312 pages
Published 1992
Read from January 4 to January 10
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (would be higher but it aged badly)
CW: fictional sexual assault, anti-queer violence
This Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novel dates from the heyday of white authors appropriating other cultures to make their writing seem more interesting. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, only to bounce off casual anti-Chinese slurs on the first page. Because this was also the era of equating bigotry with gritty realism. Bad times!
Unfortunately, I already spent $9 on a paperback copy from eBay, so I felt obligated to finish it.
Zhang is one of the foundational queer sci-fi texts. Its queerness, like its Chinese background, was appropriated. McHugh handles it more respectfully than, say, Frederik Pohl did in Gateway, but it’s still broadly stereotyped: Zhang cruises Coney Island, and has a penchant for blond white guys. McHugh also tours queer trauma and state violence in ways that may have been adventurous in 1992’s mainstream, but verge on feeling exploitative from a straight author nowadays (and probably did at the time, too).
Structurally, Zhang is more like a loosely linked series of short stories and novelettes than a cohesive novel. Classic first novel stuff. We follow Zhang himself from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to China. But we also get chapters from other perspectives, filling out the world: an extreme sports kite racer; a goat farmer in a Martian dome; a sheltered young New York woman who alters her face to fit beauty standards and promptly gets raped.
One unifying thread, the central character of the whole book, is the setting McHugh has created. Another unifying thread, the book’s emotional motif, is that you can never go far enough to escape yourself, that you have to find your own reason for continuing despite the seeming futility of it all.
McHugh is an excellent writer; her POVs pulse with interiority, and the universe is vividly realized, full of life and texture. However, her future New York, despite the intervention of centuries and Maoist revolution, isn’t far removed from the New York of the 1990s imagination. Homosexuality is still frowned upon outside gay clubs. Gay men are still described as “bent.” It’s a strange mix of future extrapolation and not being able to imagine certain things ever changing.
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