leonidskies

Al Hess has been on my radar for a little while - I've seen Yours Celestially around quite a bit, and Key Lime Sky a little (but less than Yours Celestially). Last year, I spotted Key Lime Sky sitting on the vendor table for a queer bookseller at a book fair I went to, so I picked it up to check it out and spotted World Running Down sitting underneath. I read the blurb and was immediately incredibly excited; I had to read this book.

So, naturally, SEVERAL months later I have now read the book. World Running Down is a dystopian sci-fi romance novel about a trans man, Valentine, who runs odd jobs in the area surrounding Salt Lake City in the hope he can earn enough money to secure his future in said city. The love interest, Osric, is an AI who previously inhabited the city's networks but has subsequently been forced into a body - one of the tasks he's given, in the first few days of his embodied life, is to deliver a job offer to Valentine.

This, I think, is what the blurb should have been. Instead, the blurb goes on to discuss several other elements of the plot that I think would have better served the book as a reveal rather than being functionally part of the setup (the novel takes about 50% to cover the points mentioned in its blurb. I feel like that's too much? Like the book felt like it had to do a lot of work to convince me it was worth reading).

I liked this book. I also didn't like this book. But I'm not sure the things I disliked were really anything wrong with it? It's a weird energy all round. There were elements of the way the book was held together that would have me pointing at it and saying 'this feels like a debut', but it's not; Hess is an experienced writer and this is just his traditional debut. Instead, I can only point tentatively at other things - is the editing pulling its punches on something queer and complicated for fear that readers might not 'get it'? Was the book's editing under-invested in? Do I just not like what it was doing because I have different tastes?

(And, of course, an age old question for me: do I even like romance?)

I'm also putting the cart before the horse on this one a little, I fear, so to clarify: I liked this book, but flip-flopped back and forth on whether it was "okay" or "good" several times over the course of reading it. I landed on "good", for what it's worth.

What I liked:

• The book enjoys sitting with discomfort and contradiction. No question it poses has a simple, single answer, and it's abundantly aware that the questions it asks sit at an intersection of moral and emotional issues. Characters feel bad about doing good things. They think about both themselves and others when they try to make decisions. When this happens, it tends to make sense. It's good.
• Complex depictions of different forms of awareness, experience, and communication. The novel has two POVs, including one who's an AI who's never had a body before. Sometimes this leads to some really raw and interesting narration about navigating an unfamiliar world that's meant to be familiar.
• It genuinely ended up in a place I didn't expect it to end up. For a novel that revealed half its plot before I even started reading - and for a romance - it did things I didn't anticipate and I liked the version of the plot Hess wrote more than the one I had preconceived in my head.
• Very few scenes overstayed their welcome. Everything moved at pace but also didn't feel breakneck. I think this is where Hess' experience as an author comes through, because I've read tighter-edited books that struggled on pacing far more than this.
• The sex scene. I'm sex averse and don't like sex scenes so skip most of them when I'm reading a romance. I didn't have to skip the sex scene in this book due to discomfort!
• The third act breakup actually made sense to me. This was a conflict they would have and a misunderstanding they would face, and also one that could reasonably be resolved in a way that also made sense. I'm a third act breakup hater generally, so the fact that this landed for me was surprising to me in a good way.
• The ending! I was happy with the conclusion it came to on a lot of its points, and the relationships, and the character arcs. The fact that the book stuck the landing after struggling in what I'd describe as the first and third quarters is something I find quite rare and what tipped me over into overall settling on thinking the book is good.

What I didn't like:

• The opening chapter was trying quite hard to be 'hooky' in a way that meant it was pretty unlike the rest of the book. I get why this happens; an opening to a book is important so gets the most editorial input over the course of a manuscript's lifetime! But it felt like it was trying very hard to tell me it was worth my time in a way that turned me off more than anything.
• Attraction and love came too abruptly into the relationship for my tastes. There was some conflict between the characters that wasn't necessarily resolved too quickly, but this pivoted quickly enough into strong attraction that I felt like I'd missed something.
• Outside of worldbuilding surrounding AI, a lot of the worldbuilding rested pretty squarely on 'Mad Max vibes' and making a point. Technically it's fitting that the world felt small given the restrictions of its narrators, but, well. It felt small and shallow.
• The actual villains were flat enough that violence against them felt gratuitous more than anything. I'm usually not in the mood to celebrate a man being beaten to a pulp, regardless of his crimes.

What I have complicated feelings about:

• The novel frequently relied on what I'd call 'bigotry gotcha' for humour. I understand what it was doing on one level, trying to showcase the 'imperfect ally who's actually a good person'. I can appreciate it for what it is, but sometimes Mormons don't need to say something that sounds homophobic only to have it revealed that they're actually fine.
• 'Poor people good, rich people bad' is... fine. I know why it's a message, especially in dystopia featuring huge wealth and resource divides, but I personally find it quite tired ground to retread. Hess did it well, it's just not my preferred theme.
• A refusal to name Valentine as dealing with ADHD. A lot of the novel revolves around access to healthcare, but anything other than emotional support and rawdogging coping mechanisms is completely absent. I get that it might not be within the novel's scope, but it felt weird to me at points.

The last thing I want to get my thoughts down about, I think, is the way the book handled transness. To me, Valentine was very by the book: he's a young man who gets dysphoric about everything. He's battling with feeling the pressure to live up to standards of masculinity that's largely out of his reach. We, as readers, know his deadname. He gets misgendered on multiple occasions. He has to have a bit of a genital talk before a sex scene. He's been creeped on by chasers. He has transphobic parents and a sister who can't openly support him. All of this stuff was, to be really blunt, kind of boring to me. These are all realistic traits for a trans man who lives in a world like Valentine's, but they weren't interesting.

What I did find interesting, though, was firstly the way this illuminated one of the key issues of the novel (who do you hurt to get what you need?) and secondly the way it opened up for Osric's own feelings about gender and having a body. To me, Osric is on a slightly offset, metaphorical mirror of Valentine's transition: he's forced to live in a way that's wrong, finds a way that this can be adjusted into something he wants, and then is forced away from it. The way that Osric's position is initially likened to dysphoria and this becomes a point of connection between the two that later becomes the source of misunderstandings? So good. World Running Down is best on gender when it's getting creative with it, and in some ways maybe that's served by the fact that Valentine's own position is so recognisable to be mundane; these are the building blocks for doing something fun with it.

(Also, I recognise that Valentine might not be mundane to a lot of readers; I'm talking about me here. And I empathise with Hess' position, because writers making trans fiction are often under intense scrutiny for the way they do their work. Valentine's transness doesn't have to be interesting to me! He might be very strange to unfamiliar cis readers, or comfortingly representative of some trans people's struggles.)

I think that's all I have to say on this one for now. It's been a while since I wrote longer form thoughts on a book I'd been reading, and I'm trying to read more thoughtfully now I'm back on the train of reading books I actually want to engage with. This was fun, and an interesting exercise! We'll... see if I do it again. I'm reading Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera next; A Saint of Bright Doors gave me a lot of thoughts and I've heard good things about this book so I'm excited.