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Oct. 10th, 2025 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIsaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide surprised me in several ways, some good, some bad, and some just very funny.
For a start, for a book titled Notes from a Regicide, it is really pretty minimally about regicide. I would have liked a bit more regicide. On the other hand, it is maximally about living on after dramatic events, about Having Done something world-shaking and then becoming just another person moving the various broken-and-put-back-together pieces of yourself through a life like anybody else's, and that I liked very much.
It is also, I cannot help but think, about what happens when an author sits down and thinks 'I want to write trans Grantaire but am I more interested in transmasc Grantaire or transfem Grantaire ... well! actually!! Who needs an Enjolras, why NOT trans het Grantaire x Grantaire!' I can't in any way prove this but once I started thinking it I couldn't un-think it and it did absolutely bring a particular lens to my reading of the book that heightened both my appreciation and my irritation ...
Okay, so the plot. In the novel's present day, Griffon, an NYC journalist, is arranging the papers of his deceased adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre. Etoine and Zaffre are immigrants from a Ruritanian principality named Stephensport; in their younger days, they were instrumental in bringing about revolutionary change to Stephensport, subsequent to which they fled to NYC and lived out the rest of their lives as mildly notable elderly emigré artists. The novel moves back and forth between Etoine's narrative of his life in Stephensport -- as written during a time in prison post-regicide when he thought Zaffre was dead -- and Griffon's notes on his own life with these people, how he came to be a part of their lives as a trans teen from an abusive home, his various attempts and failures to understand them and vice versa.
The other reason I think Les Mis is integral to this novel, by the way, is the fact that Zaffre is compared on like the second or third page to Jean Valjean because of her strong back and shoulders, the first reference the book ever makes, and I do think that if you're turning around thoughts about revolution and post-revolution and traumatized children rescued by traumatized people you might get end up with something like the shape of this book. The Griffon chapters are about how Griffon loves his parents and is fascinated by them and is also really often deeply annoyed by them, the way they often don't recognize his various attempts to gain their approval, the way they have their own private history that they will not share, the way their house is always messy, the way they behave really embarrassingly in art museums. And sometimes he lashes out at them, and sometimes they lash out at him, and sometimes they do provide exactly what's needed and sometimes it's exactly the opposite. I enjoyed seeing this domestic-but-not-at-all-cozy narrative juxtaposed with the fantastical revolution story; I've never seen it done quite this way before, and it's not what I expected, and I liked it quite a bit.
The revolution story itself -- well, this is the part, I think, that perhaps needs a bit more regicide. All the backstory is from Etoine's point of view, and Etoine has gotten all the not-caring-about-the-revolution-except-as-it-impacts-his-beloved bits of Grantaire. Zaffre, despite clearly being a fellow Grantaire -- she's severely, schizoaffectively depressed and introduced by Etoine as a fellow art student who's awkwardly obsessed with him before the feelings later become mutual -- is also the Enjolras; she's passionate about the revolution and deeply involved in the logistics of it (and blonde, and majestic, and compared at one point to the Marianne.) But we know very little about why she's passionate about it or what kind of logistical activities she's doing for it because Etoine barely talks about it. Etoine really just wants to talk about his alcoholism and his trans journey and his romance with Zaffre, until circumstances eventually slam him into the regicide situation. Griffon, annotating the text, complains about how little Etoine talks about the revolution, and I think Isaac Fellman thinks that because he's pointed at the lacunae and drawn a circle around it as Intentional he can dust his hands off and feel satisfied with it. I disagree! I think if you are titling your book Notes From a Regicide it is perhaps incumbent upon you to put at least a little bit of politics into it!
Also, speaking of politics ... NYC hasn't got any. I think it's really, incredibly funny that after finishing the book about, again, political refugees fleeing after a regicide, I have no idea what the political situation is in One Thousand Years Future NYC. Does the USA still exist? Is New York City an independent principality now? Does it have a mayor or a god-king? Who knows, who cares! It's A Safe Place For Etoine And Zaffre where they can get trans-affirming healthcare and go to museums.
The One Thousand Years Future thing (rather than alternate or fantastical reality) is a slow-burn reveal, by the way, and I do think the revelation is fun but I do also think that no science fiction author can be trusted with a timespan of One Thousand Years, especially when it feels like the NYC time period Fellman really wants to write is a sort of sepia-toned 1970s, with museums and nice suits and bakery trips and picturesque canals and the occasional Stonewall riot, which happens for reasons not at all delineated because, again, there are no politics.
That said, I do like the little bits of worldbuilding we get about Stephensport, though I wish there were more of it -- the disintegrating electors buried in the stone yard who rise every couple of decades to choose a new king is really very good as a bad system of government -- and I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone. So: an unusual book, an ambitious book. An interesting book, I think, on gender and identity and transgenerational trauma. Not a particularly interesting book on revolution. But revolution sells, I guess, so Notes from a Regicide it is.
For a start, for a book titled Notes from a Regicide, it is really pretty minimally about regicide. I would have liked a bit more regicide. On the other hand, it is maximally about living on after dramatic events, about Having Done something world-shaking and then becoming just another person moving the various broken-and-put-back-together pieces of yourself through a life like anybody else's, and that I liked very much.
It is also, I cannot help but think, about what happens when an author sits down and thinks 'I want to write trans Grantaire but am I more interested in transmasc Grantaire or transfem Grantaire ... well! actually!! Who needs an Enjolras, why NOT trans het Grantaire x Grantaire!' I can't in any way prove this but once I started thinking it I couldn't un-think it and it did absolutely bring a particular lens to my reading of the book that heightened both my appreciation and my irritation ...
Okay, so the plot. In the novel's present day, Griffon, an NYC journalist, is arranging the papers of his deceased adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre. Etoine and Zaffre are immigrants from a Ruritanian principality named Stephensport; in their younger days, they were instrumental in bringing about revolutionary change to Stephensport, subsequent to which they fled to NYC and lived out the rest of their lives as mildly notable elderly emigré artists. The novel moves back and forth between Etoine's narrative of his life in Stephensport -- as written during a time in prison post-regicide when he thought Zaffre was dead -- and Griffon's notes on his own life with these people, how he came to be a part of their lives as a trans teen from an abusive home, his various attempts and failures to understand them and vice versa.
The other reason I think Les Mis is integral to this novel, by the way, is the fact that Zaffre is compared on like the second or third page to Jean Valjean because of her strong back and shoulders, the first reference the book ever makes, and I do think that if you're turning around thoughts about revolution and post-revolution and traumatized children rescued by traumatized people you might get end up with something like the shape of this book. The Griffon chapters are about how Griffon loves his parents and is fascinated by them and is also really often deeply annoyed by them, the way they often don't recognize his various attempts to gain their approval, the way they have their own private history that they will not share, the way their house is always messy, the way they behave really embarrassingly in art museums. And sometimes he lashes out at them, and sometimes they lash out at him, and sometimes they do provide exactly what's needed and sometimes it's exactly the opposite. I enjoyed seeing this domestic-but-not-at-all-cozy narrative juxtaposed with the fantastical revolution story; I've never seen it done quite this way before, and it's not what I expected, and I liked it quite a bit.
The revolution story itself -- well, this is the part, I think, that perhaps needs a bit more regicide. All the backstory is from Etoine's point of view, and Etoine has gotten all the not-caring-about-the-revolution-except-as-it-impacts-his-beloved bits of Grantaire. Zaffre, despite clearly being a fellow Grantaire -- she's severely, schizoaffectively depressed and introduced by Etoine as a fellow art student who's awkwardly obsessed with him before the feelings later become mutual -- is also the Enjolras; she's passionate about the revolution and deeply involved in the logistics of it (and blonde, and majestic, and compared at one point to the Marianne.) But we know very little about why she's passionate about it or what kind of logistical activities she's doing for it because Etoine barely talks about it. Etoine really just wants to talk about his alcoholism and his trans journey and his romance with Zaffre, until circumstances eventually slam him into the regicide situation. Griffon, annotating the text, complains about how little Etoine talks about the revolution, and I think Isaac Fellman thinks that because he's pointed at the lacunae and drawn a circle around it as Intentional he can dust his hands off and feel satisfied with it. I disagree! I think if you are titling your book Notes From a Regicide it is perhaps incumbent upon you to put at least a little bit of politics into it!
Also, speaking of politics ... NYC hasn't got any. I think it's really, incredibly funny that after finishing the book about, again, political refugees fleeing after a regicide, I have no idea what the political situation is in One Thousand Years Future NYC. Does the USA still exist? Is New York City an independent principality now? Does it have a mayor or a god-king? Who knows, who cares! It's A Safe Place For Etoine And Zaffre where they can get trans-affirming healthcare and go to museums.
The One Thousand Years Future thing (rather than alternate or fantastical reality) is a slow-burn reveal, by the way, and I do think the revelation is fun but I do also think that no science fiction author can be trusted with a timespan of One Thousand Years, especially when it feels like the NYC time period Fellman really wants to write is a sort of sepia-toned 1970s, with museums and nice suits and bakery trips and picturesque canals and the occasional Stonewall riot, which happens for reasons not at all delineated because, again, there are no politics.
That said, I do like the little bits of worldbuilding we get about Stephensport, though I wish there were more of it -- the disintegrating electors buried in the stone yard who rise every couple of decades to choose a new king is really very good as a bad system of government -- and I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone. So: an unusual book, an ambitious book. An interesting book, I think, on gender and identity and transgenerational trauma. Not a particularly interesting book on revolution. But revolution sells, I guess, so Notes from a Regicide it is.
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Date: 2025-10-10 11:55 pm (UTC)It sounds terrible!
M. John Harrison has multiple stories where the point is to frustrate the reader's desire to know more about the Ruritania or the other side of the portal fantasy and so forth, but it has to be executed at about the M. John Harrison level for me to find the frustration meaningful rather than just frustrating.
(I would also expect NYC a thousand years in the future to be primarily characterized by being underwater.)
and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone.
That part of the worldbuilding does sound A+.
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Date: 2025-10-11 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-11 12:18 am (UTC)Good to know! I heard canals and just did not expect even that much surface. Has the Tarot not changed in a thousand years or has it changed in ways you were skeptical about?
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Date: 2025-10-14 06:37 am (UTC)My little pocket in Queens was pretty safe, but even as a child I had an awareness of the city as a whole as dangerous, broken-down, dirty, and drowning in poverty and crime, its best days long behind it and never to come again. The scarcity of money was something I was aware of from a very young age. I wasn't fully cognizant of things, but people and the news said things around me that I picked up on a bit. (Kitty Genovese still came up periodically a decade later, most often in context of a crime-filled city continuing to go to hell.) I have no feeling of it being normal or nostalgic.
Businessmen wore suits because they had to, but I wore a lot of homemade clothing.
Sepia, though? That I can see, since a lot of the photos I have of the time are very brown due to picture stock and it being a very brown decade.
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Date: 2025-10-11 04:58 pm (UTC)This and Dead Collections have beautiful prose and beautifully delineated characters in a paper-thin world. I have been thinking a lot why the fictional revolution here annoys me so much when fictional revolutions in Rakesfall don't, but it is probably as simple as that Rakesfall really is about revolution and Regicide isn't.
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Date: 2025-10-12 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-11 05:11 pm (UTC)Anyway, I didn't hate it, but I think the "trans Les Mis" catchphrase is actively misleading because as you say, there's almost no actual revolution in this book. I still haven't read Fellman's first novel, or Dead Collections, but I didn't particularly love The Two Doctors Gorski either.
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Date: 2025-10-12 01:57 am (UTC)I did love the electors as a realbad future political system, 100% believe this as something someone in Silicon Valley has (possibly already) come up with. And I think there’s a lot that’s interesting about the secondary world models of queerness (and the difficulty of actually…trying to rig up some kind of untroubled easy queer utopia, as a lot of genre seems to be doing right now?) What did you think about Stephen vs…um, the vizier who eventually ends up in charge? I thought there was some very interesting idea there which I did not entirely succeed in, like, unshelling from itself. Possibly partly because: not enough regicide.
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Date: 2025-10-12 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-12 05:17 pm (UTC)I think this is a classic Fellman problem too - in The Breath of the Sun he’s got three characters (cult leader nun scientist, sad protagonist, and sad protagonist’s bad ex husband who’s having a great time as a sexy mafia wife…unfortunately I think the direct address current love interest is also supposed to be a person but I remember very little about her) and what I think is interesting about it is that the texture of the characters who are people is really vivid and kind of distinctive: like, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone write quite the kind of gender that’s in Sun. But it’s such a small cast in the face of such a big plot. I guess I think one thing that’s very interesting about this is that I tend to think of novelists as being either more interested in people than this, or else less interested.
(Have you read Breath of the Sun? I don’t think I saw you review it and I definitely wouldn’t straightforwardly recommend it…but I do think it’s interesting.)
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Date: 2025-10-12 12:34 pm (UTC)Delightfully bad! What a nice metaphor for monarchy.
I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone.
That's very cool.
Thanks so much for this - I saw some stuff about this book and was genuinely just like 'I hope
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Date: 2025-10-12 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 09:26 pm (UTC)Why do they even need trans-affirming healthcare? Why hasn't something been invented that obviates that? At least give a reason! It's like imagining coming 1000 years into the future from 1820 and being happy that you can have a really good sanatorium to deal with your tuberculosis. No, we can actually just cure it! How about that! (... Okay, the cure is actually hard and long but still: eventually no sanatorium needed!)
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Date: 2025-10-15 06:32 pm (UTC)This is so galaxy-brained. Follow your bliss, author!