In Part One of my review of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlist, I explored Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Alissa Hattman’s Sift, Nghi Vo’s Mammoths at the Gates, and Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass. Putting aside the fact that this award comes with a highly desirable top prize of 25,000 USD, there are some excellent paired readings possible between the ten works selected by this year’s jury. The first three of those five offer a triptych of prose-poem novellas with compelling themes involving selfhood in relation to expansive notions of life and the world. The latter two use nonhuman animality to craft alt-worlds in which characters can navigate binary options in pursuit of more peaceful resolutions to conflict.
These works can also be held up in thought-provoking ways against the other five short-listed volumes, which wrestle with different themes and make use of broader stylistic toolkits.
One of those other texts is Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall, a novel that draws from a larger narrative universe, like Vo’s Mammoths. But where Vo’s text is gentle and meditative, Johnson’s is gritty, furious, and confrontational. It’s also not easy to tell which would be the better reading experience for Wall—that is, whether or not one should read Johnson’s previous novel, The Space Between Worlds (2020), before embarking on this one. Both SF thrillers are a touch haphazard in their worldbuilding, but there’s more about the multiverse concept that underpins the shared universe in that first volume. On the other hand, some of the characters from the first book show up very differently here, enough for the disconnect to feel like consistent characterization was not a priority for the tale. This difference might be a distraction for readers moving from Book One to Book Two, so suffice it to say: Wall can be read apart from Worlds, but some gaps in comprehension are to be expected if one does.
The narrative conceit at the heart of both books is that the multiverse, as a SF trope, is another way of depicting the role of class and racialization in shaping individual outcomes. Ostensibly, the plot in Wall is shaped around the violent deaths of a few citizens in the divided societies of Wiley City and Ashtown, but this mystery (which involves a threat of alt-universe invasion) is generally sidelined to make room for the stories of Scales and her brother, the “Emperor” of a tough and motley crew; Scales’ struggle to make sense of her relationship with Mr. Cheeks; and what (if anything) she owes to other people to whom she’s bound by blood, care, and circumstance. The societal politics of this book strive for complexity, but they also gloss over a lot of the violence done by one side to position its society as inherently superior to the hypocrisy of the other. There are also unexplored ethical problems with the solution chosen to motivate change in the end, and a strong feeling of “so long as my side does it, it’s okay” that might not work for all readers. However, this is all given to us by a character openly wrestling with not knowing which story of self she wants to tell, and routinely reminding us that she’s not a good storyteller, which might justify some of the novel’s inconsistencies.
That wavering sense of self plays out quite differently in The Skin and Her Girl, by Sarah Cypher—in which the narrator is fully aware that her life up to this point has been crafted by other people’s expectations, derived from their own patchwork stories. Nevertheless, she has a high level of confidence in her ability to tell her mess of a family story well, at the grave of her beloved aunt, before entering into a new chapter of life that will be more fully her own.
Like Harvey’s Orbital, Cypher’s book has only the slightest speculative element. “Betty” is born with blue skin to the Rummani family, a lineage haunted in part by a schism that found many of its members resettling in the US (and a fairly affluent part, to boot), at a huge remove from those who stayed in Nablus, in the West Bank, some 50 kilometres from Jerusalem.
In 2002, the Israeli military infamously destroyed two soap factories and damaged many others in this old Palestinian city, and soap has been a powerful motif in stories of resistance and resilience ever since. In Cypher’s novel, Betty is born blue half a world away, the same instant in which a factory where the Rummani family once produced indigo-blue soap is destroyed. Many relatives don’t know what to make of this bright blue child, but her aunt sees only possibility and wonder in the gift of a new life—and does everything in her power to imbue her niece with a rich sense of place and purpose until her own passing.
This story of Betty’s childhood is therefore truly the story of that indomitable storyteller: a woman who lived through many periods of family hardship, and who had to work hard to make a story for herself first. Does the book “imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now,” as per the mandate of the Le Guin Prize? It certainly presents a vision of Palestinian life that exists outside the usual narratives of constant sorrow, oppression, and brutality. The question for readers then becomes, is it the tone of this story that makes the book fantastical—and if so, is it the kind of fantasy we’re supposed to work toward making a reality here and now?
A more overtly science-fictional take on transformation comes from Emily Tesh, whose Some Desperate Glory takes an extremely mature approach to some highly familiar young adult narrative tropes. We have in this story an alt-society with clear and rigid hierarchies, a young person just on the cusp of receiving their lifetime assignment within it, and a narrative arc that will have them come to realize that everything they’d grown up believing is a lie. But the story of the protagonist, Kyr, is also not even close to as simple as that. Yes, this book depicts a fascistic cult of paramilitary holdouts, relentlessly training for lives as soldiers—or mothers to the next generation of soldiers—in an unending war against an alien species that wiped out Earth to save tens of billions of other sentient beings. And yet, Glory also refuses simple binaries.
As with Johnson’s novel, there is a strong multiverse component to Glory, but all the alternate realities we witness only elucidate for Kyr how very much she has been complicit in her own indoctrination; and how others in her cohort, having realized how much was wrong with their society much sooner, were only further wounded by Kyr’s willingness to go along with this cruel existence right until the cult’s mythology no longer served her, personally.
This is a hard, ugly truth that can be difficult to convey in such literature, but Tesh routinely crafts her characters to be capable both of victimization and culpability in their circumstances. There are no easy “outs” to the trolley problem at the centre of this universe, and there are no magic fixes for who we’ve been along the rails. All that remains, once we recognize the injustice of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, is our responsibility to do better now.
This concept makes Glory an excellent paired reading not only for the multiverse in Johnson’s Wall, but also—and perhaps more so—for The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera: another work that interrogates notions of grand personal destiny, while challenging the idea that there is any clean transformation into life after narrative rupture.
Fetter’s mother cut his shadow from him at birth, and he spent his early childhood being light on his feet and learning to stay earthbound. His mother’s catechism, which includes five unforgivable offences she raised him to believe he would fulfill—including matricide and patricide—echoes the way that many parents pour their own bitterness into us as we grow. To be nourished on such grand stories of purpose can leave us disoriented in adolescence, then stranded in young adulthood, when we finally find ourselves in narrative worlds bigger than our first homes.
Doors is a work that might be called fantasy, though this would do a disservice to a labour it shares with Cypher’s Girl, in simply depicting a world framed by cultural touchstones not as often seen in Anglo-Western literature. When Fetter finds himself in a big city, it’s much like many South Asian metropolises in which one finds the last vestiges of colonialism commingling with architectural signs of more modern oppressions—each drawing on a different grand story of mysticism and bureaucracy to justify its existence. Here, Fetter meets other people given grand destinies as children, only to hit hard social limits, and moves through circles where people turn the work of forging new destinies for themselves into political or literal theatre.
One key symbol in this book is the existence of “Bright Doors,” painted entrances that—if unopened long enough—transform into something fantastical, a one-way façade that suggests a very different portal on the other side. Although this fantastical element is firmly unresolved (as are others in the tale, in keeping with the dissolution of traditional narrative structure in general), there is a hint that these doors are connected to the idea that all the lives we didn’t get to live (because of various colonizations over deep time) never disappear completely. Rather, they’re biding their time, gathering weight in the shadows, and—who knows?—might one day reach out into our realm, to topple even the stories of a society that seems too big to fail.
Doors pairs beautifully, then, with Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Library of Broken Worlds, a book that draws on ancient Indigenous cultures to craft a far future where old tribes might have wandered off to a far-flung world—and there begun a process of technological and cultural growth that, through a system of tesseracts, later linked a handful of planets and moons. These are bound to one great, living library made up of a pantheon of god-constructs, which is in turn tended to by a range of humans from variously power- and peace-seeking cultures.
Centuries on, this vast realm of god-sharing, living-library-walking peoples has built a staggering amount of legal precedent atop its ancient interplanetary constitution, all the better, with a more warmongering god-construct on their side, to shelter some people; but all the worse for a particular marginalized people seeking protection against genocide via legal redress. But the living library has tools of its own, and Freida, our protagonist—birthed of the library, and in legal limbo herself (a person? an artificial intelligence?)—is coming of age just as an important petition from this marginalized culture is set before the court. Yes, Freida has access to parts of the living library that other librarians could never dream of accessing, but she is not exempt from the political games being played by warmongers on the one hand and those trying to keep the planetary alliance from total schism on the other—even if that means sacrificing some cultures to the maws of others.
This book’s bigger ideas take a while to come into focus, especially amid early characterization of a somewhat obliviously spoiled protagonist. Likewise, in the final third, young adult tropes take priority at some cost to a sharper conclusion to the narrative’s chewier thematic elements. However, Johnson has done an excellent job of keeping this book’s core political crises loosely analogous to real-world issues without any one crisis matching our own perfectly. That delicate balancing act in her worldbuilding creates a rich space for accessible legal and philosophical discourse, and the advancement of challenging diplomatic scenarios.
For sheer ambition in science-fantasy worldbuilding, irrespective of its somewhat muted finish, The Library of Broken Worlds is the most “Le Guinian” of the stories in this year’s shortlist. Elsewhere, Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and Its Girl, Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Alissa Hattman’s Sift, Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall, and Nghi Vo’s Mammoths at the Gate all advance reflections on the self, memory, and how one fits within larger worlds. Many of these texts pursue their thematic concerns with a narrative voice that seems at least as important as the speculative nature of the story—if not more so. The placement of these six works in the shortlist of this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction establishes them as thought-provoking touchstones for conversation: the first, imagining a world framed by more hard-won joy and wonder than our own; the next three, interrogating the borders between Self and World; the last two, building on questions of perspective explored in other works by each author.
Le Guinian themes can be found across the shortlist. For stories that illustrate the complexity of the work we have to do on ourselves when in the middle of righting worldly wrongs, Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory is an excellent contender. For a humanist vision of society wherein everyone carries into the greater throng their own, confusing notion of destiny, Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors poses a serious exhortation to unite well against broader oppression. And for a depiction of pain as the only guaranteed outcome when antithetical notions of war and peace collide, Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass looks unflinchingly at our lack of easy answers.
Whichever author is announced as the winner of an extraordinary prize on October 21 (Le Guin’s birthday), there is something special about any opportunity to gather books together in the hope that they might be better read. Should this prize continue to grow in that spirit first and foremost, we can surely look forward to many strong paired readings in the years ahead.