Tuesday, September 1, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach



The Dawnhounds is a SF/F novel by Kiwi author Sascha Stronach, and the winner of this year's Sir Julius Vogel Award for best SF/F novel from New Zealand in 2019.  Those who don't keep up with the fandom of the genre might not have known that the Hugo Awards - one of the biggest awards in the genre - were awarded this year in New Zealand at WorldCon, with the awards going to some great works but the actual ceremony and convention being an utter mess (to put it mildly).  One annoyance in particular was that the virtual ceremony included no celebration of the local scene at all, with the Sir Julius Vogel Awards essentially grafted onto another award ceremony in a way so as to give it little viewership (among other problems again).  So I was rather curious to actually check out The Dawnhounds to see what fandom had essentially missed out on, and as it was in Kindle Unlimited, it was an easy choice to obtain.

And The Dawnhounds is.....interesting.  One on hand it's a SF/F story with very strong themes, with a bi main character who became a cop to try and do some good in a corrupt system that upholds a hetero-norm, and in death obtains magic and discovers a whole other world of queerness that the guardians of the norms seek to obhold....that also throws in odd concepts like technology and magic being mostly biological in nature and some odd perhaps dead gods with their own agendas into the mix.  On the other hand, the book starts with its lead heroine getting high on opiates and thus being an insanely unreliable narrator, and even after she gets sober early on isn't particularly clear as to what exactly is happening at any given moment, as she stumbles around without a clue for much of the story.  This is not a story where the author finds a way to directly explain concepts to the reader, and it didn't quite work for me as much as I'd wanted as a result.  Still, it's again certainly an interesting read, and I'd be very curious to read a sequel to see how things move on from there.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
As a child, Yat Jyn-Hok was once left alone by the death of her alchemist father and had to thus learn to survive on the streets of her home of Hainak.  When she grew up, she became a cop so that she could help the city, using her knowledge of the streets to help the people.  But after Yat was caught with another woman, her lover Kiada in this strictly hetero-normative city, she lost her standing within the force.  Of course Kiada's fate was worse - she disappeared and Yat has never seen her again.

Now Yat spends her off duty time high on Kiro, disoriented and flooded with memories that are not her own.  But when the force's dirtiest cop drags here to the land's most notorious pirate ship and she flees in outrage, Yat walks right into a conspiracy involving a deadly poison that once wiped out an entire nation...and earns a bullet between the eyes.

But Yat comes back somehow, after a vision from beyond, and finds herself with magical powers over life - powers that show her that something is wrong in Hainak.  And when Yat finds herself among others like her, others who don't follow the heteronormative idea of the city, and others with magical powers, she learns that the wrongness she sees is only the tip of the iceberg....and to stop it will require more than Yat, or anyone else, may have to give.....
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The Dawnhounds is an interesting book - and I hate to use "interesting" so much, because it sounds almost negative in this context, but I don't mean it as such.  It's a story with a setting that is immediately interesting - focusing mainly upon a city/city-state that embraces biological-altering based technology over physical/mechanical tech (mechanical tech and inorganic material was used in the past and is used in other city-states/countries, and is technically illegal to possess, but it's too embedded everywhere for people to care).  It's a setting that has clear class issues - the rich are kept from the poor by a literal wall, with the rich openly flouting laws that restrict what one may possess or use biological technology - and the laws against non-heterosexual activity.  Severe violators of the law are turned into Blanks - mindless beings who can only follow strict orders - for a term until their sentence is over.  As you might imagine, this is a setting ripe for dealing with themes of class, race, power (and police power especially) and sexuality, and the book absolutely tackles these themes.

That said, the way it tackles them is to throw us mainly behind a main character in Yat, who at first is drugged up to the point of being completely unreliable as a guide through the world and even after that is more or less left to stumble around in the dark as she figures out more and more of what's really going on.  While we get occasional asides to the third person perspectives of other characters (mainly Yat's only cop friend, Yit Kanq-Sen, known mainly as "Sen"), we never ever get from the characters or the narration a clear explanation of the world or what's going on for the reader to catch up on: we're just expected to understand from the descriptions.  And well, it's a bit confusing at times as to what is going on - even when we're not reading the cryptic words of otherworldly deities that interrupt the story at times.  Some of this may be less the fault of the book than my own style of reading, which is quick and doesn't pay attention necessarily to every specific word (which is why books heavy on description are not my thing) but when one character gets angry at another for what she has done and I'm not sure what exactly that is, it's a problem and that happens here. 

Which is a shame because the characters and themes here are fascinating and damn relevant to today's world and they generally work really well despite the confusing action.  Yat is a character who is tremendously easy to root for - a young woman who was left alone on the streets, survived the streets barely, became a cop to try and do good for the people like her, and who needs to step away from the force to realize what the cops truly were and what she was becoming.  She's also Bi in a world that forbids non-hetero relations, and that contradiction as well as the loss of her love, which, combined with her realizing inwardly what the cops and system really are, has driven her to take drugs in an attempt to get through it all.  And when she comes back from death with magical power, she finds herself driven to protect and fix the place that was the source of all this suffering....despite the fact that she can't control the power, and her growing knowledge that that lack of power will result in horrible results for everyone.

Then there's our secondary protagonist, Sen, the older cop who is the rare good cop, and who doesn't blame Yat for her actions when he might otherwise, but is desperate to figure out what is going on since it otherwise doesn't make sense, and to stop the horrors from coming to pass when he figures them out.  Major side characters like Pirate Queen Sissi, a magician of immense power and age with dark secrets, and her wife Ajat serve the mentor role really well.  And then there's Wajet, a surprise star of a side character, a cop so crooked everyone knows it and overlooks that he has actual secrets, hiding a heart of gold.  He only has a bit part really, but every part of it is fantastic and I love him.

All of this leads to a plot that again is definitely a bit too confusing for me to truly love this book as much as I want, but which hits so many relevant themes today, from the issues of class, to a minority religious group fading from power using force to try and regain power, to cops abusing power for the pleasure of it, not caring about the people they're supposed to protect, to class issues and discrimination against those who don't fit the heteronorm - all of this is here and dealt with directly in the plot in tremendous fashion.  There are two sets of antagonists in this book - a pair that clearly has more to deal with this trilogy's ultimate arc as well as basically the system/setting itself, as emblemized by a couple of the cops in particular, and that latter group really works to give this book a serious impact....and the ending, which I will not in any way spoil, is extremely satisfying and far happier than I'd expected.

So yeah, in retrospect after writing this review, I think I do like The Dawnhounds a bit, even if I wish it'd been a bit more clear.  Hopefully the sequel will manage to improve on that, and if so, it'll definitely be one to watch.
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