The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2024

My first inclination was Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory (2023) because I was in a space-mood. (Bill finished it first.) It’s divided into five parts, each heralded by an excerpt from writings about Earth and Earthlings which offer a peek into others’ perspectives. The novel itself, however, is presented in Kyr’s voice: a competitive, loyal, brash student on Gaia Station, who has trained her whole life to battle the majoda for survival. As a teenager she knows everything and is convinced the universe is against her: “How stupid to assume that anything has rules, when nothing in the universe has ever been fair.” But she’s about to uncover some untold history, that “the world isn’t divided into good people and traitors”. It took me about a fifth of the novel to feel somewhat comfortable in her worldbuilding, but overall it’s a character-driven story (and not too science-y). In her acknowledgements, Tesh pays homage to Tolkien and to Le Guin, “from whose writings I learned the phrase ‘social science fiction.’”

The next to arrive in the post was Anne de Marcken’s novella It Lasts Forever and Then it’s Over (2024), with the dead, flat bird on the cover. deMarcken is also the editor and publisher of one of the prize’s independent nominees—Alissa Hattmann’s Sift—which makes me wonder whether it’s just as strange. The epigraphs for each of this novella’s seven chapters are from poets and philosophers. De Marcken offers some lyrical bits to admire, even an occasional simile: “Stumps hunker in the thicket of regrowth like gravestones in an untended cemetery.” For about a quarter of the novel, I found myself thinking I could decipher a narrative but, then, I fell into the words. Statements are simple but concepts are complex: “Here and there are strange reminders of a past before the past was everything before the end.” It seems like the kind of book that might be preoccupied with recreating a particular mood (melancholy, despair) but the epigraphs and some recurring motifs suggest there’s more to it. Perhaps it would be good company in the kind of fog that can characterize bereavement, or when you’re inhabiting a disorienting kind of thoughtful confusion: it’s definitely one that rewards the single-sitting read. (Bill writes about it here.)

Next was Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and its Girl (2023), a story in three parts: Soap, Salt and Ink. It begins with: “Imagine this.” It’s the story of Betty Rumanni who turns to her aunt’s notebooks to determine where she belongs. Readers meet her when she’s born: “Where my mother and grandmother saw only danger, you, Auntie, saw possibility.” Hers is not an ordinary childhood, partly because her family is living in exile in the U.S., far from Palestine. Partly because she was born blue. Cypher frequently addresses readers, urging us to attend to specific story elements. “The story before the beginning is always more important than anyone realizes,” she warns, for instance. But she’s not simply on the margins, directing, and sharing the contents of her aunt’s diaries: she’s a storyteller too. Her language is usually simple and clear, with some striking figurative language: “Me, I had done what babies do. I paid almost no attention to time while it stuffed years of experiences in me, warped and disorganized like someone packing in a hurry.” She delicately weaves together mythic elements on the personal and cultural scale with details of ordinary life, into a strangely satisfying tale.

Then, The Saint of Bright Doors (2023) by Vajra Chandrasekera arrived via ILL. The prose style is rich and occasionally the vocabulary had me reaching for the dictionary (“deliquesces”—now a contender for new, favourite word—and “compellence”, for instance). It’s a character-driven story that reminded me of last year’s nominee, Brother Alive, in the way that it dances across the blurry territory between symbolic and literal. At times, I was convinced that the doors were metaphorical and, at other times, when people are sitting with them for hours, studying and observing, I thought they’re actually doors. On this count, here’s a quotation: “Pipra is full of interesting facts about the bright doors, but he’s already encountered many of them in his reading. Apparently so little is known that the line between dedicated amateur and professional expert is quite narrow.” But, actually, it’s passages like this longer one, which explain why I still enjoyed the book so much, even while mostly feeling confuddled:

“Hej takes to tracing Fetter’s scars with his fingers and never asking about them, a conjoined intimacy and respect that finally breaks Fetter’s commitment to high collars and long sleeves in public. They devour each other, again and again; they talk all the time; they entangle themselves in each other’s lives and hearts and minds, so much so that in their moments of closest intimacy, stray thoughts spontaneously transmit themselves across the space separating their skulls and become audible, crackling and whispering, in the other mind’s ear.”