Six years ago, during the Covid shutdown, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and facing the sudden collapse of what I had thought my future would look like. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, just down the street from one of the city’s best features: the 400-acre, wooded hills of Allegheny Cemetery. It was the perfect place to go for long walks where I could, if only temporarily, escape from everything else. Unfortunately, I lived on the opposite side from the entrance gate.
To break out, I would have to break in.
Luckily, another of Pittsburgh’s distinctive features is its thriving anarchist community. Having made a few friends of the black-flag persuasion, I learned how to freely navigate the city—how to find secret staircases, abandoned boats in the river, and gaps in the chain-link cemetery fence.
Around the same time, I also started looking for escape where I had found it as a child: in science fiction and fantasy stories. A clean escape requires sharp bolt-cutters, so I sought out the cutting-edge—what are magazines publishing these days? Who’s the new Ursula K. Le Guin?
Pretty soon, I stumbled on an intriguing aubergine-colored website. It published beautiful and quirky stories, titled everything from “We Are Here to Be Held” to “Dirty Wi-Fi.” The magazine was totally free, dared to experiment, and appeared to be run like an anarchist commune (something, as I mentioned, I’d developed a certain fondness for).
Strange Horizons soon had my devoted readership. Shortly thereafter, it also had one of my early, awkward attempts at science fiction in its slush pile. I wanted to be a part of this beautiful organism, an international effort to open portals to other worlds. And at first, I thought that would be through gracing its pages with my genius.
After getting humbled, I reached out again a couple years later to volunteer as a slush reader. I got more humbled. As a slush reader, I learned that for every concept I considered myself clever for coming up with, there were a hundred people who had not only had the same idea, but turned it into a far better story. I learned I needed to read more. A lot more. Everything, actually.
So, I’m still working on that.
But I’m happy to announce that as of this year, I am getting to do so in the context of a new role at Strange Horizon:
Fiction editor (!!!?)
Six years ago, when I first fell in love with Strange Horizons, I could never have imagined I’d become one of its editors. I’ve still got total imposter syndrome. But I’m so grateful for the opportunity to become even more involved with the magazine that not only reignited my love for speculative fiction, but provided me with an invaluable escape during difficult times.
Ursula K. Le Guin once answered the criticism of “escapism” by affirming: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?” And, she concluded, “if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”
I still have a lot to read and a lot to learn. I’m still getting more humbled every day. But what I do know is how to break out by breaking in. How to find where someone has made a hole in the chain-link fence. How to wave my hands over my head like a crazy person and holler “this way! over here! OVER HERE!”
I can’t guarantee we won’t be escaping into a cemetery.
In fact, the first escape hatch I’m excited to share, “This Obituary Has Been Retracted” by P.C. Verrone, opens into something not unlike a city of the dead: told through obituaries in a 1980’s gay men’s magazine, it imagines a world where the AIDS epidemic suddenly and mysteriously changes course.
It’s really fun and it made me cry a lot, which is why I picked it.
***this post contains spoilers for A. K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon/Harrow the Ninth***
What is it about being a child bride to a dead god in a sepulcher deep underground that we find so relatable? Whatever it is, if you’re getting ready for Tomb Girl Summer, your reading list must include Ursula K. Le Guin, Tamsyn Muir, and A.K. Larkwood.
For this post, I wanted to focus on hyping Larkwood, who has done something special with her debut novel The Unspoken Name. But I couldn’t help but review this book in literary conversation with Le Guin and Muir. And because I’ve got a million things on my mind this week, instead of this being a standard book review, it’s more like an overflow area for connections between these three writers my brain keeps flooding with.
Like, I only found Larkwood because of Muir. I fell in love with Muir’s Gideon the Ninth a few months ago, and in an interview she mentioned being friends with Larkwood and embroidering her a blanket or something that said “Love means never having to say you’re Csorwe” which cracked me up. (Csorwe is the main character of Larkwood’s book. See? Now it’s funny.)
Anyway, Larkwood’s book performed a kind of miracle for me, and I wanted to share this happy surprise.
Atuan, Atutwo: A. K. Larkwood’s Reenvisioning of Earthsea
When I was a kid, I adored The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin. I returned to it again and again over the years because it’s so immersive, the kind of fantasy story that feels like it literally unlocks a door between worlds. Comforting and magical at the same time, a Narnia you never get told you’re too old for.
And yet, to this date I have never read any of the other Earthsea books. Somehow I stumbled on Tombs first (it’s not the first book in the series) and stopped there. When I tried to read further, I was disappointed to find Tenar, the priestess of the tomb, didn’t remain the main character. But that Le Guin, feeling bound by sexist fantasy conventions, had to set her aside in favor of some guy wizard.
Ursula Le Guin herself expressed regret over how Earthsea manifested, quoted here as saying: “The Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total, complete bust. From my own archetypes and from my own cultural upbringing I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard. Maybe I’ll learn to eventually but when I wrote those I couldn’t do it. I wish I could have.”
I wish Le Guin had lived to read Larkwood’s book, because I feel like A. K. Larkwood wrote the Earthsea that Le Guin envisioned writing in a better world.
I can’t express how much catharsis I felt reading The Unspoken Name. Calling it the “spiritual successor” of Tombs of Atuan isn’t enough, because it’s more like the reincarnation or second coming. Which is not to say this book ever feels derivative or like it’s purely an homage. It’s entirely its own story too.
Yet all these years, when I’ve thought about Tombs of Atuan, I’ve felt this wistful regret that it ended where it did, and never could have imagined that someone could write something that would completely wipe away that feeling. To stumble onto exactly that was a startling, lovely experience.
Now that I’ve tried to express how blown away I was, I’m going to pivot away from #LeGuining and compare and contrast The Unspoken Name with another book, Gideon the Ninth, by Tamysin Muir.
Note: Because I listened to the audiobook, I don’t know how characters’ names are spelled, and will be referring to them as I heard them. Obviously I could just google them, but I’m interested in the idea of audiobooks as a distinct medium/experience and in the potential they have for reintroducing elements of oral storytelling to the writing and enjoyment of mainstream fiction. So for experimental purposes, I’m passing on the names of these characters as I experienced them, and if you want to look like you know what you’re talking about, you shouldn’t quote me.
Note note: Speaking of Le Guin and blogging, I just learned she started a blog toward the end of her life, where she reflects on aging, and writing anecdotes and advice, and her cat’s adventures. You can find it on her website still, and some of these posts were collected into a book.
Tomb Fast, Tomb Furious: Muir vs Larkwood
Tamsyn Muir and A.K. Larkwood seem to be IRL friends and there are a not-insignificant amount of similarities between their debut novels Gideon the Ninth and The Unspoken Name, respectively. I would not be surprised if as an inside joke or something, they drafted their books based on the same prompt or list of things it needed to include.
Likely, their books emerged through shared conversations around mutual favorite authors and themes, producing two different takes on a common vocabulary/conceptual set.
I enjoyed reading Muir and Larkwood back to back; it’s similar to reading C.S. Lewis and Tolkien together, and getting additional depth out of the reading experience through the comparison of how two good friends tackling similar genres and themes can produce such divergent results. I’m early in my fiction writing journey but the dream of this kind of friendship-of-professionals is what motivates me to get out of my hobbit hole and network.
I made this compare and contrast chart of random similarities (***SPOILERS!***)
Concept
A. K. Larkwood
Tamsyn Muir
What I imagine their concept for the book was
Tomb of Atuan II: 2mbs of A2an
The Westing Game but written by a terminally online Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Revenants
Weak zombies, not central to story, raised to serve necromancers, common on dying worlds
Powerful, big part of lore and feature in story, come back to fight necromancers who pissed them off, literally are dead worlds
Spellcaster/Swordswoman partnership
Csorwe (main character) is swordswoman to a powerful wizard/chancellor, Sir Thennai. Student overcoming her mentor relationship.
Gideon (main character) is swordswoman to a powerful necromancer, enemies to beloveds relationship.
Librarians who kick ass and are also necromancers
Oranna has a masterful character arc that keeps you on your toes, and is the main antagonist
Pal/Cam and Abigail Pent all fit this category to a degree, but are helpful friends and not main characters
Sapphic main characters and nothing unusual about homosexuality in the world of the story
Csorwe and Shuthmili are both young women, very sweet and wholesome sapphic story of first love. Other main characters are gay as well.
Gideon and Harrow are both gay women, story does not feature a traditional romance B plot between them, but they are *together.* Lots of other characters gay.
Important Tomb / Help! I married a dead god
Csorwe betrothed to the god of death “the Unspoken and Unspeakable One,” who lives in essentially a tomb, but she escapes and denounces it
Gideon sworn to Harrow, the tomb priestess figure who’s basically betrothed to the body in the Locked Tomb they have both been raised to protect.
Genre
Fantasy, but with science fiction elements
Science fiction, but with fantasy elements
A particular narrative style characterized by contemporary cussing and somewhat “anachronistic” narrative voice for the setting
Generally, Larkwood sticks to traditional fantasy narrator voice, with a few exceptions like “Kicking the shit out of a crate of melons”
Muir references a lot of memes, which sort of has an in-world reasoning for it. “In some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons.”
Narcissist male mentor who main character loves before learning better
Csorwe and Sir Thennai
Harrow and the God Emperor
Some more in-depth comparisons:
Narration, and emotional experience reading the books
If the experience of reading a book were a relationship, Gideon the Ninth felt like a teenage obsession and The Unspoken Name felt like a slow, stable romance. I enjoyed both, but I could see them appealing to different demographics who might only click with one or the other.
With Gideon, Muir’s narrative voice is what kept me turning the page. It was charismatic, unpredictable, and laced with descriptions that spammed the dopamine button in my brain. 80% of why I enjoyed the book was the freshness of the voice (especially as read by Moira Quirk, whose distinctly capturing the voices of over a dozen characters dazzled me!).
The compelling characters and narration perhaps allow Gideon (and its sequels) to get away with a plot that’s notoriously almost incomprehensible until you finish the book and read it through a second time. It worked for me for the first two books, but I couldn’t get through the third, which asked more of me as a reader than I was ready to commit.
In contrast, Larkwood offers a more traditional narrative style, a voice that mostly dissolves into the background to let the story bloom forward. There are a few moments of what felt like breaking character for the narrator, such as the “melons” comment in the table above. Although they made me laugh, these moments felt out of place, like the author was torn between a “mature” voice and a more trendy/quippy/internet style, as Muir employs consistently. It pulled me out of the moment when these happened, even though they were fun; breaking the fourth wall in a book that otherwise isn’t written in that meta style.
While the narration had a couple of these inconsistent moments, the plotting was impressively rendered, like running your hand over the perfectly fitted joints of a piece of woodworking craftsmanship. Gideon made my heart leap, but the sense of security in promises made and kept through The Unspoken Name‘s plotting had me feeling cuddled up by the fireplace in an old quilt.
Which is not to say I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, especially with a dramatic pivot and leap forward in time after the first act. As someone currently trying to learn how to write a novel, I was awestruck at the situations Larkwood dragged her characters into and still got them out of. I periodically paused the audiobook at scenes I knew I would have shied away from taking so far, not trusting my creativity to get the character out alive without some cheap effect, and I tried to guess what Larkwood would do next. (The answer, always: blow my mind).
Cults and religious trauma
Gideon explicitly features a “cult,” but it’s more a cult in the classical sense of a maintenance of a sacred site. Throughout the series, one of the main characters has a positive relationship with the cult and her spirituality through it. There’s an actual, unstated, cult around their God Emperor, but it’s not in direct conflict with the MCs like the cults in Unspoken are (at least, not in the first two books of the series).
The cults and abusive relationship dynamics in The Unspoken Name are a major theme, as several primary characters tackle being born into and growing to eventually escape cults of various and blended types: religious, political, family, romantic.
The Kharsagi empire was my favorite aspects of the worldbuilding. I haven’t felt that nauseating sense of horror from even the actual horror genre books I’ve read this year like I have from Larkwood’s depiction of the Kharsagi’s coldly sophisticated systems of religious and political repression. I think if you’ve had any experience with religious or cult trauma, especially as a young woman, you’ll especially empathize with Csorwe and Shuthmili’s long and difficult interior journeys.
Themes: the struggle with breaking out physically but not yet mentally, with leaving one master just to end up serving another until you can recognize the cycle, the overwhelming responsibility of deciding what your life should look like for yourself, being unable to trust your own perception of reality, feeling “contaminated” etc. Through the medium of fantasy, Larkwood was able to empathetically engage with these in a way that might be more triggering to read if it were straight up fiction or nonfiction.
Worldbuilding: cultural references and influences
The Kharsagi culture is not all evil, but has a few redeeming qualities. They are big on research projects into the history of a universe with a clearly troubled past and uncertain future, which the other worlds in the book don’t seem that interested in understanding. In an alliterative paraphrase of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (“though much is taken, much abides”), the Kharsagi scholarly motto is “Much is lost, but much lasts.” I often feel torn between old school and postmodern, Eastern and Western philosophy, tradition versus impermanence, so I appreciated this envisioning of a middle way–learning from what can be gathered of history even recognizing most of the data has disappeared, and that new, better ways are also being created.
I haven’t analyzed this in depth, so just covering what jumped out at me personally—both Muir and Larkwood appear to draw on a similar canon of influences, both Western classic literature and Millennial culture. But Muir leans into internet cultures and Gothic/Romanticism explicitly, with the direct incorporation of memes and characters named things like “Christabel” and “Annabel Lee.” While Larkwood’s worldbuilding draws more subtly on her influences, melding them together rather than directly pointing at them, as in the paraphrase of Tennyson, the echoing back to fantasy influences like Tombs of Atuan, and the subtle inclusion of orc- and elf-like races without smearing on the high fantasy tropes too thick.
Relationships
Another area where Muir and Larkwood diverge is in the treatment of toxic relationships. The relationship between the two main characters in Gideon, who follow an enemies-to-beloveds arc, is a troubled one, and the angst is part of the appeal. In Unspoken, basically every single relationship between every single character is toxic except for that between Csorwe and Shuthmili, who find a path out of their respective religious cults and narcissistic parent figures to create something entirely gentle, kind, and loving with each other.
I love that Gideon and Harrow are so nasty to each other, their banter is off the charts and their fraught relationship lays the groundwork for their eventual commitment to each other to be that much more powerful. I adore Csorwe and Shuthmili’s relationship for entirely the opposite: they never say anything mean to each other, but are both just earnestly trying to do the right thing, and that eventually brings them together. They are both respectful of each others’ differing religious backgrounds even while disagreeing and deconstructing their own. Especially in representation of a queer relationship, it’s lovely to just have love, without tragedy.
Also, in my headcanon Shuthmili is autistic. If this was indeed the intent, Larkwood did a great job with representation here too, without being hamfisted or stereotypical about it. A character who values research and rule-following, struggling to break free of the research and rules of the repressive religious cult she’s been brought up in, is a powerful story. And the respect that she and Csorwe show each other for things they have grown used to other people not taking seriously about them is just so heartwarming.
If you made it this far in my rambling about queer tomb maidens and second comings of Ursula K. Le Guin, you may just have what it takes to get through Gideon the Ninth and its even more perplexing sequels, and you are definitely in for a treat with A. K. Larkwood, queen of plotting, who would never have started this blog post with the punchline of a joke before setting it up.
AUSTIN DEWAR 