I don't imagine anyone will ever complain that I only read or write about the most fashionable or hot button topics of the contemporary moment. But I imagine it is still odd to be reviewing a book series that, to my eyes, has largely dropped out of the subcultural spotlight. Ah well. Such is my curse.
The Terra Ignota series is in my mind once again for a couple of reasons - one, it was recommended to me very strongly by friends, and they continue to talk about it; two, I'm finally reading the Book of the New Sun, after having listened to Shelved by Genre's unit on those books (and they're cited as inspirational to Palmer, the author of Terra Ignota); and three, they keep coming up on a discord server I'm on, where most of the time, people are posting about how much they like them.
I, unfortunately, did not like them. Even worse, I have not yet seen anyone online articulate exactly what it is that I did not like about them. Most of the online commentary I've seen falls into one of two camps; ecstatic, effusive praise, or problematics thesis posting. Unfortunately for me, I think most of the critical problematics postings are missing the point. Unfortunately for you, you have the link to my blog, where I'm going to write about it.
The biggest and most consistent charge I've seen leveled at the series is that they are ciscentric / transphobic, or otherwise do bad gender stuff. The problem with these reads is that they center mostly on the language and behavior of the narrator, and don't usually account for a thematic reading of the book, which reveals that the problems run even more deeply into the core way gender is imagined therein. This is far from my only problem with the series, but it's as good a place to start as any.
The books are nearly impossible to summarize quickly, but here's the basic gist - by 2450, earth is quite different, and maybe almost utopian. People are not bound to geographical borders, and neither are nations (well, the important nations, like european ones). People hardly have to labor, and labor is not considered central to a person's life. Organized religion has been abolished (?) and so has gender (??). Our guide to this world is the deeply idiosyncratic little freak, Mycroft Canner, who has committed a crime so heinous that he's been condemned to a life of involuntary servitude (???).
And Mycroft, it turns out, has opinions about gender. While the world might think that by getting rid of pronouns, it's solved gender, Mycroft is "enlightened" and knows the truth - gender is deeply enmeshed in our society, not just in language but also deeper culture. As a convert to the power of gender, he gleefully assigns gendered pronouns to everyone, an act that is meant to be transgressive in his society. In addition, he tells us that his pronoun use does NOT necessarily correspond to genitalia-! but instead what he takes to be the essential nature of gender; having a "caring nature" is feminine; being forceful and forthright (and intimidatingly sexual) is masculine; fighting valiantly for a child is feminine, via the stereotype of "mother bear."
Most analysis stops here - and if this weren't a work of fiction, so would mine, probably. This is obviously not terribly daring thought about gender. It is not liberatory to insist on essential gendered nature, even if we allow that it might be divorced from biology. Certainly, some people like to lean into notions of masculinity or femininity to express their gender, but I think ultimately this way of thinking is pretty shallow - I don't want to say, when I am being caring and gentle, that I am getting in touch with my "feminine side". I think most people have a sense of how limiting this conception is.
There's something to be made, too, of the fact that Mycroft is literally misgendering people - according to the text, most of these people *should* conceive of themselves as genderless (more on this later). It is, at the very least, extremely rude to misgender people. Something that I've only seen a few comments on is that, in addition to his comments on gender, Mycroft cannot stop himself from disclosing characters' genitalia. The output of this is that, although Mycroft claims we should not imagine any sexual characteristics based on his use of gendered language, that I have basically zero questions about the genitalia of any of the major characters, which frankly I find a little weird.
So far, so bad - Mycroft is obviously a weird, gender/genitalia obsessed little freak. But what if that's the point?
Depiction is not endorsement - the ethics of a work of fiction are not just the outputs of the actions of the characters, no matter how protagonist-y they may be. I'm certainly opposed to the idea that the only books we should read are "moral" ones. Consuming "moral" media is not the key to being a moral person, and consuming "immoral" media does not stain one's soul. I don't need or want to only read books where the good guys win, or where every character's moral failings are addressed until they are perfect, pure role models.
However, I do think it's possible to tease apart a reading and identify the questions it's asking or the stance it's taking about the real world, not just in the world of the fiction. You should not misgender someone in the real world - but a fictional character is not real, and characters misgendering other characters is not an "act" let alone a moral or immoral act. Now, if events in the book were positioned such that it appears that the book is advocating for misgendering people, we might rightly criticize it, on the grounds that actually misgendering sucks and is harmful when it happens to real people. But making that case, that the book is positioning an ethical argument, requires more than just a recitation of events in the plot.
And in this case, I do believe that there's a sarcasm or irony going on in Terra Ignota. Mycroft is, by his admission, a convert to a very particular, gender-essentialist school of thought. This "school" is run by the character Madame (who more literally runs a brothel). Madame is the evil conspirator at the heart of the setting, about whom, nearly verbatim, a character shouts "She's trying to take over the world with gender?" Believing in gender essentialism is something the bad guys do - they want you to do it too, so they can control you (by making you horny or otherwise controlling who you love or how you behave).
The, uh, specifics of that mechanism there are a little suspect, perhaps, but it's kind of an interesting idea. I read it as being in concert with the series' fascination and disappointment with the enlightenment. Just like the enlightenment believed in the triumph of human reason and a kind of egalitarianism that had no room in its triumph for anyone but white men, so too does the society of Terra Ignota believe in the triumph of their new egalitarian and most perfect world. The "point" of the first parts of these books is that simply declaring gender differences abolished and ignoring the very real social relations lying under "gender" isn't a solution at all, and in fact risks losing the "progress" towards true egalitarian society entirely. The in-text method by which progress is lost is a little bizarre, but the thematic position is at least something I think most people could agree with. Don't let the bad guys use gender essentialism to control people!
We can read the books as arguing that we should doubt that there is an arc to history, as well as doubt that, even if there were such an arc, that it bends towards justice. It's imperfectly expressed through the gender conflict going on in the series, but that little core nugget of an idea is sound! Yes, the narrator is awful, and reading him can be unpleasant, but there's a theme here we can get behind, an idea we can chew on, an ethics we can wonder about instead of discard out of hand! We can finish up here and go home, right? Right?
Well, the problem is that the books keep on going. Actually, even in the first book, there's plentiful evidence to suggest that people in the world do not consider themselves genderless, rendering the whole scheme kind of moot, but most damningly, the later books wind up advancing gender-essentialist ideology pretty wholesale.
Here are two case studies, beats in the plot that I can't get out of my head. The first is when one of Madame's brightest pupils, Heloise, makes an impassioned plea in front of the senate to save the Cousins. The Cousins are one of the world governments, and their "brand" is being a caring, nurturing democracy. It's just been revealed that actually, their government is corrupt, and riots are mounting. The senate is about to disband the nation, before Heloise's intervention. She monologues on behalf of the Cousins, arguing that only their government embraces feminine virtues, and for that reason, must be saved. Thematically, this seems like a pretty clear read - deploying staid notions of femininity to preserve the corrupt status quo is a way that women in positions of power have remained part of the oppressing class! Heloise, however, is met with cheers, and the Cousins do retain their nationhood, promising to reform. Hmm.
Towards the very end of the book, tensions have erupted into war. It's a very messy war, we're told. Our narrator, who at this point is not really Mycroft but is kind of sort of Mycroft, has a video call with the other major world leaders to discuss an upcoming battle, and the leaders promise to a set of rules of engagement that everyone believes will keep casualties to a minimum. After the call is over, our narrator rejoices, and informs us that no one on that call had a penis! Look at how good of a job the penis-less are doing running the world, and making ethical war!
The reason I've singled these out is that at these points in the book, I don't believe you can make the same kind of "double" reading that we made with Mycroft - the tone of the book reads to me as utterly sincere, and events do not later throw our understanding of these plot beats into question. Nobody challenges the notion of ethical war. The position of the books does seem to be that putting women, or quite specifically people without penises, in charge of world governments will make those governments more ethical. You won't catch me saying that world governments aren't deeply sexist and biased against women, but this line of thinking is essentially the definition of trans-exclusive radical feminism. I don't mean that Palmer is a TERF, but I do think that this is the kind of trouble you get into with unexamined gender essentialism. Even if Palmer had made a carveout in that latter case, and centered the beat on women more broadly, instead of vagina-havers, I still would take issue with the positioning that caring and nurturing are "feminine" qualities, or that "femininity" needs to be preserved in government, and particularly that merely the presence of women in positions of power is sufficient to make ethical war!
So, the way these books imagine gender is not very liberatory; neither is it very deep. It's a very common kind of gender essentialism, ultimately, once we move beyond the early ironic mode. We could read everything through that ironic lens; maybe my first instinct was correct, and I should have read the text as being deeply skeptical of Heloise's monologue in defense of feminine government, and I'm meant to roll my eyes at Mycroft2's celebration of ethical war via vagina-centric leadership. Under my reading, after all, the "bad guys" win (and the child of the gender essentialists is even elected to world dictator)! All I can say about this is that it would be a pretty lonely reading; I don't see anyone else talking about reading the books this way. It's also kind of self defeating - every reading could be second-guessed on this basis, excepting if I were to email Palmer and ask for the word of god about my interpretation, or obsessively dig through her interviews and posts, hoping to find the true, intended reading. But I think the case makes itself. Regardless of what Palmer meant to signify, the output reads to me as boring, ultimately perfectly in line with some of the dominant ideology of the day, in a way that I note is particularly transmisogynistic (and transphobic in general).
My most charitable read is that the later books are simply not interested in any of these bigger questions, and that the heat is instead on the melodrama between the characters. I could construct a similar argument about religion (for example, the in-text solution to religious disputes is to have a worldwide troupe of licensed priest/therapists, and it's revealed that there's corruption and bias, but ultimately the books declare that's just a problem of bad leaders, rather than an inherently oppressive regime) or race (africa doesn't even show up until the last book); or labor (criminals are indentured servants????), or politics (would an absolute dictator be ok if their subjects could simply leave?), but they all boil down the same way - the first book gives the impression of being interested in these topics, but does not have the juice to commit to exploring them. They are all merely set dressing for the character drama. Personally, I found that extremely disappointing!
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