Yarn, by Jon Armstrong
Title: Yarn
Series: This is a non-series prequel to Armstrong's debut novel, Grey
Author: Jon Armstrong
Publisher: NightShade Books
Format: Trade Paperback
Year: 2010
Pages: 309
Genre: Science Fiction
Subgenres: Cyberpunk: Fashionpunk
Challenge Information: Science Fiction Challenge category "Locus Recommended Reading List for 2010"
Full Disclosure: I received this book in a free giveaway on Tor.com
Jacket Description
From the neo-feudalistic slubs, the corn-filled world of Tane's youth, to his apprenticeship among the deadly saleswarriors of Seattlehama -- the sex-and-shopping capital of the world -- to the horrors of a polluted Antarctica, Yarn tells a stylish tale of love, deceit, and memory
Tane Cedar is the mast tailor, the supreme outfitter of the wealthy, the beautiful, and the powerful. When an ex-lover, on the run from the authorities, asks him to create a garment from the dangerous and illegal Xi yarn -- a psychedelic opiate -- to ease her final hours, Tane's world is torn apart.
Armed with just his yarn pulls, scissors, Mini-Air-Juki handheld sewing machine, and his wits, Tane journeys through the shadowy underworld where he must untangle the deadly mysteries and machinations of deceit.
My Review
This was not, ultimately, a book for me.
I say that right off the bat because I want to be clear that even though this will be a largely negative review, I am not saying it is a bad book. There are some flaws, but I am sure that if I were the book's target audience I would have loved it.
I must say next, though, that I am very good at keeping an open mind while reading, so I think my criticisms are fair criticisms of the book, things that objectively could have been done better to make a more well-rounded reading experience.
First off, this is very much a cyberpunk novel, which means it has all the strengths and failings of that subgenre. Both and strength and a failing is the way in which the plot is so typically cyberpunk: lone honorable man trying to survive in a corrupt society, surrounded by women who work with him and women who work against him but all of whom want to sleep with him. I expected that going in, and while it doesn't do much for me as a plot I can appreciate it when it's well-done. It isn't, really, here; the characters are just too flat, and not even sexy-enigmatic-flat, just boring-flat.
It isn't straight cyberpunk though; it's a brand-new, author-created derivative of cyberpunk called "fashionpunk," and those fashionpunk elements are by far the strongest parts of the book. The world is fascinating -- the way all of the technology is predicated on knitting and weaving probably makes no sense, but I didn't give a damn because it was just so, fucking, cool. While all of the compound words (creditwarrior, loveeffort, salescut, etc.) threatened to cross the line into preciousness, Armstrong kept them just the right side of that. And the warTalk that runs through the first section of the novel is absolutely brilliant, the sort of language that you have to let skim over the surface of your brain so you can see the shape of it, because looked at head-on it dissolves into meaninglessness.
Unfortunately, as soon as Armstrong started putting all the pieces of his world together and getting the plot moving, it was a little. . . banal. The twists failed to surprise, and the major reveal fell into a trope that I find problematic.*
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Trigger Warning for transprejudice.
Throughout the novel there were bits of world-building that made me raise an eyebrow and wonder if Armstrong was going to be able to pull them off or if they were going to devolve into fail: the fantasy skive, the epic about the Sensitive Dead Penisless Boys, etc. About halfway through the novel I was really hoping they weren't going anywhere, because the only place I could imagine them going was destined to piss me off. And sure enough, Armstrong went there: the root of many of the evils in Seattlehama is a transwoman, essentially driven mad by the conflict in her gender identity.
On a technical level, Armstrong did this well; the clues are all buried there in the text, obvious in retrospect but not highlighted as you're reading for the first time. It's very tidy.
However, on a political level, no matter how well this solution fits, it is damaging. Hurtful. It is practically the only way transgendered individuals ever get depicted in fiction, and that speaks to our culture's extreme discomfort with and prejudice against non-cis-gendered people.
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So again, not the book for me.
My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★1/2
Read this for: The world-building
Don't read this for: The characters
Bechdel Test: Fail
Johnson Test: Unable to determine
Books I was reminded of: Light, by M. John Harrison
Will I read more by this author? Probably not
*Edited 3/24/11: I was lazy in my first review and linked to a misleading TVTropes page rather than figuring out how to phrase what I wanted to say; I've since taken out the link, expanded that section and put it behind a spoiler warning. Thanks Hap for calling me out!