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banyanjing 's review for:
The Genesis of Misery
by Neon Yang
i wanted to like this book so badly. i really wanted to like this book so tremendously badly. the prospect of a queer singaporean writer breaking into and revising sci fi tropes was giddying. the fact that they were clearly inspired by neon genesis evangelion and a host of other scifi things i love was even more thrilling. even setting aside what happened with neon yang’s role in the internet hate campaign against isabel fall (which is a whole, other twisted thing)—i really just wanted to like this, so very much.
unfortunately, i disliked this so much. i think i just really seethe at messianic stories—but in particular how this messianic story is written. it seems to me profoundly unthought out to simply say “what if a messiah was QUEER” while seemingly not interrogating examining or revising any of the deeply flawed building blocks of the story structure, of the giddyingly christian rhetoric and theological matter invoked, in the same way that this futuristic spaceworld of the novel is one where everyone is introduced with pronouns and neopronouns are respected and yet a world riddled with awful, despicable empires and eugenics and inequality and borderline genocidal religious violence. i simply don’t feel as if one issue can be easily picked apart from everything else, and the ways in which the novel didn’t examine the horrific nature of the story it told, well, it bothered me deeply.
there is one flippant chapter that says, in essence, well! everyone is selfish and bad here, so who am i to cast the first stone? (with some sneaky anti-cancel culture language slipped in there, too) but, plainly, my issues aren’t to do with imposing a sense of morality or moral superiority. i just find the characterisation of—frankly, everyone—deeply annoying. i find the cultish, extremist world of the faithful cloying and unbearable. i find the sudden flip from extreme self-doubt to complete arrogance and holier-than-thouness by misery unstomachable. a protagonist so entirely ensconced in their own suffering who is simultaneously miraculously buoyed out of every scenario and trouble by fate and destiny. i scream at the levels of selfishness, thoughtlessness, and also brutal hatred that these people sometimes display toward one another. it doesn’t help that, apart from misery, there are no characters that we are really given space to inhabit.
i appreciate the thematic idea of the nullvoid and the holystone; there’s a lot of power and magnetism to the ways in which the universe of the Forge is one defined by utter fluidity, utter elasticity and a seeming sense of unfixedness. yet this is so wholly contradicted by the unending, incessant hammering on of the idea of the omnipotence and perfection of the Forge and hir Will and the unquestionable authority of the Messiah. I rankle—I was plainly, disgusted by it all. The story seemed a thinly veiled fantasy of gaining power and “self-actualisation”.
Of course, then, there are the mechas, and the ways in which this story fixates on the idea of holy, divine transcendence as a kind of gender euphoria, a surpassing of “human biology” and an unlocking of some primordial, universal, cosmic substance. it makes all too much sense and i was sickened by it because i think i simply dislike utopias that are (a) impossible and (b) do not reckon with the messiness of it all and coast along on pretty language and an almost hedonistic sense of indulgence and pleasure. i reject your killing-fucking power fantasy of apotheosis! i simply do! and i accept and see that this is but the first book in a series that is fundamentally setting up a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between the faithful and the heretics, between the forge and the void, but nowhere in this first book are we given actual pause to consider this, to challenge or subvert the up & up narrative of the genesis of misery.
as a coda, i could not help but compare this to “i sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. i do not believe neon yang deserves to have their career shipwrecked and ended in the name of some invisible accountability. but i believe there is analytical power to comparing neon yang’s & isabel fall’s visions of gender given how viscerally yang reacted to fall’s story. it’s kind of astonishing how much the two stories mirror each other as stories that use mechas and machine-human melding as analogies for transness and gender. and, both in hyper-militaristic contexts, focusing on downtrodden individuals who sublimate their identities through war machines.
fall’s story is nuanced and complex and interesting because it constructs a world in which gender is not an absolute plane of being, some divine beyond-body enlightenment, but rather a fraught and contingent kind of social instinct that is aimed toward some kind of function and utility. something that is, in fact, bound to, and by, bodies and their interchange. something that is mystifying because it is inarticulable, because it clicks in a part of the brain that language can only grasp at, but that is immanent, not transcendent. pleasure and euphoria are contrasted against violence and power. the two are uneasy handmaidens. there is no utopia here and by the end of the short story the helicopter pilot and navigator duo realise their complicity and insist on another way of holding onto this slippery, free thing of gender. somewhere beyond the US military.
for yang, the apotheosis of gender is achieving a kind of ultimate, unbridled expression of self. one where an archangel is free to kill, free to wage war, free to fuck. an apotheosis which is, by definition, reserved for a particular kind of enshrined power, set apart from everyday, normal human bodies. in fact, misery consistently looks down upon the human, the fleshy. the machine hungers, not in a libidinal way, but in a cosmic, fated way, toward what it must do. there is a sense that this primality should not be restrained or bound. and yet, it is! it is bound by the machinations of politics and religion and war. it does not exist as some kind of godly thing by fiat. there is a cursory dismissal of the formal hierarchy, the bureaucracy of military and empire, but misery, giddy on their own god complex, compares herself to oppenheimer after the creation of the atom bomb twice. i cannot think of a more militaristic weapon than one that exceeds and surpasses the bounds of rank and order because its power is unimaginable, incomprehensible. if that is gender utopia, count me the fuck out.
also, one last thing: this read like a novel that needed more sharp editing. the language work genuinely felt sloppy (how could phrases like “yeet” and “calm your tits” slip by untouched in a world where people barely remember the earth and you get archaic overwritten references to shit like moby dick or AI??) the characters as mentioned were basically non existent beyond flashy referential names, the worldbuilding of holystone while interesting felt swimmingly convenient, and god, again, there was just no dramatic tension because a fucking ANGEL and the ability to manipulate matter saves misery from everything.
unfortunately, i disliked this so much. i think i just really seethe at messianic stories—but in particular how this messianic story is written. it seems to me profoundly unthought out to simply say “what if a messiah was QUEER” while seemingly not interrogating examining or revising any of the deeply flawed building blocks of the story structure, of the giddyingly christian rhetoric and theological matter invoked, in the same way that this futuristic spaceworld of the novel is one where everyone is introduced with pronouns and neopronouns are respected and yet a world riddled with awful, despicable empires and eugenics and inequality and borderline genocidal religious violence. i simply don’t feel as if one issue can be easily picked apart from everything else, and the ways in which the novel didn’t examine the horrific nature of the story it told, well, it bothered me deeply.
there is one flippant chapter that says, in essence, well! everyone is selfish and bad here, so who am i to cast the first stone? (with some sneaky anti-cancel culture language slipped in there, too) but, plainly, my issues aren’t to do with imposing a sense of morality or moral superiority. i just find the characterisation of—frankly, everyone—deeply annoying. i find the cultish, extremist world of the faithful cloying and unbearable. i find the sudden flip from extreme self-doubt to complete arrogance and holier-than-thouness by misery unstomachable. a protagonist so entirely ensconced in their own suffering who is simultaneously miraculously buoyed out of every scenario and trouble by fate and destiny. i scream at the levels of selfishness, thoughtlessness, and also brutal hatred that these people sometimes display toward one another. it doesn’t help that, apart from misery, there are no characters that we are really given space to inhabit.
i appreciate the thematic idea of the nullvoid and the holystone; there’s a lot of power and magnetism to the ways in which the universe of the Forge is one defined by utter fluidity, utter elasticity and a seeming sense of unfixedness. yet this is so wholly contradicted by the unending, incessant hammering on of the idea of the omnipotence and perfection of the Forge and hir Will and the unquestionable authority of the Messiah. I rankle—I was plainly, disgusted by it all. The story seemed a thinly veiled fantasy of gaining power and “self-actualisation”.
Of course, then, there are the mechas, and the ways in which this story fixates on the idea of holy, divine transcendence as a kind of gender euphoria, a surpassing of “human biology” and an unlocking of some primordial, universal, cosmic substance. it makes all too much sense and i was sickened by it because i think i simply dislike utopias that are (a) impossible and (b) do not reckon with the messiness of it all and coast along on pretty language and an almost hedonistic sense of indulgence and pleasure. i reject your killing-fucking power fantasy of apotheosis! i simply do! and i accept and see that this is but the first book in a series that is fundamentally setting up a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between the faithful and the heretics, between the forge and the void, but nowhere in this first book are we given actual pause to consider this, to challenge or subvert the up & up narrative of the genesis of misery.
as a coda, i could not help but compare this to “i sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. i do not believe neon yang deserves to have their career shipwrecked and ended in the name of some invisible accountability. but i believe there is analytical power to comparing neon yang’s & isabel fall’s visions of gender given how viscerally yang reacted to fall’s story. it’s kind of astonishing how much the two stories mirror each other as stories that use mechas and machine-human melding as analogies for transness and gender. and, both in hyper-militaristic contexts, focusing on downtrodden individuals who sublimate their identities through war machines.
fall’s story is nuanced and complex and interesting because it constructs a world in which gender is not an absolute plane of being, some divine beyond-body enlightenment, but rather a fraught and contingent kind of social instinct that is aimed toward some kind of function and utility. something that is, in fact, bound to, and by, bodies and their interchange. something that is mystifying because it is inarticulable, because it clicks in a part of the brain that language can only grasp at, but that is immanent, not transcendent. pleasure and euphoria are contrasted against violence and power. the two are uneasy handmaidens. there is no utopia here and by the end of the short story the helicopter pilot and navigator duo realise their complicity and insist on another way of holding onto this slippery, free thing of gender. somewhere beyond the US military.
for yang, the apotheosis of gender is achieving a kind of ultimate, unbridled expression of self. one where an archangel is free to kill, free to wage war, free to fuck. an apotheosis which is, by definition, reserved for a particular kind of enshrined power, set apart from everyday, normal human bodies. in fact, misery consistently looks down upon the human, the fleshy. the machine hungers, not in a libidinal way, but in a cosmic, fated way, toward what it must do. there is a sense that this primality should not be restrained or bound. and yet, it is! it is bound by the machinations of politics and religion and war. it does not exist as some kind of godly thing by fiat. there is a cursory dismissal of the formal hierarchy, the bureaucracy of military and empire, but misery, giddy on their own god complex, compares herself to oppenheimer after the creation of the atom bomb twice. i cannot think of a more militaristic weapon than one that exceeds and surpasses the bounds of rank and order because its power is unimaginable, incomprehensible. if that is gender utopia, count me the fuck out.
also, one last thing: this read like a novel that needed more sharp editing. the language work genuinely felt sloppy (how could phrases like “yeet” and “calm your tits” slip by untouched in a world where people barely remember the earth and you get archaic overwritten references to shit like moby dick or AI??) the characters as mentioned were basically non existent beyond flashy referential names, the worldbuilding of holystone while interesting felt swimmingly convenient, and god, again, there was just no dramatic tension because a fucking ANGEL and the ability to manipulate matter saves misery from everything.