THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART, hypercapitalist hellscape meets trans Terminator

THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART
IZZY WASSERSTEIN
Tachyon Publications
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a queer, noir technothriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue, a trans woman faces her fear of losing her community as her past chases after her. This bold, thought-provoking debut science-fiction novella from a Lambda Award finalist is an exciting and unpredictable look at the fluid nature of our former and present selves.

In mid-21st-century Kansas City, Dora hasn’t been back to her old commune in years. But when Dora’s ex-girlfriend Kay is killed, and everyone at the commune is a potential suspect, Dora knows she’s the only person who can solve the murder.

As Dora is dragged back into her old community and begins her investigations, she discovers that Kay’s death is only one of several terrible incidents. A strange new drug is circulating. People are disappearing. And Dora is being attacked by assailants from her pre-transition past.

Meanwhile, it seems like a war between two nefarious corporations is looming, and Dora’s old neighborhood is their battleground. Now she must uncover a twisted conspiracy, all while navigating a deeply meaningful new relationship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are some tropes in the noir genre I love more than others. One is the private dick with a complicated love history. Rick and Elsa in Casablanca. Marlowe and Ruth in The Maltese Falcon. Jake and Evelyn (and her daddy) in Chinatown. Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.Not one tiny shred of honest, forthright communication and commitment to any relationship's future in the lot. This being my deeply cynical belief about the reality of all marriages' basis and fates, I thought I'd got a solid bead on the way the genre will work on this topic.

Laddies and gentlewomen, Izzy Wasserstein blew the (closet) doors off this one.

Dora, our protagonist, lives in a deeply dysfunctional dystopian near-future (a couple decades) post-apocalyptic USA. We don't explore the apocalypse much, just live day-to-day with Dora...Theodora, né Theodore...as she tries to survive in the wreckage of hypercapitalism. She (chosen pronoun) spent years in a hardscrabble anarchist commune with her pretransition Theodore-self's lover and commune co-founder, Kay. The pair split up, and Dora left the commune, over Kay and the others' rejection of her desire to tighten the commune's security about new members and the commune's handling of data. The others felt it was not in the spirit of the effort to be so closed and paranoid; she did. So she closed the door behind her on the way out. Maybe slammed is fairer; maybe slammed the damn door so hard it splintered, even.

And now Dora has to return to the commune, using all her skills acquired while she was Theodore, to solve the murder of Kay. Why was Kay murdered? What did Dora tell the communards about security? Is this thing on? So begins a fast-lane tour of the hellscape that is Kansas City in this deeply divided world, as Dora ferrets out facts and confronts Big Bads. Naturally, there are ties in the story Dora unfolds to the Theodore past...and, not coincidentally, Dora is confronted with the cruelest, most cinema-friendly enemies imaginable: clones of Theodore.

This, then, is the heart of the story. The world, and the world-building, are not deep because you're not here for the wrapping paper but for the gift. Dora has to battle Theodore-faced enemies bound and determined to kill her! Can there be anything more visually appealing than that?! Can the cruelty of deadnaming be more bluntly portrayed?

I really doubt it can. The setup, the story, the world...all part of the point of the read: Identity, its power, its costs, and the sheer nightmarish house of mirrors the trans person must live with, and through, simply to claim what cisgender people walk around blissfully unaware that they possess.

Themselves. Their unquestioned selfhood, unimpacted by the feelings, opinions, judgments of others, unquestioned by the self-appointed guardians of...you know, I just don't know what they are guarding. No one's attacking my maleness by being transmasc or transfem. What needs guarding about that? Anyway, I exist in a bubble of privileges of many sorts, and reading books like this that take me into the unprivileged side of my life do me a gigantic service. Perspective is something I treasure, even when I don't unreservedly enjoy getting it.

I did not read the book with unalloyed pleasure. There'd be a fifth star on my rating had that been the case. I enjoyed the pace; the author starts fast and doesn't slow down. I enjoyed the message; see above. I was squirmy about the echoes of The Man Who Folded Himself. That wasn't unnecessary; but I had to read the author's Afterword to get why it was not gratuitous. I was a bit unconvinced by the Big Bad's motivation. Not eyerollingly so, but in that niggly little itch that says, "really? all this because of that?"

I default back to, readers aren't here for just one experience, just one focus, a single reward for their time spent in Dora's world. It's just a thing I felt vaguely unsatisfied by, and should try to explain to others in advance of their reads.

I think Author Izzy deserves your afternoon and evening to get this involving story into you. I'm glad it's in me now.