So I decided to pay a bit more attention at what happens at the Hugo and Nebula Awards every year. Browsing through the list of nominees, I noticed this among the novellas, a work by a relatively new Singaporean writer JY Yang that is sometimes described as being in the ‘silkpunk’ genre. It was published together with the second book of the series Red Threads of Fortune as a bit of an experiment though each is short enough that I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as a single book. I only bought this one first to check it out however.

In a world in which those appropriately skilled can manipulate something called the Slack to call to heel the fundamental energies, the oppressive Protector rules all. Having violently put down a riot the year before with the aid of the Grand Monastery, she has promised to repay the favor by offering one of her children to the sect. To the surprise of the Head Abbot however, the Protector has deliberately borne new infants to fulfill her promise and twins at that. The twins Mokoya and Akeha become inseparable and in time do indeed become apprentices at the monastery. As they grow up, both become skilled in the Slack but Mokoya in particular reveals herself to be a prophet whose visions of the future come true no matter how hard they try to avert them. This talent makes Mokoya especially valuable to the Protector and threatens to drive the twins apart but this novella focuses particularly on Akeha as both twins strive in their own ways to resist their mother’s rule.

The prose here is undeniably beautiful and the aesthetics of this world is both fresh and compelling. In particular, the opening scene involves the Head Abbot going to meet the Protector is a real eye opener with its detailed description of the impossible construction of the palace made with slackcraft. The basic premise here appears to be a world in which development in physics and engineering as we understand them has been stunted in favor of this peculiar form of magic with a special focus on how it affects biology. The most intriguing part of this is that everyone, including the two twins, is born genderless and decide for themselves in adulthood which gender they want for themselves. This confirmation process involves slackcraft by doctors which biologically alters their bodies to that of their choice. Other Slack-powered technology include flying machines and weapons plus of course those skilled in it can use it in combat directly in a manner that seems similar to the elemental bending techniques of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Unfortunately while the broad strokes of this setting are great at whetting your appetite, the novella never gets much deeper than that. Due to its staunch refusal to avoid any exposition whatsoever, we never get any description of what the Slack actually is, how it works or how deeply intertwined it is with the people and animals who live on this world. The fact that humans start out as being genderless should be huge but we’ve never shown how this makes their society different from ours. I don’t even understand what happens if there aren’t any doctors available to do the confirmation ritual. Similarly we get that the society as a whole has a vaguely Eastern Asian flavor but there are frustratingly few details on what it’s really like, such as how large the nation is, its place in the wider world, how far back its history stretches, how political power is distributed and so forth. In short, the worldbuilding here seems to be only skin-deep. Compare this to N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series which is full of details about how society is completely structured around the need to survive catastrophes.

The plot around the twins is solid enough but I don’t find myself being blown away or anything as it’s pretty standard fare and this is exactly how prophets are written in every story that involves them. It’s nice that it’s patterned somewhat like how myths and old stories are told but that’s nothing truly surprising there either. I am frustrated that there appears to be so many unfired Chekov’s guns in what is supposedly a standalone book. By the end of the novella, we still don’t know what the Protector’s plan is or much else about her character in fact. Early on, we get a hint that Sonami, another of the Protector’s children is interested in working against her mother as well but nothing seems to come out of that. I’m sad that after that amazing description of high-end slackcraft at the beginning, nothing else comes close to being that awesome. I can’t even enjoy it as if it were a kind of xianxia novel because despite having monastery-trained pugilists who use their mastery of the Slack in combat, there aren’t any cool fight scenes in the book.

This would have been a much better book if it had been longer in my opinion. Yang spends a lot of time with the characters when they are children but the story takes decades to play out and the long time skips create glaring pacing problems. It feels wrong to try to tell to try such a large story with so few pages. It feels to me like that this are the mere outlines of a real novel and the work done so far on the setting are mere notes that need to be expanded to cover a whole world with all of its history and complexity. Overall, this novella makes a great first impression, aided greatly by its fantastic cover, but it ultimately promises more than it can actually deliver.