Readercon: Book Club: The Locked Tomb Series by Tamsyn Muir

[kate_nepveu]

My second-to-last panel and, therefore, report!

Book Club: The Locked Tomb Series by Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series is dense with allusion, mystery, heartbreak, ever-more-unreliable narrators, and terrible jokes. Let's share our favorite characters and moments, point out telling details we were excited to discover, and speculate wildly about what might happen in Alecto the Ninth.

Benjamin Rosenbaum, Gillian Daniels (moderator), Graham Sleight, Kate Nepveu, Yves Meynard

A panel I wasn't moderating! (Partly because I was a last-minute addition to it.) I wasn't able to reread beforehand, but I did start listening to the audiobooks as a bit of a substitute. (After the drive home, I'm two chapters from the end of Gideon. Moira Quirk is as good as everyone says, though I'm glad I have the text fairly firmly in my head already, because as good as her voices are, I still prefer the ones in my head.)

I made extensive notes ahead of time, which I posted pictures of to various social media. I did my best to be restrained on the panel, however, so I only (only!) got out maybe half of that. And I took pretty detailed notes ... until my pen ran out of ink, which seems thematic somehow (as did the broken clock that Readercon gives every panel room to track the time).

This is full of spoilers.

Discussion with SPOILERS for all of the Locked Tomb books and short stories

Readercon has been using name tents made of white-board material (which are very handy because you never forget them, which is a decent tradeoff for the occasional person whose handwriting is illegible). Someone had put a House affiliation on theirs, so Gillian started by asking us all to introduce ourselves with names, what we did, and what House etc. we would be.

I know Ben was Hot Sauce's gang; me, I go back and forth between Fifth House (mom-coded) and Sixth (which seems most appellate-lawyer-like?), but really I'm a random background extra on Nona's planet; and Gillian was likewise the latter, or alternatively a skeleton servant from Canaan House. I can't remember what Graham and Yves were: I think Sixth and BoE, but I'm not sure who was which.

Gillian then asked us how we recommended these books to people. I said I talked about the increasingly unreliable narrators—culminating, in a phrase borrowed from Tumblr, in someone who is literally only six months old on all levels but the physical—and the incredible density of the works.

Ben talks about the way it plays with genre. He'd made a Twitter thread back in the day about the first sentence of Gideon, which I'll simply refer you all to the Wayback Machine version of for the sake of my hands. The bravado of the writing carries you through the apparent incongruities—until the third book reveals the reason for them!

Graham agrees about the register shifts. His pitch is that the series seems likely to be a hundreds-of-thousands-of-words, multi-volume argument for why Pluto is a planet.

Yves talks about the originality, though he notes that as possibly the oldest person on the panel, he may be missing some things about the books.

Gillian asked about our favorite characters.

I said what I'd been telling people all weekend about listening to the Gideon audiobook: when you can't rush through the early Ninth stuff, it's just so crushingly obvious how much Gideon needs to be able to give her affection to someone who returns and shows it! Saddest girl in the whole world even then!!!! I just want her to have that healthy mutually affectionate relationship and I'm 99% sure she's not going to get it. So even though I'm sure I'll have that reaction when I get to Harrow and Nona (indeed, I was wearing my "tell your dog i said hi" T-shirt in honor of Nona), it had to be my girl Gideon, first and forever.

Yves: Palamedes. The first time through, he wasn't sure whether he was secretly a bastard, but on reread, he was sure.

Ben: Palamedes is a mensch. His favorite is now Nona; Gideon and Harrow are so emotionally cramped and burn so hot, with their interlocking traumas; then Nona is so emotionally expressive (raised by three loving parents!), in a heartbreaking respite.

Graham: his favorite, though not for aspirational reasons!, is John, and/because of the whole structure behind him and the question he poses of whether there's a way out of this cycle.

Gillian said that her favorite reveal in Harrow, the faux school story, is that Harrow is learning to deconstruct living planets, no big deal. (I'm sorry, if Gillian said a favorite character, I didn't write it down!)

Ben followed up by saying that Gideon is a queer Warhammer 40k campaign (apparently? this is outside my area of expertise), and John is such an elegant way of bringing home all that tropey stuff.

As for the memes, I references this Tumblr theory about why they exist beyond just "John remembers them."

Ben went back to the "dirty magazines" part of the first line of the series, noting that this is the modern world peeking through the Gormenghast bullshit that John came up with; John couldn't come up with everything (me: but he could come up with feudalism and indentured servants!), so then the stuff he didn't specify gets filled in by people being people.

Yves: the Empire conquers planets [*], there must be some influence from those societies

Gillian: are dirty magazines the carcinization of porn?

Graham: sees the series as a savage political critique of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, specifically the unexamined costs of Severian bringing the New Sun, as seen from the outside. also of the lack of agency that women in those books have. unfortunately the amount of information need to get out to make this case, does mean that he's slightly less fond of Nona

I picked up on this about texts that the series is in conversation with, and Ben's mention of Nona with an emotionally healthy family life, to give a little speech. Family and reproduction in the Empire is death, theft, and trickery. The only good parents in the novels are parent figures: Abigail and Magnus are infertile. Then outside the Empire: there's babies all over! Nona has an incredibly loving and patient family! Pal's mom gets to leave the short story and come into the novel proper! And this is part and parcel of the violence of empire, which extends all the way down to the family relationship.

Because another major text the series is in conversation with (credit this observation originally to several people on Tumblr), is Lolita. Poe's "Annabel Lee" is woven through Lolita. John renames Alecto to "Annabel Lee," puts her in a doll's body, and calls the Lyctors their children (who he also renames, whose memories he wipes, and two of whom, U— and T—, he literally puppets). He says he'd want Harrow to be his daughter but gaslights her throughout the book (he knows from Chapter 2 of Harrow that she edited her memories because he's touching her when he says "Gideon" and she passes out). He replaces Alecto with Harrow in the heart he draws in the sand. It's the same violence all the way down, mental sexual physical, for domination and control.

Gillian pointed out that this is literally what necromancy is, after all: using other people's bodies as objects.

This is where my pen ran out of ink, so based on the keywords I put into my phone's notes:

Someone, possibly Graham? saying that the great thing about Ortus getting his vindication in Harrow is that it's a defense of tedious people. Very rarely does the thing that makes someone tedious turn out to also be the thing that makes them win.

Graham recommends The Locked Tomb Podcast.

Someone notes that all the references are on the same level, which I think meant, the Bible and Homer and Homestuck and Gene Wolfe and Lolita and memes, they're all treated on equal footing.

Graham closed the panel by putting a very light bet on what the structure of Alecto might be: since it seemed like John was getting tired of being Emperor and his "children" were fighting over being in charge, might it end up being ... Succession?

And that was the end of the panel. Please feel free to continue the conversation in comments!

[*] Speaking of conquered planets. I no longer remember if this is from a text to someone or what, but I have this in my notes to myself for a Nona discussion post that I never made ... until now.

I mean, based on Harrow's experience of flipping planets, and the description of travel away from Earth in Nona, I thought for a while that there were no planets that hadn't been initially colonized by the Houses--flipped, settled, left on their own, then hundreds of years later resettled when the planet goes uninhabitable; I thought that timeframe would explain the feeling of disconnect from the Houses.

And then I looked and saw that sermon guy talking about people born on thalergic planets and Judith reporting that Corona "said what would be most economically productive was intermingling with these people, allowing immigration and absorption into the Nine Houses; that shepherd planets got more costly the further the Houses extended themselves".

So: definitely wrong! There are humans out there who weren't ever connected to the Houses!

Where the fuck did they come from?! Could the FTL fleet have resulted in that big a population? If they are descendants of that fleet, why is John still looking?

I don't understand.

I have a great big question mark over the River, the zombies, what Ianthe wants, etc. etc., in Nona, but if you have thoughts, feel free!

Oh, and here's my Tumblr tag for The Locked Tomb; as I said on the panel, Tumblr is full of amazing analysis of these books, and I paged so far back in prep for the panel yet barely got to the release of Nona before I had to stop for lack of time.

Edit: gah, I forgot to say that I mentioned this important New Zealand context!

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Comments

[chomiji]

I need to see about attending this con sometime. I love your write-ups from it.

[kate_nepveu]

it's a great con! I hope you can!

[rydra_wong]

Graham: sees the series as a savage political critique of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, specifically the unexamined costs of Severian bringing the New Sun, as seen from the outside.

OH SHIT

Excuse me, just having a moment of revelation here.

[kate_nepveu]

😂 this seems to be a not-uncommon reaction!

[hebethen]

Thank you as ever for your write-ups! I hadn't heard that theory about the memes before and am intrigued -- and ofc lots of really interesting analysis and discussion there.

I'm sure it would be different if I'd listened to the audiobook first, but yeah, same -- to me it's like an excellent close adaptation in that particular aspect.