Review copy provided by the publisher.
Today I was on the periphery of a conversation of books “about” queerness and books that “just happen to feature” queerness, and I need to say: this one is about queerness, it sure is, it is as about it as anything ever has been. What it is not, however, is a 101-level work about queerness. In science fiction this division often points at science fiction novels where knowledge of, for example, trans people is assumed and the trans people are allowed to have space adventures (undersea exploration, dimensions of the human heart, whatever) just like cis people, vs. novels where the author is going to do a science fiction about What If Gender: Weird Stuff, Huh.
Not in Notes from a Regicide. This is a book where it matters deeply to the main characters’ experiences that they are all trans people. It matters to the action plot, and it matters dreadfully, intensely to the main plot arc that is “young man attempts to understand the outside world forces that have shaped his parents.” It matters that their trans experiences are not all the same, both in terms of what’s available/expected from the outside world and in terms of what they want/need internally. This is very much a book that knows that there is no unitary trans experience any more than there is a unitary artist experience or a unitary revolutionary experience, and it’s a much stronger book for that.
Because yeah, some of the people who manage the most revolutionary acts do not burn with a political fervor here. Some of the things that change the world were meant to change it in other ways, or in unknown ways. The breadth and depth of human variety is stunning here, as the pieces come together, as we find out who did what and how it has mattered, small scale and large.