In the near-future China of Maggie Shen King鈥檚 (Harper Voyager), the country鈥檚 one-child policy has resulted in a shortage of eligible women, and a vast, unmarriageable male population. Viewing this as a potential source of civil unrest, the government vastly restricts people鈥檚 rights and freedoms, and encourages them to enter into polyandrous marriages. Forty-something Wei-guo has finally saved enough money to enter into negotiations to become the third husband of May-ling, already married to brothers Hann and Xiong-xin. The novel switches between their four points of view in order to explore the stresses of such an arrangement, as well as the social forces that can make it advantageous and even desirable.
One can sense the influence of Margaret Attwood鈥檚 The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale in King鈥檚 construction of her future society, particularly her use of neologisms and the repressive social policies they stand for, designed to 鈥渟olve鈥� the problem of the excess male population. Gay men are dubbed Willfully Sterile, forced to either register or be hospitalised. Men who have difficulty socialising or have autism are designated Lost Boys and can be institutionalised and sterilised. Single men like Wei-guo are assigned Helpmates for impersonal 鈥渉ygiene sessions鈥� in which the authorities prescribe the precise extent of sexual contact.
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Despite these policies and the unhappiness they cause, An Excess Male is less a dystopia than it is a novel of manners, in which each of the characters must navigate norms both old and new in order to arrive at that holy grail of so much fiction: a good marriage. King and her characters are open about the flaws of the novel鈥檚 social structures; the later chapters focus on a terrible act of abuse, which the characters struggle to expose. But An Excess Male also suggests that the exigencies of its premise have opened the door to new definitions, not just of marriage, but of masculinity.
Far from devolving into brutality and violence, as their government fears, the societies that arise in the novel give men the opportunity to be nurturing and supportive. Polyandrous marriages, similarly, offer the male characters companionship not just with their wives, but with each other, as exemplified by Wei-guo鈥檚 fathers who, though straight, remain married even after his mother鈥檚 death. While King can hardly be said to be advocating the society she describes, which victimises and entraps both men and women, An Excess Male does end with the creation of a new family: one that requires all four spouses to function.
A different combination of dystopia and romance can be found in M. T. Anderson鈥檚 Landscape With Invisible Hand (Candlewick Press).
When Earth is discovered by the alien vuvv, they initially claim to have come in peace, offering technological breakthroughs in exchange for resources. The reality, however, is the type of colonisation and exploitation familiar from Earth鈥檚 own history. As the economy collapses, a tiny sliver of the population live like kings, serving the vuvv, while the remainder are left jobless and scrambling for survival.
Since the vuvv exoticise and fetishise human behavior, teenager Adam and his girlfriend Chloe decide to broadcast their relationship to an admiring alien audience, selling a vision of romance carefully tailored to appeal to the vuvv鈥檚 simplistic understanding of human customs.
Adam also hopes to win an art contest organised by the vuvv. The vuvv, however, are put off by his choosing to depict the ravages caused by their arrival. After all, they explain, they can see vuvv installations anywhere, and they much prefer the 鈥渨ild鈥� Earth depicted in Adam鈥檚 more fantastical paintings.
The resulting story feels like a cross between The Hunger Games and the Black Mirror episode 鈥淔ifteen Million Merits鈥�, pondering the cost of selling yourself to an audience that does not recognise your humanity. Adam and Chloe鈥檚 relationship crumbles under the strain of having to model what the vuvv take human love to be, and Adam is inevitably forced to choose between artistic integrity and his family鈥檚 future. The speed with which the characters go from middle-class security and self-confidence to bare subsistence might strike adult readers as a little overdetermined. But the combination of non-standard sci-fi ingredients, such as the focus on art and reality TV, and an extremely dark sense of humour, give Landscape With Invisible Hand a flavour all its own, one that will appeal to readers of any age.
Leaving Earth for the far reaches of outer space, Dave Hutchinson鈥檚 novella (Tor.com) focuses on Duke Faraday, the reluctant president of an anarchic space colony that has for centuries been relentlessly pursued by Earth鈥檚 Bureau of Colonisation. His job, run on the principle that only people with no interest in politics should be entrusted with public office, is usually a light one. But when a BoC probe appears in the colony鈥檚 system, he must corral a population of independent-minded geniuses and misfits to arrange an evacuation that will leave Earth clueless as to their new whereabouts.
Readers familiar with the political slant of Hutchinson鈥檚 Fractured Europe sequence will be puzzled to find him writing about a Robert Heinlein-esque libertarian utopia, and perhaps fatigued by the dozens of paragraphs of explaining the colony鈥檚 workings. Not surprisingly, then, the story ends with a twist, but this, alas, is delivered so abruptly as to leave one feeling even more wrong-footed. Lost in space, as it were.
