Iron Widow

When Iron Widow came up on the list of the list of rejected Hugo Award nominees in the controversy over the Chengdu Worldcon, I figured that I should bump the book further up my reading list (it was already there, it was just further in). Then it became a Sword & Laser book club pick, and I made sure to get ahold of a copy from the library – and I was not disappointed by this book at all, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel.

The premise of Iron Widow is that it follows Wu Zetian – not the version of our world, but a different one (this is extremely loosely inspired by her rise to power), a girl from basically the sticks, who volunteers herself to be the consort of a Chrysalis pilot – someone who supplies qi to the pilot of these shapeshifting mechs so they can fight the monstrous Hundun who attack the country – a position that also puts the consorts at great risk of death, indeed most consorts die. However, Zetian has a secret reason for this – the pilot she wants to be the consort of murdered her sister, and she wants revenge. When she succeeds in her mission, but not in the method she had in mind, she ends up becoming a consort to another pilot, Li Shimen, who has previously killed numerous consorts, but together their qi balance allows them to work together successfully – and in turn overturn the systems of power that seek to victimize them both.

In short, Iron Widow goes – the story moves at a tremendously brisk pace. It’s not so fast that you lose track of the story’s events, and who is doing what to whom and why. However, it’s also tremendously easy for a significant plot beat to also be overshadowed by a slew of other plot beats. By the climax of the novel, there are a string of character deaths that happen with the rapidity of characters getting killed off of the climax of a Tomino-helmed Gundam series, though not in the “Kill-Em-All” Tomino kind of way.

To be clear, I’m not just making the mecha anime comparisons in a “Guy who only watched Boss Baby gets Boss Baby vibes” kind of sense. When I read the description of the piloting system of the Crystalis mechs, my first thought was, “Huh, I’m getting Darling in the Franxx vibes” – and then I reached the acknowledgments at the end of the book and, lo and behold, Darling in the Franxx came up multiple times, in a clear “This book is in dialog with that anime” sense. As someone who wrote a fanzine for several years for the specific objective of, Parent Trap-esque, trying to get Anime & Lit-SF fandom back together again, I had to stifle a squee in the breakroom at work.

Darling in the Franxx was enjoyable, but certainly flawed series – I didn’t dive into it as much at the time in my review, but it was a series that had sexual politics that were certainly problematic – with a focus on heteronormative romantic pairings likely as part of the political push of the Abe government to try to boost the declining birthrate of Japan’s ethnic Japanese population, and thus failed to examine, interrogate, and explore the other aspects of the sexual politics of the world they were creating, and similarly refused to seriously work with the ideas of having different compatible gender pairings than male dominant/female submissive (which, to be clear, is something that at least Goddanar was willing to consider back in the day – so desire to be horny on main is not an excuse). By contrast, author Xiran Jay Zhao clearly went into this having already interrogated these ideas herself, and was willing to incorporate the results of that interrogation into the book – with plenty of room in the upcoming sequels to explore that further.

Also, the character dynamics in the story are great – especially the core trio of Zetian, Shimin, and Zetian’s childhood friend Gao Yizhi, with a few solid supporting characters like strategist Sima Yi. Not to make this “my year of fiction about polyamory”, but the three make for a great polyamorous relationship, and seeing the relationship between the three build throughout the novel is wonderful. How that relationship will go into the second book is… hard to get into without spoilers, but it’s something I’m excited to read about, but also anxious over how it will turn out – which admittedly is probably what Zhao was going for, so Mission Accomplished.

One other thing I also appreciated – a thing that bugged me about She Who Became The Sun is that it was a fantasy novel heavily inspired by Chinese history that wasn’t really willing to interrogate some serious aspects of it – because the focus was on overthrowing the Mongol government (referred to as the Hu Dynasty, instead of the historical dynastic name of the Yuan dynasty) – so there’s no consideration of the thought that historical China, being an Empire, was generally often in the process of, to use the modern parlance, “Doing an Imperialism”, and the barbarians attacking at their borders were just as often peoples seeking to resist conquest as those seeking to raid and conquer, and in the process, reiterated old stereotypes that basically lead to the Mongols being written like stereotypical Orcs (in the ways that some interpretations of Orcs by Western authors are written like stereotypical Mongols). Instead, Iron Widow through the back half of this story also interrogates the romanticization of Imperial Chinese history – calling out that the country, through its surrogate in this novel, was an empire, and did the things that we justly and rightly call out other historical empires as having done, whether in the form of the brutal subjugation of peoples (particularly ethnic minorities), and using the satellite areas of the nation for resource extraction for the wealthier imperial core. That crap happens in the world of this novel, and it’s one of the numerous injustices (including the heavy institutional misogyny that kicks off the story) that Zetian is seeking to overthrow.

It made for a novel that I enjoyed immensely, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel. Also, with how well this book turned out with Zhao riffing on Darling in the Franxx, there’s a chunk of me that really hopes she watched Getter Robo or Gurren Lagann, because there’s a bit of that I’d be interested to see if she riffs on in a future book.