Book Review: Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

[hrj]

As usual, this is a bit of a dual review: book review and meta-review of my relationship to the book, to genre, and to reading it. Meta-review first.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would never have read Karen Memory. As I regularly lament, the relationship of my to-be-read pile to my available reading time is such that a book has to really grab me to claw its way to the top. Steam-punk isn’t really my thing; Western settings aren’t really my thing. I’ve enjoyed some of Elizabeth Bear’s short fiction when I encountered it (I think mostly the New Amsterdam series). But I’ve never sensed that extra something that pushed me over the edge. And, sure, all sorts of my on-line friends were raving about how wonderful this book was going to be, but they do that a lot about books that leave me feeling rather meh, so it isn’t a good guideline. And then someone mentioned, “And the protagonist has a lesbian romance.” Say what? I went to look at all the official publicity for the book and could find nothing at all to confirm this. I looked at the blurbs pulled to promote it, and nothing. So I plunked down my electrons in the iBook store to pre-order it, but didn’t have high hopes, because if the publisher wants to keep that aspect of the book out of sight, then it was hard to believe it would be a significant and satisfying aspect of the story. Well, I was wrong about that. But I still long for the day when an SFF publisher doesn’t feel that they have to keep a queer woman’s sexuality hidden inside the covers.

Karen Memory is a lovely, exciting, atmospheric steam-punk adventure in an alternate goldrush-era Seattle (by another name), seen through the title character: one of the girls at Madame Damnable’s bordello. We have a serial killer, class and racial dynamics, political shenanigans hyped up by the influence of a mind-control device, chases through dark dangerous streets by means of a steampowered sewing machine (yes, really), and what feels like a somewhat tongue-in-cheek assortment of standard steam-punk tropes such as mechanical octopuses. Oh, and significant supporting characters include the real-life models for the Lone Ranger and Tonto as well as a delightfully diverse cast – one that is far more true to the realities of the late 19th century west coast than Hollywood defaults would have you believe.

Karen is an engaging protagonist, and the strong idiosyncratic “voice” that comes through the first-person narration makes this stand out above what might otherwise be an over-the-top romp. Her romance with another runaway prostitute is sweet and genuine without glossing over (or dwelling deeply on) the realities of their profession. (Given that profession, it’s worth noting that the book has essentially no on-page sex, and certainly doesn’t eroticize the business of a whorehouse.) And the romance ends happily – I don’t care if that’s a spoiler, it’s something I needed to know to be willing to invest in reading the book. Because, you know, sad experience and all that.

In conclusion, I am now willing to add to my “must read” list any book by Elizabeth Bear in which I am allowed to enjoy similar characters and relationships. But in order to do so, I have to know that they’re in there. I’m looking at you, publishers.

Comments

[rosefox]

I immediately went to check the PW review and was relieved to see that we did indeed mention Karen's relationship with Priya, though it was put alongside a bunch of other plot points.

Given that Tor books show up on the Lambda Awards SF/F/H shortlist every year (three of them this year), I'm kind of surprised Tor isn't more overt about publicizing the queer content of those books.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Tor submitted four books for the SF/Fantasy/Horror category of the Lammies, and none of those books' catalog listings provides any indication that they have content or characters that would make them eligible for the award.

[rosefox]

I guess they figure straightwashing sells more books on Amazon--while courting the queers in the queer-only space. :/

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I thought about saying something similar, but since I can't exactly be considered a disinterested party, I refrained.

But the converse of that objection is leaning towards "community cred" requirements for awards. And that has a tendency to shut down the literary conversation across publishing communities and readerships. (I'm suddenly realizing how awkward it is to express some things when I'm trying to eliminate the metaphoric use of "ghettoization" from my vocabulary.) If an award for LGBTQ writing is restricted -- either explicitly or implicitly -- to those who wholeheartedly embrace LGBTQ identity, then it risks not challenging the community to stand up to the quality standards of the larger world. It occurs to me to wonder, for example, what people (both in and out of lesbian publishing) would think of Karen Memory being submitted for consideration for a GCLS award next year.

ETA: I did not mean to imply by that wording that Elizabeth Bear does not "wholeheartedly embrace LGBTQ identity"! I was thinking in terms of the publisher's embracing of the book's identity.

[rosefox]

I don't actually know how Bear identifies.

I'm not sure how you got from my side-eying Tor to community cred requirements for awards. I was a Lammy judge when we were supposed to be verifying queerness by reading author bios and vehemently opposed those rules (ended up resigning over it). I think Tor is trying to play both sides while never being overtly pro-queer in publicity materials, which is rude. I don't think the Lammies or anyone needs to respond to that by policing who can submit to awards.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The "community cred" thing was my own brain free-associating, largely based on conversations I see in lesbian-focused social media. (I'm hesitantly working up to a blog post or posts on the topic of some odd dis/functionalities I've encountered in the context of lesbian-focused publishing and associated communities. So it's a general topic that frequently prompts me to not-entirely-contextualized ramblings.)

I have seen Bear identify as bisexual, hence my concern about the unintended implication.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

In Bear's modern day sort-of urban fantasy "Whiskey and Water," one of the supporting characters is Carol Bierce, the first female Merlin (which in this universe is a Sorcerer Supreme-type title, not a personal name), who's also a lesbian living happily with her girlfriend somewhere in Connecticut. She really doesn't appear very much in that book, but, judging by Amazon's description, she's the protagonist in "Blood and Iron," the previous book in Bear's Promethean series. (I haven't actually read "Blood and Iron," since I checked "Whiskey and Water" out of the library without realizing it was Book Two of the series. Until I read the Amazon blurb just now, I figured that the first book pretty much focused on the same characters as the second one did. The main POV characters in "Whiskey and Water"--who also include a young woman who identifies as female, but is technically intersex--were interesting enough that I finished the four hundred-plus-page book, but I didn't find either them or the story compelling enough to rush right out in search of the previous weighty volume.)

There's also a major lesbian character in Bear's science fiction novel "Dust," but the woman she falls in love with is basically asexual (and, I believe, also turns out to be her half-sister), so their relationship never turns into romance.

[rosefox]

Aren't the Promethean books the ones with hot quasi-consensual sex scenes involving Lucifer and Christopher Marlowe? There's a whole lot of gay in pretty much everything Bear writes, though I've generally found it more on the titillating end than on the thoughtful exploration of relationships end. Both are totally valid, IMO, but people looking for one may not be satisfied by the other.

(They're also the books that triggered RaceFail '09, but that's a separate concern.)

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Probably. Marlowe is a fairly important character in "Whiskey and Water,"* but I don't recall any hot sex scenes between him and Lucifer. But I read the book several years ago, and it's the only one of the several installments of the Promethean series I have read so far, so that could be in one or more of the other volumes.

*Bear has kind of a thing about him. She's also written a short story in which Marlowe is a trans man who survives his in-real-life-fatal-stabbing by being pulled forward into the future by literature-loving scientists who've developed a time machine and have previously rescued the tubercular John Keats.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

And here we touch on some of the differential treatment of LGBTQ characters. Based purely on observation of what gets published, it is MUCH easier to get male homoerotic relationships published in mainstream novels than female ones.

And speaking as a reader with entirely subjective personal preferences, while I may cheer for an author's willingness and ability to include male homoerotic relationships in their novels, they don't touch my heart any differently from straight relationships. It's one of my frustrations with Melissa Scott's recent work.