The 2024 Ignyte finalists for Best Novel collectively exemplify the “vibrancy and diversity” that the awards seek to celebrate. Their settings take us to twelfth-century China and an alternative nineteenth-century Turtle Island, to the city of Luriat in a familiar-but-different secondary world, the contemporary US and US Virgin Islands in a few parallel realities, and globe-trotting around the real and spirit worlds across a millennium. The protagonists include a band of outlaws of marginalised genders, a Chosen One who has unchosen himself but can’t escape his intergenerational trauma or his destiny, a Yoruba orisha in love with a succubus, a young Indigenous woman who knows having two romantic interests means more love and not competition, and the largest cast of main characters I’ve ever enjoyed keeping track of.
In so doing, they each showcase differently familiar worlds and problems, and capture a range of genre conventions or un-conventions. For example, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi is described as a heist novel, and it is—but recovering a stolen artefact from the British Museum isn’t as important to the story as its narrative of freedom in a capitalist society or the growing romance between Yoruba deity Shigidi and the succubus Nneoma, based on the figure of Naamah in Jewish literature. Their pasts are revealed in flashbacks across a fragmented timeline, with cinematic prose that suits a narrative alternating between hedonism, history, and battles. Aside from this, Shigidi stands out for its unusual worldbuilding, featuring capitalist spirit companies exploiting lower-level deities.
S. L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws also has many recognisable elements in its tale of rebellion against tyranny and corruption, based on Chinese classic The Water Margin (c. 1450), but its cast predominantly comprises female and queer characters. The novel is set during the twelfth-century Song dynasty with a touch of magic and alchemy, several protagonists who have varied motives and backstories (including an arms instructor, a ghost hunter, a poet, a monk, and at least one cannibal), and numerous fight scenes drawing on the author’s expertise in martial arts and stunt performance. As in Shigidi, the storytelling is highly visual, particularly the details of battles, so it’s easy to imagine on screen or in comic format. The plot and action might feel familiar, but this has the effect of highlighting the cast and themes that set The Water Outlaws apart.
The book that least fits conventional genre norms is Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors. This novel is nominally a secondary world contemporary fantasy featuring “the high drama of divine revolutionaries,” but this doesn’t evolve into the type of conflict narrative seen in The Water Outlaws or Shigidi. There is still violence—the main character, Fetter, is raised for it—but for the most part it’s simply inherent to life in this setting, and Fetter actively chooses it only when he sees no other options. Not only are the challenges faced by the characters—historical revisionism, colonialism, state violence that’s almost synonymous with religious violence, and more—strongly grounded in reality, but the physical details of the setting are also very reminiscent of Sri Lanka and particularly Colombo. [1] Drawing on familiar settings, refiguring the narrative of Buddha’s son Rāhula, and capturing how the effects of colonisation and historical revisionism continue to inflict trauma on the land and its people after the events themselves have been erased, Saint manages to be simultaneously wildly imaginative and unusually realistic.
Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence trilogy—of which the second volume, We Are The Crisis, has made the Ignyte’s Best Novel shortlist—also mixes real-world issues with supernatural elements. The books skip through space, time, and parallel worlds, across recent-past and contemporary versions of Massachusetts and St. Thomas, introducing more and more people and making for an even more complex timeline than Shigidi, where we’re largely confined to following the two main characters. Conceptually, the series follows the likes of X-Men in depicting superpowers as an analogy for intrinsic characteristics targeted for marginalisation, but with more explicit acknowledgement of intersectionality. Many of the characters are coming to terms with either the existence of “monsters,” including themselves, or with the way monsters are received by society. The brutal physical violence faced by Turnbull’s monsters and their allies makes the concept strikingly analogous to ethnicity in the US context, alongside political violence reminiscent of gender and disability discrimination.
As in The Water Outlaws, the cast of We Are The Crisis have a range of motives and backgrounds, from a bookshop co-op co-owner turned werewolf pushing for mainstream acceptance of monsters, to shadowy secret society leaders trying to influence the narrative for reasons that aren’t yet clear. It’s impossible to break the battle down into just two sides, and by this point in the trilogy the reader—along with the characters—is likely just beginning to understand the different factions and their goals. The disparate groups are threaded together by the narrator, who crosses between realities. Many characters haven’t yet interacted directly, and it’s not clear how everything can tie together in just one more book. But Crisis, like its predecessor, No Gods, No Monsters (2021), has such an overt focus on community-building and solidarity that, although it’s a little discomfiting to be so far into a trilogy without an idea of direction, I’d like to believe Turnbull knows where it’s all going, if only for reassurance that working together can achieve social justice in the face of extremism.
Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is an alt-history fantasy that recalls previous SFF works using similar concepts and settings, particularly humans bonding with dragons and protagonists navigating colonial academia: Naomi Novik’s Temeraire (2006-2016) immediately comes to mind, but so do the Dragonriders of Pern novels (1967-) and R.F. Kuang’s Babel (2022). As in The Water Outlaws, Blackgoose’s use of familiar tropes lets her novel’s unique aspects shine. The main character is a confident, self-possessed young Indigenous woman in an alt-history Turtle Island. Having come of age in the early years of a colonial regime, she makes the conscious decision to study in a colonial academy knowing she has limited options, but with the determination to recover traditional knowledge about dragon-human mutualism that she will bring back to benefit her community. This book is the first in the Nampeshiweisit series, and gives a clear sense of Anequs’s personality, the strength she gains from being grounded in her homeland and community, and her potential as a role model. While shortlisted for the Ignytes as an adult novel, it was awarded the Nebula for Middle Grade/Young Adult fiction, and seems at least as suitable for young adult readers, if not more.
One element shared by each of the finalists, and by many contemporary speculative fiction novels, is a focus on trauma and injustice. Here, the characters’ personalities and choices are closely linked with their histories and the structures they are trying to fight or flee. Those in The Water Outlaws and Shigidi start off dealing with personal traumas—injustices and burdens that, while systemic, have been inflicted directly on the characters rather than passed down through generations. Injustice is part of the social fabric in the other three novels: particularly in The Saint of Bright Doors and Dragon’s Breath, we see how parental experience of colonialism and historical injustice shapes the protagonists. Whether they’re opposing systemic oppression through community-building or—like Shigidi—only trying to free themselves, the cast of the shortlist range from antiheroes through morally ambiguous characters who’ll commit torture and violence for a cause they believe in, to reluctant, flawed protagonists, and seemingly flawless heroes. Their respective narratives take in trauma, injustice, and questions of what makes a hero.
Although Shigidi’s worldbuilding ensures it isn’t a typical heist story or romance, I felt the protagonists did fit an antihero archetype, with their more violent actions rarely morally justifiable. Created by the absentee chairman of the Orisha Spirit Company, nightmare god Shigidi is scraping by on “barely enough prayers and offerings to keep him in existence,” because belief is low and his hated job offers a little security. He has already been murdering people in their beds for minimal “pray-pay” from the spirit company, and is very willing to join Nneoma when she offers him good looks and a chance to turn freelancer. Beauty is very important to Shigidi, and he literally lets Nneoma reshape him to be “beautiful”:
Olorun had created him that way intentionally—large head, ugly face, small body, ashy, and pockmarked skin of unpolished clay. Every time he saw himself reflected, in a mirror or on a water surface, he craved the oblivion of alcohol. He had never even felt the touch of a woman—human or god or spirit. How could I, he thought, looking the way I do?
He hated it, and because of it, he’d spent a significant amount of his existence hating himself.
As a succubus, Nneoma survives on sex and murder—she meets Shigidi while going after the same woman. The two are soon off looking for victims to seduce together. Later in the book she’s even shown sexually assaulting one of her victims before killing him. But she doesn’t care for others judging her use of sex as a weapon, she tells the god Olorun:
“You males are all the same. Both human and god alike. You love sex, you’re all obsessed with it even, but you like to pretend you aren’t and you especially hate it when we use it as a weapon against you.”
The author has said that one goal with Nneoma was to show her actions as “amoral” rather than “evil.” And, of course, a reader doesn’t have to agree with the protagonists’ actions or morals to be interested in them. But as well as these, there may be value judgments implicit in other characters’ appearances that can’t be attributed to the main characters’ perspectives. I counted three men with pot bellies who were all vulnerable to the protagonists’ influence, and at least two of whom came to a bad end as a result. The two female orishas who get most page-time are also described with stereotypes that may appear negative to readers—one changes from a “tall, shapely woman” to “corpulent” when she loses her disguise; another, also fat, has a “shrill, high-pitched voice.” Fortunately, there are also other antagonists and victims with a range of body types. This could be an unintended consequence of the protagonists having few allies, but it comes across as an outdated authorial choice to portray the only fat characters as worthless victims or villains, and the protagonists as “beautiful.”
There’s political context to Shigidi’s setting: gods have decided capitalism is a good way to distribute the power they get from human belief and, at a time when faith is low, the Orisha Spirit Company is in a bit of corporate trouble. As for the heist storyline, it turns out even the divine have trouble getting their stolen stuff back from the British. Shigidi and Nneoma aren’t out to confront or change colonial or capitalist systems, though. Compared with the rest of the shortlist, this book’s strength is found less in inspiring change and more in creative worldbuilding, action, and romance—the success of individuals in beating up some other guy, escaping a hated job, falling in love, and overcoming their personal challenges to do so.
The Water Outlaws’ main protagonist, Lin Chong, an arms instructor driven by her morals and sense of duty, also faces a personal challenge—but it’s to her entire worldview. When she’s targeted by a more powerful, less scrupulous man, those who offer her sanctuary are not quite as powerful, and many of them can’t be described as scrupulous either: The bandits of Liangshan were “founded by women who had fallen off the edges of society,” one explains, and they continue to steal, inflict violence, and take in fugitives. Lin Chong doesn’t approve. But the bandits are abolitionists by nature and necessity, giving others who’ve committed crimes a chance to reform, while the Imperial officials don’t hesitate to punish, imprison, torture, or kill anyone they dislike. Lin Chong realises she’s been wilfully ignoring the flaws in society that she had, until now, been able to work around:
She hadn’t wanted to admit that injustice was anything more than a rarity, the sad result only when a thousand turns of luck all landed wrong … How could civilization be rotten to its core and still function?
She’s not the only character in the novel who, having found a way to survive in a corrupt patriarchy, is forced to become less complacent when she realises keeping your head down and following the rules isn’t enough to protect the less powerful. Her friend, Li Junyi, who starts off more willing to challenge authority, also has her world turned upside down, and eventually finds her own way to keep fighting from within the Imperial system. Lin Chong’s adjustment to her new life is a compromise, but she has company in this, as she also does in her attachment to the Empire. Several of the Liangshan bandits already envision using their banditry to fight corruption, and after Lin Chong joins them, they start to win popular support from ordinary citizens to do so. To use western analogies, these protagonists are Robin Hood-style outlaws, not those of the Wild West.
The authorial message I sensed here was in Lin Chong’s decision to stay with the bandits in the hope of pushing for a justice-oriented approach from within—something she never had a chance, or desire, to attempt in her official and long-held arms instructor role. The element that stands out most, though—especially for a fantasy novel with such a large cast and several point of view characters—is that Lin Chong’s new comrades are almost all women, those who “ride the sixteen winds” (meaning they change gender, temporarily or permanently), or not gendered. My understanding is that this is where Huang deviates the most from the original story, where most of these characters were men. Other types of marginalisation like colourism, discrimination against those from outlying provinces, and disability, are gently highlighted as well. For example, the bandits’ physician An Daoquan communicates through sign language, and of her backstory, Chao Gai says, “it’s very easy to frame or blame the woman who cannot speak for herself” in a way that magistrates understand. The cast is also varied in age, with several bandits having a bit more life experience—including Lin Chong, who must be in her forties or fifties, with grown children. This isn’t framed overtly as empowerment for middle-aged women; their ages simply feel believable, as reflected in their character development, martial skills, and relationships with the younger bandits. While the bandits’ goals are portrayed as idealistic, their diversity exists quietly in the background in a way that makes it realistic.
One question, likely to be a theme from the source text, is left open. The poet Song Jiang claims that “[w]e fight to improve the Empire because of our love for it.” The outlaws aren’t concerned about changing the Imperial structure, only about removing those they see as corrupt and unjust from it. Lin Chong considers this “rationalization,” and still wants to believe it. Later, she’s the one spreading this message:
“Let the Empire be the Emperor and the people, not those others who would use their power to destroy everything civilized we have built over so many generations.”
Why are these rebellious, justice-oriented bandits of (according to the novel’s blurb) “dangerous philosophies, and ungovernable gender” so unwilling to question imperialism? Is it just expedient for vigilantes to believe they’re fighting for something greater? Although several bandits share Song Jiang’s idealism, we see them dividing up looted treasure amongst themselves early on: “Nothing manufactured loyalty—or drained resentments—faster than gold,” thinks their tactician. Later in the story, several bandits choose torture, cannibalism, and murder as an appropriate way to avenge a comrade. “We are the Empire,” says Lin Chong as Liangshan grows in fame and popularity. It’s hard to know whether the growing number of bandits will stay united as they grow in power—or whether their new institution will be any more resistant to corruption and injustice than the original Empire.
The reluctant hero of The Saint of Bright Doors also seems headed towards vigilantism at the start, with much of his childhood devoted to training as an assassin. Fetter, like Shigidi, gains just enough control over his own life for his own satisfaction early on in the novel—escaping maternal expectations that he will commit patricide and finding the freedom of city life—before encountering influential people with other ideas.
He is making a new life for himself, all his own. His only purpose now is peace, he tells himself. To find some; to keep it; to age in grace; to never again raise his hand in violence.
Like Lin Chong, Fetter manages to get by in Luriat by following the rules, for a time and it’s partly the manipulation of others and partly his own nature (curiosity, rather than self-defence in his case) that disrupts his quiet life.
The Saint of Bright Doors is the only shortlisted novel that closely follows the development of a single character over a long period, allowing us to see how the aspects of himself Fetter has tried to keep separate—assassin son, ex-Chosen One, low-status migrant, friendly neighbour, lover, scholar, exile—are forced together by these events. Fetter doesn’t prioritise his love interests or his freedom, though, and has no institutional loyalty holding him back; he has no illusions about finding justice and equality in Luriati society and its power structures. Under the veneer of socialism, different categories of citizens have different levels of protection and privilege, and he experiences this directly when masquerading as Peroe, a student of “higher type” in “Alabi race science.”
Success for other protagonists on the shortlist might include a long-term view of building alternative power structures and combating such injustice. For Fetter, it might be enough to stop his father, cult leader the Perfect and Kind. When he sees no alternative, Fetter takes great risks to do so. But where Shigidi and The Water Outlaws thrive on teamwork, strategised heists, and battles involving expert fighters, Fetter is often strategising on his own and not always successfully, even cutting himself off from allies out of guilt and shame:
He … abandoned the people who loved him, put everyone who ever touched his lives at risk, and he failed—he sacrificed all of this for nothing. He deserved to stand in the wreckage of all his lives.
His efforts often seem futile—he is, after all, dealing with someone who can rearrange history—but, in keeping with the theme of community, it’s not all up to him. The final outcome is thanks to a series of contributions from several characters, Fetter included. This theme of collective action is taken up across the shortlist, as we will see in the second part of this review.
Endnotes
[1] Readers of Chandrasekera’s second novel Rakesfall (2024) might note Luriat’s reappearance in sequence with our own world. The actual relationship between the two remains unknown, but this highlights the sense that Luriat is just a sideways version of our reality. [return]