In Other Lands

"I had to put this one in because I love queer romances, I love happy endings, and I love jokes. Rees Brennan is excellent at all of them. This is about a young man from our world who falls into a parallel world and ends up at a place called Border Camp, which is both treated very seriously and is also a parody of the ‘magical school’ genre. The main character, Elliot, ends up in this other world where he is in classes where people can do magic, and there are elves. Some of the conflicts in this world are treated quite seriously, but at the same time, it is a loving send-up of many fantasy tropes. For example, the elves are very matriarchal, and they are a complete flip or parody of patriarchal attitudes. All the humans are mildly sexist in the way that humans tend to be, and then there is this elf, who is his classmate, who says ‘I think all the boys should be at home cooking and knitting.’ This is played for laughs, and Rees Brennan gets away with it because it is so funny. At the same time, it is a very sweet and sincere coming-of-age story for this main character, who is realizing what it means to fall in love, what it means to not be a loner and to exist in the world in a network of relationships with people, and what it means that he has problems with his family back home and going over to this other world does not solve them. He is going back and forth between these worlds, so he has a fantasy arena for some of these problems, but it is never not grounded in what is a very real and believable situation for this guy. There is a reason that the ‘nerd and jock’ romantic trope is a classic. On the one hand, I think there is a desire to explore the physical aspect of queer relationships. We have all had very different experiences of coming out of the closet. Many of us have very different relationships with our bodies and the way those bodies exist in the world. The refreshing thing in reading about a queer jock, for people who have more complicated relationships with their bodies, is that here is a queer person who is absolutely at home in their body, they are doing things with it that are bringing them joy, taking part in fighting or playing games, the epitome of physical activity in whatever world it is. I think there’s something very compelling there. Then, on the other hand, you have that relationship with someone who is more comfortable using their mind to do things. That’s the epitome of the jock and nerd relationship. I would say the overwhelming majority of us who read and write science fiction might say we are nerds. You overthink stuff and you are very good at one particular area, but there is a limit to the stuff that your mind is good at. Often, this limit is the relationship you have with someone else you care very deeply about. It is that boundary where your mind meets someone else’s existence. I think that’s one reason that we are so interested in exploring nerds in fantasy. Well, it’s queer, it’s romantic, and it’s funny, which are three things you might have noticed I like. Ocean’s Echo is a romantic sci-fi novel about two people with very different views of the world who mind-meld and find they each have something the other one lacks. It starts when the awful nephew of the president gets arrested for misusing his mind-reading powers. He ends up forcibly conscripted into the army and told to mind-meld. The person he’s told to merge minds with happens to have absolutely cast-iron ethics and refuses to do it, so they decide to fake it. The rest of the book is about how they stop a military coup and fall in love. I’m really fascinated with the intersection where a person’s mind meets someone else’s, and also where their body meets someone else’s, and a lot of this is exploring that in a very literal way. In this world, there are people who can read minds, and there are people who can write minds or compel people to do what they want to do. It is quite easy for these two to form what’s called a ‘sync’, where your minds are merged. In the book, it’s encouraged to use this to control the mindreader who’s being arrested. But that is not how it works out. The novel explores the questions: if you are uncomfortable in your own mind and you could be in someone else’s, would you do that, and would that be a good thing? And, can you ever really understand someone else, and what happens to all that when the fact that you really love someone is in the mix? That’s a good point! This is what we’re doing all the time. We are occupying other people’s minds, and we are trying to live their lives, and we are trying to make our own lives richer as a result. I would say for your average reader it’s working pretty well. In the real world, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend mind-melding, but for me and books it’s been wonderful."