Thread by @Delafina777

Reading Robert Jackson Bennett's "City of Stairs", which, normally at this point I'm done with fantasy/scifi by white guys, but I was in the mood for noir and the description sounded fascinating. Plus, female lead character. It's... an uneasy read.

One one hand, after I bought it I noticed the main blurb was by Brent Weeks, which normally would make a book a hard no for me, but on the other hand, I really was feeling noir and political intrigue, so I forged ahead.

So, first off, the good things:

The main character, thus far, is not sexualized/objectified, and is awesome. She's barely described physically, other than what she's wearing, which is largely a disguise.

The world-building is *exquisite.* It unfolds with just the right amount of coyness, and is virtuosically clear on where the line between "mysterious" and "confusing" is. Like, in that, it's a masterclass.

It's what the worldbuilding is *saying* that makes me uneasy. And to be clear, I'm speaking here of actual uneasiness as in, "I'm not sure about this" rather than "this is doing something bad."

The premise of the world setup is that there is an Eastern/Northern-European-ish culture that had very involved gods--as in, the gods made all kinds of everyday magic items for them, like teapots that never emptied or cooled--and conquered their way across the world.

They conquered and enslaved a Southeast-Asian-ish culture. But now, there's been a war, the "Continentals" (Eastern European-ish people) lost, and the tables are turned. The Saypuri won, and slew all the Continental gods.

Now they rule the Continent, and any mention of the gods, symbols related to them, etc. is illegal. The Continentals are forbidden to learn their own history (although the Saypuri study it). And so on.

So, therein lies the unease. On one hand, the premise of "culture conquers the world because it's got gods on call, enslaved people rises up and kills those gods, takes over, takes pragmatic but perhaps not humane approach to god-stuff, what happens now?" is fascinating.

And I think I'd be enjoying the hell out of it if he'd just done that with fresh, interesting, made-up cultures that weren't obvious 1:1 analogues to real-world cultures.

(Like, obviously, any fantasy world-building is going to draw from and evoke *elements* of real world history, but there's a difference between "in some ways this reminds me of the French" and "they have French names, cultural practices, history, etc.")

And on one hand, the narrative is always from the point of view of the Saypuri (and their agents), and they largely come across as reasonable, if somewhat harried, bureaucrats trying to make an empire run smoothly and ensure no one kills each other.

On the other hand, the Continentals can't help but have a point in wanting them gone, so even though they're presented as the "foreign" culture here, they're fighting an occupying power that is denying them access to their own culture and history.

As a thought exercise? Interesting. But on the other hand, it's hard not to see it as a fantasy of white persecution--a sort of, "if the brown people get too much power they'll just do to us what we did to them" paranoia.

(I mean, this would be grosser if the European-analogue culture were British-ish rather than Russian-ish, but there's still a lot of potentially cringey implications.

I dunno, I'm interested in whether anyone else has read it, and what they thought.

(I also want to add--again, to the book's credit, the characters are thoughtful about this stuff and not cliches. Nothing about this--at least as far as I've gotten--is clumsy or shallow. Quite the opposite.)