now reaches Best Novella. This post shall discuss two of the six contenders: Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race

 

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. HarrowCover of A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow. Illustration shows a hand reaching down to the spire of a tower.

Zinnia Gray is a twenty-one-year-old with Generalised Roseville Malady, an illness that has taken the life of every recorded sufferer before the age of twenty-two. She associates her present condition with that of Sleeping Beauty, a figure who has fascinated her since she received an illustrated volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a child. When the time of what may be Zinnia’s final birthday rolls around, her best friend Charm thoroughly embarrasses her with a Sleeping Beauty-themed party, complete with a spindle.

Zinnia obligingly pricks herself – and finds herself transported to another world. This is a land of fairy tales, allowing Zinnia to meet a princess named Primrose: the real-life Sleeping Beauty. After befriending the princess, Zinnia looks on as the king announces Primrose’s impending marriage to Prince Harold of Glennwald – “handsome, in that generic, Captain America-ish way that does absolutely nothing for me” – who has tracked down the lair of the evil fairy responsible for Primrose’s curse.

It looks as though everything has been laid out. Just as Zinnia is fated to die young, Primrose is fated to marry her saviour Harold, even if she is not particularly keen on him. But the two women decide to reject their respective destinies, and in what turns out to be the first step in a grand re-write, they head off to confront the evil fairy for themselves…

A Spindle Splintered is the first instalment of Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables series, and it subjects the single most passive heroine in the bedtime canon to a thoroughly up-to-date reimagining. Feminist rewrites of fairy tales are nothing new, and Harrow – via her narrator Zinnia – acknowledges that she is walking some well-trodden ground:

I wish briefly but passionately that I’d been zapped into a different storyline, maybe one of those ’90s girl power fairy tale retellings with a rebellious princess who wears trousers and hates sewing. (I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.)

Indeed, through its overwhelming self-awareness, the novella gives the impression of trying to be the feminist fairy tale to end all feminist fairy tales (aside from the sequels, anyway). It opens by rejecting subtext in favour of point-blank – and very snarky – analysis: the early portions resemble a blog post at least as much as they do a work of narrative fiction, with Zinnia citing a Jezebel article on the “least woke” Disney films in the second paragraph. Something of this tone persists even once the story has got underway, as when Zinnia makes a timely dig at J. K. Rowling during a text conversation with Charm:

She texts back so fast I feel a hot stab of guilt, knowing she’s sleeping with her ringer on. how are you getting home??
Portkey?
there’s no such thing as portkeys asshole. A brief pause. and i thought we agreed never to mention joanne or her works ever again

But while a quick flick through might give the impression that A Spindle Splintered is more of a Cracked article than a story, the novella turns out to have far more going on beneath its surface than might be expected. To start with, Harrow has clearly done research into the different versions of the Sleeping Beauty story: not only does Zinnia remark upon the difference between the Perrault and Grimm renditions, different Sleeping Beauties turn out to exist within the story’s fantasy world, with inspired use being made of Zellandine – the heroine of a particularly disturbing medieval version of the story.

Second, as flippant as its tone may be, the story carries a genuine emotional heft. The eternal slumber of Sleeping Beauty – typically a rather abstract prospect for those of us outside fairyland – is brought into relief through comparison to Zinnia’s terminal illness. The story is able to articulate this subject while delicately avoiding over-sentimentality:

When I was eleven, I used my Make-a-Wish Foundation wish to spend a night in the Disney castle and get the full princess experience. It was a total letdown. I think I waited too long: eleven is old enough to see the cracks in the plaster, to sense the pity behind the megawatt smiles of the staff. It was like trying to play with my Barbies a year after I’d outgrown them, perfectly remembering how it used to feel but unable to feel it again.

Also helping the story along is a healthy amount of humour, with rarely a page going by without some wry observation or another. Many of these are the sort of obvious genre-spoofing that could just as easily have come out of a Shrek cartoon, as when Zinnia refers to the Prince Charming character as a “sentient cleft chin”, but others are more poignant. Zinnia has set herself a list of “dying girl rules”, one of which is no romance: her entire life, she tells us, is one long trolley problem, and she has no desire to put more bodies on the tracks. Elsewhere, she opines that “[t]omantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.”

On top of this, the novella is able to maintain its interest by keeping the reader guessing – a tactic that is harder than it may sound. To start with, given the story’s intertextual bent, it is never certain when another Sleeping Beauty will be introduced to the narrative, or which fairy tale archetype will be subverted next. Zinnia’s terminal illness prompts another question: is she truly fated to die young? The story treats the matter in a sober, clear-eyed manner meaning that it would be a cop-out to give her a magical cure – yet in a fairy tale world of transformation, there is surely room for something unexpected to happen.

Still another layer of ambiguity is provided by the basic adventure story question of who can be trusted: are the goodies so good and the baddies so bad? This is what drives A Spindle Splintered in terms of core plot mechanics, with Zinnia and Primrose being tossed between various characters of differing moral stripes. Each of these questions has been given a satisfying answer by the time the novella has run its course.

The novella has already received a sequel – A Mirror Mended, which takes us to the world of Snow White. Yet A Spindle Splintered itself gives little indication that it was intended as the first in a series: as a self-contained story, this is pitch-perfect.

 

Elder Race by Adrian TchaikovskyCover of Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Illustration shows a tower looming over a hilly landscaoe.

Disobeying the orders of her noble family, Lynesse Fourth Daughter heads with her travelling companion Esha Free Mark to the top of a forbidding mountain, where the Elder Tower awaits. Here, the two young women meet the ancient Nyrgoth Elder to alert him of a grave threat in the land: dark magic is being used, dark magic once used in a far-off age by Lyn’s legendary grandmother Astresse Once Regent. The source of this magic is a demon that steals minds, and unless the demon is dealt with, the land will be in dire peril.

This, at least, is the story as seen from the perspective of Lyn. The story narrated by Nygoth Elder – or Nyr Illim Tevitch, as he refers to himself – is very different. Nyr is a spacefaring anthropologist who was sent by Earth’s Explorer Corps to track down the interstellar colonies that have spent a thousand years cut off from the rest of humanity. Having spent centuries in stasis, Nyr arrives at the homeworld of his former companion Astresse Once Regent to learn that Astresse has long since died and passed into legend – a legend believed by her granddaughter Lyn.

To Nyr, this is a world not of magic, but of technology that the locals no longer understand. To Lyn, however, the seven-foot-tall Nyr is not an astronaut with technological implants but a sorcerer with a pair of horns, ”clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors.” Ordinarily, Nyr is forbidden from interfering with colonies; but as the demon is a threat that arose from another world, he is free to intervene. The trouble is, however, that he has no idea what the demon might actually be, and so the superstitions of the locals are his only guide.

With a dedication that credits Gene Wolf’s “Trip, Trap” as a particular influence, Elder Race belongs to a venerable subgenre that blends heroic fantasy with far-future, sometimes post-apocalyptic elements. This aesthetic has long since lost the novelty value that it once possessed in that long-ago era before He-Man, but it retains plenty of tantalising ironies to be explored.

And Elder Race is a story ripe with irony. “I am a remnant of a culture whose second flowering into space, that seemed unstoppable and glorious, was actually just brief and doomed”, says an angst-ridden Nyr. “I am more a relic worthy of study than those I was placed to observe.” He has a far greater understanding of the universe than the people of the colony possess, but he is still a long way from being the all-knowing magician that Lyn has made him out to be. The situation presents a tricky dilemma not only to Nyr, but also to Lyn, who is forced to realise that her hero of legend is actually something rather different.

Most of Elder Race’s chapters alternate between the perspectives of Lyn and Nyr, even after the two have met, although the novella’s centrepiece – quite literally, coming as it does exactly halfway through the book – is a chapter narrated by both characters. The two leads are each given a column, so we can see their two descriptions in parallel. Nyr’s “fifteen hundred years” become Lynesse’s “four hundred Storm-seasons”; a spaceship from Earth becomes a ferryboat from the otherworld; an onboard AI becomes a talking figurehead. The most crucial detail underlined here is that, while Nyr’s description is clearly the most accurate, Lyn’s account – written in a pseudo-King James Bible tone – is much prettier.

After this, the protagonists find common ground. Nyr is forced to accept that her direct involvement with the planet means that she can no longer lay claim to her stated role as disinterested observer; from there, it is only a small step to him taking on the role of legendary hero. Lyn, meanwhile, comes to realise that the old legends are not as accurate as she had believed and that she must rely upon her own skills of deduction: while she lacks Nyr’s knowledge, she is nonetheless capable of grasping the concept of scientific inquiry.

Across these shifts in perspective, the demon remains a fitting antagonist for the simple reason that neither character is able to understand it. Whether it is described in terms of evil spirits or of aliens, it is simply beyond their comprehension – and consequently an imposing threat to fantasy hero and scientist alike.

That said, the encounters with the demon turn out to be the novella’s weakest elements. Gene Wolfe was able to bring a touch of the genuinely weird to his scientific fantasy, but Elder Race struggles. While the demon and the effects that it has on its victims are horrific in concept, the story’s prose is too drily descriptive for it to come alive. The effect is reminiscent of late-period H. P. Lovecraft, who had come to see his once-eldritch beings as interesting rather than scary. The shortcoming stands out in large part because Elder Race is, on the whole, adept at shifting between distinct tones. Take, for example, the scene in which an injury impairs Nyr’s equipment and we segue from Lyn’s heroic-fantasy mode to the science fiction narrative of Nyr:

Nyrgoth Elder whirled round, focused more on Esha than the monsters, and something unfolded out of the corrupted man’s chest: a barbed, four-jointed arm that must have filled most of his chest cavity. It snapped forwards, father than a spearman could have lunged, and drove itself into Nyrgoth’s gt in a spray of blood.

[…]

ow.
bloody.
stabbed me.

While the novella succeeds in carrying both modes, the general impression is that its heart lies with heroic fantasy, particularly given that it comes to actively subvert its science fiction component: a major part of Nyr’s character arc is his disagreement with his superiors, who observe without interfering.

How times change. Earlier stories of interplanetary adventure were written on the assumption that their heroes had every right to interfere in the affairs of other worlds. Later, Star Trek and its non-interventionist Prime Directive would chime with rising suspicion of colonial narratives.

But the Prime Directive was notoriously hard for writers of escapist adventures to sustain with consistency. In Elder Race, we see a story that looks at questions of intervention and non-intervention – and decides that the best answer is to put on a pointy hat, become a wizard, and run riot in a world of fantasy.

Series Navigation<< 2022 Hugo Awards: O2 Arena/L’Esprit de L’Escalier2022 Hugo Awards: The Past is Red/Across the Green Grass Fields >>
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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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