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A review by betharanova
Silk Fire by Zabé Ellor
1.0
This is not a DNF review. I've seen the whole thing, start to finish. I read the first half of the book slowly, taking meticulous notes, piecing together names and in-universe rules. I read the second half in a desperate bid to have a normal reading experience and see whether any of the ideas in the book panned out. Neither method was especially enjoyable, but the notes were necessary for any level of understanding, and speed was necessary to preserve my sanity.
In short: it's bad. There is very little craft in this book. It's an ego trip and revenge fantasy. No cohesion in the worldbuilding, just every cool thing the author could think of, thrown together. The world's most beautiful and tragic boy becomes a dragon, rides dinosaurs, foils evil necromancy plots, and has lots of sex. I think there are people who will enjoy that, if their expectation is a popcorn read, they love #boyboss #boypower stories, and they can avoid being terminally confused by the writing. I did not have a good time.
Let's address the elephant in the room: the evil matriarchy. I don't think it's inherently wrong or misogynist to write an evil matriarchy in your fantasy world. Making up weird societies is literally part of the ball game. But I do think that you have to put thought into it and that the society should make some sense as a whole. Half of my trouble with the society in Silk Fire is thus: it's not a matriarchy. It's a patriarchy with swapped genitals. Men are catty, weak, demure, and expected to raise the children. Women are loudly confident, angry, crude, predatory, and all enormously buff and strong. Exuding what we understand as the most toxic version of masculinity and overpowering the feminine men. These women even have bad sex like our men, jackhammering the protagonist, rolling off him, and falling directly asleep, even though that is not, physically, how any of that works. It's lazy! It shows no understanding of either why we have a patriarchy OR real-life examples of matriarchy! Absolutely no thought was put into this. I must presume it's there so that the male main character can experience a caricature of sexism. The other half of my problem is that none of the pieces of the sexist 'matriarchal' society go together. Men can't be in power, but several are and only continue to climb higher. The protagonist rails against homophobia ("I'm not the little queer boy you get to control" comes up at least three times), but you never see any. In fact, a significant portion of the corrupt women in charge are lesbians. Most baffling of all, there is a trans woman whose transition not only goes unquestioned in a very strict society but helps her get political power. Powerful women accept her identity immediately and hand her a high-up position and their respect. Men are in fact encouraged to transition into women so that they too can climb the social ladder. What?? Yikes??
There's much accusation that this book is too complex for people. It's not actually; it's just that the writing does not care about conveying information to the reader. I'm a long-time fan of weird high fantasy. I even like The Godstalk Chronicles, so you know I don't mind being thrown into a confusing world with little explanation. The problem is not that the world of Silk Fire is so vastly confusing. The writing simply wants to prance around showing off both the depth of in-universe historical trivia and fancy, poetic diction to the point that the whole thing becomes opaque. Every page is loaded with unfamiliar names and concepts without any indication of which bits might be important later. And most of them are not important! They are unnecessary except to ensure the reader knows that there is great depth to the world's history. You will never hear about most of these rattled-off wars or legends again. When things are important, the basic descriptions are prettied up until they're incomprehensible. You get gems like "Dark steel rippled red down his blade" and "A spring hissed. Steel cable hummed through gears. A bucket of rags shot upwards. Faziz dropped like a spider on a line, gold muscles tensing through his arms and back as he slid into a back handspring on the unspooling winch." Please trust me when I say that this is all there is. These are not then accompanied by clearer phrases. I'm just left with no idea what I'm looking at. Possibly, the narrative does not want me to have any idea what I'm looking at, so long as it gives the impression of being smarter than me. Even the guide to the names at the start of the book just... lists names, without any indication of whom they belong to or what significance they might have.
The characters speak like this, too, except when they don't. They're prone to archaic monologues, and then they become maddeningly modern. One character asks, "This fabled ‘love’ too-wealthy poets praise—how likely will it overshadow your good sense?" and then turns around on the same page to say, "Zega sounds like an abusive asshole," and that talking to him "clearly isn't healthy for you." It's not done cleverly or with intent. The dialogue just swaps around at random, no matter the speaker or the circumstance.
There's as much thought given to the plot. The political intrigue is hamfisted when it makes any sense. Character motivations bounce around wildly. Plot twists rely on the reader's confusion and forgetfulness, active concealment of information, or retroactive changes. Nonsense simply happens. One scene ends when an unnamed passerby throws a ball of robot bees at a crowd, which makes no more sense in context than it does to you, right now.
I usually talk about the characters of a book first and foremost, but frankly, I've been avoiding it. The entire book is narrated by Koreshiza Brightstar, a blunt prostitute touted as a politically savvy courtesan. All you need to know about his approach to his goals is that while attending a wedding as an escort, he approaches a political candidate and bald-faced asks to be her campaign manager. He then curses sexism when she declines to hire a prostitute with no prior experience while she's trying to chill on a Saturday. Everyone is mean, often cartoonishly mean, to Kore, and it's because of the prejudices. His endless trauma has convinced him that he's a monster, and you, reader, will not be permitted to forget that. He will harp on it at least once per page, how he must drive everyone away because he destroys all he touches. Edgy 2005 protag style. It gets tiring fast. Watching people reassure him that he's actually perfect and has never done anything wrong also gets tiring. The truth is in the middle: he's annoying and a dick. Nothing in his backstory supports the idea that he's human garbage, and yet it's maddening to see the few sympathetic characters around him assert that he's innocent and there's no need at all to change his behavior. This is because everyone in the book revolves around Kore, always. If he can't see them, they don't exist. The man's whole character arc is accepting his own worth and others' love. It's like watching Scott Pilgrim all over again and seeing the selfish jackass win through self-respect instead of, I don't know, not throwing other people under the bus.
There are two love interests, but it's another loss for poly rep. The female love interest, a scholar and noble, gets an insta-love story line and multiple sex scenes, starting way early in the book. The protagonist adores her; when his internal monologue isn't about loathing himself, it's about how perfect and wonderful she is, literally from the first time they meet. There's no journey or romance to it, he simply lives for her. (When he's not stabbing her in the back. Hate this guy.) The male love interest is so disrespected that I'm still infuriated. He's a working class guy, non-magical. He gets ONE short sex scene, and almost every description of him especially when they're being intimate is about how plain and ugly he is. Even though he just looks like a normal human being. His thin, chapped lips and his scarred, blemished skin, because he doesn't have magic like everyone else. There is a poly relationship, but it's very "Ria, love of my life, my own heart, I will make the world shine for her. Faziz is here too I guess." I truly believe the author just did not know what to do with the poor guy.
It's a mess. It's badly put together, it's pretentious just for the sake of it, and the cartoonish matriarchy that the author has claimed is incidental to the story looms uncomfortably on every page. Perhaps the most tragic part is that I've read a couple of interviews by this author, and he makes relatively intelligent points about gender and societal pressures. It's simply that none of these ideas make it into Silk Fire, at least not in any coherent, recognizable way. Instead, the poor, innocent protagonist gets to show up a bunch of women who were cruel to him, there are hordes of evil lesbians, and trans women gain access to power by transitioning. I won't claim that these are the author's views, but I can certainly see why people are upset at him. Personally, I'm upset at him because he's such a cuttingly arrogant literary agent when his writing is this unbelievably awful.
(Least) favorite quotes to see you off:
"A good boy is a jeweled chalice. A stupid boy is a leaky sieve. A bad boy is a water pistol. I’m a bad boy."
"We three all had bloody fingers in our hearts."
"It would impress my nerd friends back home and usher in a new era of utopia."
"The Phfigezava fought alongside Varjthosheri the Dragon-Blessed in the Warmwater-Scholars War." (None of these terms come up again.)
"Pets were too good at making you love them."
"Real jewelry. What boys wore in tales when ladies dueled for their hands."
"Like, how do I even start? Being an adult? Being my own person?"
"I could force my desires back inside me. Make myself a fancy toy, not a breathing person. I could protect myself from my dark, wrong soul."
"Come collect your debts with whatever army your dry ovaries can pump loose."
"I’ll cut off those pretty hands and drag you to Vashathke in chains! I’ll rape you and make a dragon child of my own!"
"I donned a mauve skirt with a living brocade of fluttering eyelids, matching sash of iridescent green feathers, and elbow-length steel bracers inlaid with coral roses."
"My friends back home… they only want to hang out with me when I’m fine. … It’s nice to hear you say I don’t always have to be fine."
"A vertical loop of road rose from the city-planet’s surface, supporting a domed lattice of iron, bone and copper scaffold, woven in a billion messy stitches. Abstract mosaics of holdweight ran in waves along the street and its crossways, holding reja and runners at impossible angles. Steam, sparks and fire leapt from whirling bronze machines that ran along the dome’s outer surface."
"She locked her arm around my shoulders, planted her feet back against the wall, and walked up it until she braced level with my ear. ‘My client has the greyest mound I’ve ever seen. I’ll picture you between her thighs tonight.'"
In short: it's bad. There is very little craft in this book. It's an ego trip and revenge fantasy. No cohesion in the worldbuilding, just every cool thing the author could think of, thrown together. The world's most beautiful and tragic boy becomes a dragon, rides dinosaurs, foils evil necromancy plots, and has lots of sex. I think there are people who will enjoy that, if their expectation is a popcorn read, they love #boyboss #boypower stories, and they can avoid being terminally confused by the writing. I did not have a good time.
Let's address the elephant in the room: the evil matriarchy. I don't think it's inherently wrong or misogynist to write an evil matriarchy in your fantasy world. Making up weird societies is literally part of the ball game. But I do think that you have to put thought into it and that the society should make some sense as a whole. Half of my trouble with the society in Silk Fire is thus: it's not a matriarchy. It's a patriarchy with swapped genitals. Men are catty, weak, demure, and expected to raise the children. Women are loudly confident, angry, crude, predatory, and all enormously buff and strong. Exuding what we understand as the most toxic version of masculinity and overpowering the feminine men. These women even have bad sex like our men, jackhammering the protagonist, rolling off him, and falling directly asleep, even though that is not, physically, how any of that works. It's lazy! It shows no understanding of either why we have a patriarchy OR real-life examples of matriarchy! Absolutely no thought was put into this. I must presume it's there so that the male main character can experience a caricature of sexism. The other half of my problem is that none of the pieces of the sexist 'matriarchal' society go together. Men can't be in power, but several are and only continue to climb higher. The protagonist rails against homophobia ("I'm not the little queer boy you get to control" comes up at least three times), but you never see any. In fact, a significant portion of the corrupt women in charge are lesbians. Most baffling of all, there is a trans woman whose transition not only goes unquestioned in a very strict society but helps her get political power. Powerful women accept her identity immediately and hand her a high-up position and their respect. Men are in fact encouraged to transition into women so that they too can climb the social ladder. What?? Yikes??
There's much accusation that this book is too complex for people. It's not actually; it's just that the writing does not care about conveying information to the reader. I'm a long-time fan of weird high fantasy. I even like The Godstalk Chronicles, so you know I don't mind being thrown into a confusing world with little explanation. The problem is not that the world of Silk Fire is so vastly confusing. The writing simply wants to prance around showing off both the depth of in-universe historical trivia and fancy, poetic diction to the point that the whole thing becomes opaque. Every page is loaded with unfamiliar names and concepts without any indication of which bits might be important later. And most of them are not important! They are unnecessary except to ensure the reader knows that there is great depth to the world's history. You will never hear about most of these rattled-off wars or legends again. When things are important, the basic descriptions are prettied up until they're incomprehensible. You get gems like "Dark steel rippled red down his blade" and "A spring hissed. Steel cable hummed through gears. A bucket of rags shot upwards. Faziz dropped like a spider on a line, gold muscles tensing through his arms and back as he slid into a back handspring on the unspooling winch." Please trust me when I say that this is all there is. These are not then accompanied by clearer phrases. I'm just left with no idea what I'm looking at. Possibly, the narrative does not want me to have any idea what I'm looking at, so long as it gives the impression of being smarter than me. Even the guide to the names at the start of the book just... lists names, without any indication of whom they belong to or what significance they might have.
The characters speak like this, too, except when they don't. They're prone to archaic monologues, and then they become maddeningly modern. One character asks, "This fabled ‘love’ too-wealthy poets praise—how likely will it overshadow your good sense?" and then turns around on the same page to say, "Zega sounds like an abusive asshole," and that talking to him "clearly isn't healthy for you." It's not done cleverly or with intent. The dialogue just swaps around at random, no matter the speaker or the circumstance.
There's as much thought given to the plot. The political intrigue is hamfisted when it makes any sense. Character motivations bounce around wildly. Plot twists rely on the reader's confusion and forgetfulness, active concealment of information, or retroactive changes. Nonsense simply happens. One scene ends when an unnamed passerby throws a ball of robot bees at a crowd, which makes no more sense in context than it does to you, right now.
I usually talk about the characters of a book first and foremost, but frankly, I've been avoiding it. The entire book is narrated by Koreshiza Brightstar, a blunt prostitute touted as a politically savvy courtesan. All you need to know about his approach to his goals is that while attending a wedding as an escort, he approaches a political candidate and bald-faced asks to be her campaign manager. He then curses sexism when she declines to hire a prostitute with no prior experience while she's trying to chill on a Saturday. Everyone is mean, often cartoonishly mean, to Kore, and it's because of the prejudices. His endless trauma has convinced him that he's a monster, and you, reader, will not be permitted to forget that. He will harp on it at least once per page, how he must drive everyone away because he destroys all he touches. Edgy 2005 protag style. It gets tiring fast. Watching people reassure him that he's actually perfect and has never done anything wrong also gets tiring. The truth is in the middle: he's annoying and a dick. Nothing in his backstory supports the idea that he's human garbage, and yet it's maddening to see the few sympathetic characters around him assert that he's innocent and there's no need at all to change his behavior. This is because everyone in the book revolves around Kore, always. If he can't see them, they don't exist. The man's whole character arc is accepting his own worth and others' love. It's like watching Scott Pilgrim all over again and seeing the selfish jackass win through self-respect instead of, I don't know, not throwing other people under the bus.
There are two love interests, but it's another loss for poly rep. The female love interest, a scholar and noble, gets an insta-love story line and multiple sex scenes, starting way early in the book. The protagonist adores her; when his internal monologue isn't about loathing himself, it's about how perfect and wonderful she is, literally from the first time they meet. There's no journey or romance to it, he simply lives for her. (When he's not stabbing her in the back. Hate this guy.) The male love interest is so disrespected that I'm still infuriated. He's a working class guy, non-magical. He gets ONE short sex scene, and almost every description of him especially when they're being intimate is about how plain and ugly he is. Even though he just looks like a normal human being. His thin, chapped lips and his scarred, blemished skin, because he doesn't have magic like everyone else. There is a poly relationship, but it's very "Ria, love of my life, my own heart, I will make the world shine for her. Faziz is here too I guess." I truly believe the author just did not know what to do with the poor guy.
It's a mess. It's badly put together, it's pretentious just for the sake of it, and the cartoonish matriarchy that the author has claimed is incidental to the story looms uncomfortably on every page. Perhaps the most tragic part is that I've read a couple of interviews by this author, and he makes relatively intelligent points about gender and societal pressures. It's simply that none of these ideas make it into Silk Fire, at least not in any coherent, recognizable way. Instead, the poor, innocent protagonist gets to show up a bunch of women who were cruel to him, there are hordes of evil lesbians, and trans women gain access to power by transitioning. I won't claim that these are the author's views, but I can certainly see why people are upset at him. Personally, I'm upset at him because he's such a cuttingly arrogant literary agent when his writing is this unbelievably awful.
(Least) favorite quotes to see you off:
"A good boy is a jeweled chalice. A stupid boy is a leaky sieve. A bad boy is a water pistol. I’m a bad boy."
"We three all had bloody fingers in our hearts."
"It would impress my nerd friends back home and usher in a new era of utopia."
"The Phfigezava fought alongside Varjthosheri the Dragon-Blessed in the Warmwater-Scholars War." (None of these terms come up again.)
"Pets were too good at making you love them."
"Real jewelry. What boys wore in tales when ladies dueled for their hands."
"Like, how do I even start? Being an adult? Being my own person?"
"I could force my desires back inside me. Make myself a fancy toy, not a breathing person. I could protect myself from my dark, wrong soul."
"Come collect your debts with whatever army your dry ovaries can pump loose."
"I’ll cut off those pretty hands and drag you to Vashathke in chains! I’ll rape you and make a dragon child of my own!"
"I donned a mauve skirt with a living brocade of fluttering eyelids, matching sash of iridescent green feathers, and elbow-length steel bracers inlaid with coral roses."
"My friends back home… they only want to hang out with me when I’m fine. … It’s nice to hear you say I don’t always have to be fine."
"A vertical loop of road rose from the city-planet’s surface, supporting a domed lattice of iron, bone and copper scaffold, woven in a billion messy stitches. Abstract mosaics of holdweight ran in waves along the street and its crossways, holding reja and runners at impossible angles. Steam, sparks and fire leapt from whirling bronze machines that ran along the dome’s outer surface."
"She locked her arm around my shoulders, planted her feet back against the wall, and walked up it until she braced level with my ear. ‘My client has the greyest mound I’ve ever seen. I’ll picture you between her thighs tonight.'"