The books shortlisted for the 2024 Ignyte Best Novel Award emphasise the role of co-operative action in addressing the problems faced by their characters—and their readers. We see this in the group that coalesces around Fetter to oppose the Perfect and Kind in The Saint of Bright Doors, and in the increasing cohesion among the bandits of The Water Outlaws as they face an external threat. The protagonists of Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence saga, including similarly reluctant or unplanned heroes, also begin coming together in the shortlisted second book, We Are The Crisis. This book embeds the theme introduced in No Gods, No Monsters (2021) of community-building in response to trauma, and as protection against injustice. Following a mass shooting targeting monsters and their allies, key members of the cast have begun taking on greater responsibility, risk, and transformation in the hope of contributing to social change. While some characters are preparing for violent defence against opposition and others remain hidden, several protagonists are quietly or openly building community in the hope of safety in numbers. One group in Boston comprises monsters and allies running a co-operative bookshop, itself part of a network of co-operatives. The idea of co-operatives as a fundamental social structure, introduced through these characters in the first book, continues here, with their foregrounding and discussion of intentional communities suggesting these are values and models the reader is being asked to embrace.
On St. Thomas, pressing for political reform to protect monsters, Senator Matthew Reed argues that there’s no need to treat “our people” in the way those in the mainland US do. He cites the threats to those merely suspected of being monsters:
“I don’t want us to become hateful, frightened people. I want us to be good to one another. Like it or not, the monsters in our community come from the same places we do, with the same histories … Now that we know they are real, we’ve had the good fortune of reuniting with a part of our heritage.”
The obvious criticisms of using superpowers as an allegory are that it can flatten and minimise real-world injustice, and that real-world marginalisation doesn’t come with physical advantages like being able to turn into a wolf. But among this cast, many characters have multiple marginalisations. Few are white. Ridley is asexual and trans, his brother-in-law was murdered by a police officer, his wife’s girlfriend is a second-generation Puerto Rican immigrant recovering from a drug addiction, and so on. And as Matthew says, monsters may also be a part of local cultures and histories, like weredogs and soucouyants on St. Thomas. The experience of being at risk as monsters exists alongside other experiences of marginalisation, and monsters are discriminated against largely on the basis of perceived risk, rumours, and fear. This isn’t helped by a mysterious cult trying to provoke war between “humans and monsters”—or rather, to be consistent with the framing elsewhere in the book, humans who are and aren’t monsters.
One of the protagonists of We Are The Crisis has been turned, like Fetter from The Saint of Bright Doors, into a weapon—not by his mother, but by an abusive stranger who has become a parental figure. During this book, we see him begin to find trustworthy adults who genuinely care for him, and to reciprocate their care. But the injustice in We Are The Crisis is not only an ongoing threat. It’s an escalating one, and appetite for allyship is limited even when the general public knows monsters are real and under threat.
How does someone keep sane in this new world? ... they leave the disturbing stuff to the media; they don’t conjure human darkness into their living rooms.
To the marginalised, a response like this isn’t surprising. People are comfortable denying the existence of things that frighten them, and when they can’t, they’re perfectly fine not talking about them.
As a way to protect monsters, those focused on community-building continue to lean on—and sometimes risk—personal and community relationships in order to build support networks and spread understanding of social justice issues. In this way, both books of the trilogy so far take a different approach to the theme of compartmentalisation explored in The Saint of Bright Doors, when Fetter’s identities collide. In the same way that people in our world might disclose gender, sexuality, or disability, or express solidarity with social justice movements, characters in the Convergence series reveal their “monstrosity” or allyship to community members and loved ones, asking not just for acceptance but also social and structural change. When Ridley, having overcome his hesitation and fears from the previous book, exhorts his community to show solidarity, he is told, “I’ve been watching the news. I know what happens to monster supporters.” The violence dealt to allies in these books might seem disproportionate compared to the often less pronounced real-world risks faced by allies of marginalised people in the US; but readers who’ve been asked to leave “politics” out of the workplace, or who have experienced or witnessed others’ fear of expressing allyship, might still find these scenes familiar.
Close third-person narration following multiple characters is employed by four of the finalists. In Shigidi and The Water Outlaws, both written in past tense, it is the only style of narration, and simply switches between characters in different scenes. Narration in The Saint of Bright Doors is functionally mostly close third-person and present tense, but takes a more experimental, though very effective, form. The use of the close third is more ambitious still in We Are The Crisis, where the near-omniscient narrator Calvin, a character in his own right, takes us into the minds of more than ten others, often switching perspective within a scene, combining with present tense to increase the sense of urgency. It’s not quite an omniscient narrative; we aren’t allowed into some characters’ minds, so we glimpse fragments of worlds and times without understanding the bigger picture. However, it does serve to connect us to a vast number of characters. As in the other three novels discussed above, while some characters can be considered “villains,” most of the protagonists are depicted as ordinary, “flawed,” characters whose actions deliberately, incidentally, or inadvertently cause harm.
By contrast, Blackgoose’s To Shape A Dragon’s Breath has a tendency to read as a simple “good versus evil” narrative whose sole main character, Anequs, seems to be a hero who can do no wrong. On the rare occasions on which Anequs feels she has erred, the reader can see she’s facing structural racism whose consequences she could not have anticipated. Any tragic events in the novel are clearly the fault of the colonisers. Since the novel is presented as the first-person perspective of an Indigenous woman in a colonial environment, however, this seemed reasonable to me.
Anequs is the first person to see an Indigenous dragon on Masquapaug island in generations, let alone to find its egg and be chosen by the newborn Nampeshiwe as Nampeshiweisit. There aren’t any Anglish on the island, but Masquapaug is still under colonial law. After discussion with her family, Anequs determines that attending the academy is a compromise for survival, which may also enable her to do more for her community in the long term. She leaves home with all the confidence that comes from being raised in a loving family in her own homeland. Her grandmother has the understandable fear that Masquapaug will die “slowly by bleeding away its young people,” but Anequs is determined to return home afterwards. All of this means that we don’t get a stereotypical “not fitting in at boarding school” narrative. Although the colonisers see her as a girl in her mid-teens, Anequs is a woman by the standards of her people, which are the only standards that matter to her. She is not afraid to disagree with them and is not interested in “integrating,” but rather in recovering lost knowledge that will help her bring her dragon safely back to the island. We see the colonial world through her skeptical eyes, in which the values she grew up with are the norm. Consequently, within the academy she manages to befriend the most isolated people with the most traumatic histories: a “black-folkish” indentured maid, the only other Indigenous student, and an autistic Anglish student who is bullied by his own mother as well as classmates. In this context, Blackgoose’s privileging of Anequs’s perspective becomes a meaningful literary choice.
When writing about Fetter in a previous review, I said that he was, Like any of us, Fetter is a different person in different contexts.” That now seems too much of a generalisation, because Anequs—perhaps due to her youth and perhaps thanks to her grounding in her own culture—comes across as being very much the same person in any context. She only reluctantly puts on a performance when pushed to conform in Anglish colonial society. When she develops two romantic interests, in a woman and a man, she’s scornful of Anglish customs enforcing heteronormativity and monogamy, and hopes to welcome them both into her own community when circumstances allow. I see Fetter and Anequs as counterparts in how they respond to colonial history, with Fetter disconnected from his people’s past and Anequs solidly grounded in hers. They are both dealing with intergenerational trauma—most starkly for Anequs, the massacre of her father’s people on neighbouring Naquipaug island, and for Fetter, the erasure of his mother’s entire history—but Anequs is raised in a strong community with knowledge of her history, and Fetter is raised to kill his father with little idea why. They are both community-minded. Once she leaves for the Academy, Anequs creates a network of allies in Indigenous and colonial society outside of Masquapaug. Fetter also finds a natural place helping other new arrivals to Luriat, but his biggest contributions to society are arguably not well planned, and his community-building is often more spontaneous, responding to unpredictable situations. Still, he creates for himself, as an adult, the social support Anequs has through her community from the start, and his determination to act grows as he learns his family’s real history.
In most adult novels, a character like Anequs would be too perfect—winning over friendless characters, bringing estranged family members together—and I suspect there will always be more space in genre fiction for angst-ridden protagonists forced to make impossible choices. However, I valued this portrayal of an Indigenous woman who isn’t affected by self-doubt and who—at least in book one—hasn’t been confronted with author-imposed trolley problems or made to wallow in her own mistakes. It’s possible she’ll face such choices or explore her weaknesses in later books, but regardless, there’s inspiration in her uncompromising self-esteem in the face of overt, extreme racism, and I expect many readers will see her as a role model.
While the morality of Dragon’s Breath is relatively straightforward compared to the rest of the Ignyte novel shortlist, its worldbuilding is complex, and more visibly so. The premise is that ancient and mediaeval history in Europe were completely different, but two groups of Europeans have still colonised Turtle Island: the Vaskosish and the Anglish. [1] Although I felt the depth of the worldbuilding slowed down my reading, the complex alt-history reduces expectations of direct parallels to New England’s real history, and will appeal to those who enjoy intricately crafted fantasy worlds. The confusion of the unknown in The Saint of Bright Doors and We Are The Crisis becomes key to those stories and their atmospheres, and Shigidi and The Water Outlaws are more selective about when to elaborate on setting or events. However, Dragon’s Breath seems not to miss any detail, from the dresses Anequs wears to events, to in-depth discussions between students of social expectations in their respective cultures. This makes for a longer read, but is justified by the first-person narration, and by the sense of oral storytelling that is evoked by chapters entitled, “This is the story that [X] told” retelling tales shared by other characters, or the sequences of yet more informative chapter titles such as “Anequs gathered her family around her,” followed by, “And had a revelation.”
“Every lost past is a world,” says Fetter of altered histories. In setting To Shape a Dragon’s Breath in earlier colonial times and showing us the strength Anequs gains from connections to place and community, I think Blackgoose offers strong recognition of what has been taken through colonisation, especially from Indigenous peoples, and also of how culture and values persist despite colonisation.
A common element across the shortlist is the structural and physical violence that underlies marginalisation and dispossession, and the potential for violence in response. “Violence is not the way,” says Lin Chong in the first chapter of The Water Outlaws, discussing how to gain gender equity in the Empire. And indeed, while the violence in The Water Outlaws and Shigidi ends up being crucial to the plot (and Lin Chong is proven wrong, in that context) it does have a well-defined role. Both novels feature battles and blood, and their protagonists are fine with these, if not always with the magnitude of their losses or injuries. This casual attitude towards violence is not unusual in my experience of English-language fantasy. It’s a surface-level threat and tool that we don’t interrogate further. But the other three books on this shortlist take less common approaches.
In We Are The Crisis, physical violence is usually initiated by the antagonists. Sometimes it’s returned, sometimes it is used to manipulate its victims, and sometimes it targets those unable to fight back. The emphasis is not so much on action and tactics but on the shock of violence—mass shootings, mass amputations, and gory scenes. The story picks up from No Gods, No Monsters a few years after a mass shooting, and although the version of the US in which “monsters” exist is technically a parallel world, the structures that allow it aren’t so different. It overtly discusses targeted violence in a way that recalls historical and contemporary racism in the west, particularly in the US:
Years before, there were random acts of violence by frightened and angry individuals. … [T]hen the [organised] lynch mobs began. In rural areas, where the communities were small … Where everyone talked about how strange it was that Doree and her family had arrived in town right after the Emergence. And how … animals started to go missing. Frank’s cat … which swelled in the imagination to become several pets.
That sort of paranoia grows wings … First as whispers … Harmless gatherings … Weeks later, someone’s house goes up in flames. Isn’t it tragic how no one made it outside?
Violence is not a way of life for these protagonists, but it is an unpredictable threat to marginalised people and their allies, and they realise the importance of being prepared for it. The same is true of The Saint of Bright Doors and Dragon’s Breath, both also set within histories of colonisation and violence against marginalised people. The violence in these two books is constantly in the background, and less visible than in We Are The Crisis except where it directly confronts the main characters—when Fetter sees public executions, for instance, when Anequs learns of the murders of other Indigenous people, or when they’re both directly victimised.
Although the backdrop of The Saint of Bright Doors includes the physical violence of hangings and internment camps, this cannot be separated from structural violence. Despite Luriat being a nominally socialist city, its everyday functioning is underpinned by systemic oppression, much of it constructed around religion. The Perfect and Kind explains:
“The path … must act in the world, and so it must have robes and titles, events and funding, a social strategy and political patrons.”
“Prisons,” Fetter says. “Pogroms. War.”
Fetter tries to reject the violence he’s been raised for, but his mother’s idea that “the only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence” is supported by the conclusion of The Saint of Bright Doors. In Dragon’s Breath, too, there is a very realistic backdrop of structural violence against Indigenous communities that means interactions between people, media, and political powers rapidly escalate into physical violence. Anequs isn’t currently interested in inflicting violence; it doesn’t occur to her to take her dragon into battle, as other students aim to do after graduation. Her response to violence is to seek diplomacy rather than revenge. However, towards the end of Dragon’s Breath, Anequs observes of her colonial education:
I had become like Crow, venturing to dangerous and unknown lands to bring fire back to my people. I wondered, as we sat together in one another’s company, what we were going to burn with it.
The book’s blurb hints that Anequs and her dragon will be the ones to “change the world.” It will be interesting to see whether, and how, Blackgoose and Turnbull, the two finalists with pending sequels, will go on to make inferences about violence as a tool of resistance and change, rather than just oppression.
Although none of the 2024 Ignyte finalists for Best Novel are set wholly in our contemporary world, the issues they depict are quite recognisable: colonialism, capitalism, corruption, and marginalisation. They address related themes of injustice and empowerment in different ways, from the exploitation of individuals in hierarchical societies, to how colonialism changes the very fabric of the world and our collective memories. Violence is built into their plots or settings, becoming a tool used by both the oppressor and the oppressed. Families, whether those we are born into or those we acquire, are realistically depicted as a source of trauma and a source of strength. More broadly, we see how people may respond to oppression as individuals and, powerfully, as collectives.
Stories about bands of heroes triumphing against evil are nothing new, of course. But most of the examples we see in this shortlist aren’t Tolkien-esque fellowships, political alliances, or even popular uprisings to overthrow a particular regime as much as they are diverse communities coming together for long-term change. And this spread of novels, too, in coming together, forms a map of several routes we might take to change our worlds.
Endnotes
[1] Thanks to the differences in this alternate history, Anglish and its loanwords are different to English (for example, algebra is al-jabr, geometry is anglereckoning, chemistry is skiltakraft). [return]