The Tensorate Series by J Y Yang
Feb. 19th, 2019 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Tensorate Series: Three novellas
4/5. Series of silkpunk novellas about the twin youngest children of the autocrat leader who are sold to a monastery until it turns out one of them is a prophet. Then things get complicated.
These got a lot of press for their approach to gender, which is not really what they are about but is a thing they are doing. And it's an interesting thing – gender in this universe is the result of a choice made out of a biologically nongendered childhood, which sounds like a more ideal system except, well. It may be a choice, but that doesn't mean it isn't a political or social bargaining chip, and that definitely doesn't mean everyone is happy to make it or interested in making it.
If you want to know what these are about about, that would be different paths to rebellion, and different paths to power – magic versus machinery, and who that empowers and who it doesn't – and family born and made. They are great, and stitched together they tell a story spanning decades that is not actually a novel because the story is unfinished aaaargh. There's a fourth this summer, apparently. I did not know that when I started, thankyouverymuch. Unrelatedly, I find it interesting that each successive novella is shorter. That is not the usual pattern with novella series; I think it speaks to Yang making these tighter, meaner, leaner as they go.
Content notes: Grief, child death, references to institutionalization and experimentation.
4/5. Series of silkpunk novellas about the twin youngest children of the autocrat leader who are sold to a monastery until it turns out one of them is a prophet. Then things get complicated.
These got a lot of press for their approach to gender, which is not really what they are about but is a thing they are doing. And it's an interesting thing – gender in this universe is the result of a choice made out of a biologically nongendered childhood, which sounds like a more ideal system except, well. It may be a choice, but that doesn't mean it isn't a political or social bargaining chip, and that definitely doesn't mean everyone is happy to make it or interested in making it.
If you want to know what these are about about, that would be different paths to rebellion, and different paths to power – magic versus machinery, and who that empowers and who it doesn't – and family born and made. They are great, and stitched together they tell a story spanning decades that is not actually a novel because the story is unfinished aaaargh. There's a fourth this summer, apparently. I did not know that when I started, thankyouverymuch. Unrelatedly, I find it interesting that each successive novella is shorter. That is not the usual pattern with novella series; I think it speaks to Yang making these tighter, meaner, leaner as they go.
Content notes: Grief, child death, references to institutionalization and experimentation.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-20 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-20 01:01 pm (UTC)Definitely not grim all the way down. The first one in particular is not. But for you I would note that the second is from the pov of a woman who has lost a child years in the past and who still struggles with it (she does some healing and finds her way to a new family).