An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

An Excess Male

DNF. In a near-future China where the one-child policy has resulted in a glut of men, an "excess" man has finally saved enough money to become a third husband in a state-mandated polyandrous marriage. Of the first two husbands, one is queer and the other is on the spectrum, both of which are criminalized to a degree.

So this is theoretically doing a thing I love, i.e. telling a science fictional story almost entirely through the domestic. But my god did I dislike this domestic scene. Everyone is realistically flawed, but they are also unrelentingly terrible to each other in the determined way of a novel with literary pretentions. And every one of them is terribly unhappy, of course. And don't get me started on the sex. It's not that it's unsexy – it's not supposed to be sexy. It's that it's so emotionally fucked up and physically unpleasant that one scene actively turned my stomach.

No thank you. That's a flop off last year's Tiptree list.