primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2023-01-28 09:36 pm
primeideal) wrote2023-01-28 09:36 pm
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(SFF Bingo): Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots
Twelve pages into "Hench," our narrator, Anna, is talking to her friend, Greg, when Greg does something that, to me, hints (perhaps inadvertently) at the reality and strength of their friendship. Anna and Greg are both temp workers in the gig economy--they do what they can to make ends meet, and in their case, that often means taking short-term jobs for supervillains. Capitalism is screwed up, and a lot of smart people, like Anna and Greg, have frustrating, dead-end jobs without secure access to quality health care! The fact that they're stuck in these jobs should not be taken as a negative reflection of their intelligence or skill or potential! Anna makes allusions to Gustave Doré's art and headless bodies from the "Nuremberg chronicles" that sail over my head! As someone who's fortunate to have a cushy white-collar job, I'm in no place to judge Anna and Greg and how they make a living.
What does Greg do? While talking on the phone with his boss, a hapless supervillain who needs to be reminded to try turning the death ray off and on again: "He caught my eye and mimed shooting himself in the head, his first two fingers pointed to his temple."
Why did this line grab me? Because I've been in what's supposed to be a fun, social situation with board game friends and friends-of-friends, where one person did this all the time. His job? Awful. His love life? The worst. The fact that he's stuck playing this stupid game where he doesn't feel like he has much agency? Hell on earth. (Of course, he won.) Again, as someone who's been dealt a luckier hand in life than him, it's not my place to criticize. But if everything going on makes him performatively act like "I just hate life and wish I was dead, tee hee hee!", it's never going to be "my turn" to speak up or even to mention that it's making me uncomfortable (who am I to add more problems to the pile?) And the reactions of everyone else, acting like we're all friends and everything is fine, feel like self-delusion.
After a short-term gig in data processing goes well, Anna is invited to go join her villainous employer in the field. Only when she gets there does she learn his newest evil scheme: kidnapping the mayor's son and mind-controlling him in the hopes that he'll obediently cut his own finger off--if the mayor pays $5 million in cryptocurrency, he'll let the kid go with no further damage! But before the mind control kicks in, a mighty superhero comes to "save the day," shoving Anna out of the way while he takes down the villain. By superheroic standards, this is a relative "success," with only a few henchpeople killed and maimed. But for Anna, even a very brief injury leads to a serious leg fracture requiring hospitalization and a long time recovering--no fun for anyone, but particularly if your economic situation was already precarious.
So Anna, being a smart twenty-first century nerd, turns to...utilitarianism! Yes, that's right; she's going to expose how terrible superheroes are in a quantifiable way, by measuring the toll in death, injury, and property damage, and converting this all to a single scale by using the unit of "disability-adjusted life years." But don't worry, she cites her sources (two paragraphs from the European Centre for Economic Policy Research are quoted verbatim, with a footnote).
I side-eyed this for several reasons. First of all, anyone who's this tendentious about "my ideological frameworks, let me show you them" should in a work of fiction should be taken with salt. Not disregarded altogether--there are plenty of enjoyable works of fiction that have very explicit didacticism!--but taken with salt. Secondly, the quantification of "disability-adjusted" is something that's gotten rightful pushback. It's certainly true that if I was badly injured or disabled like Anna had been, my reaction would be, like hers, "well this sucks and I sure wish it hadn't happened!" But the implication that people with long-term physical disabilities or illnesses are worth "less than one healthy person, per unit of lifespan remaining"...like, I don't have to describe why that's a yikes?
And if you're going to go utilitarian, you'd better go all the way. Anna points out that compared to the DALY toll exerted by the superhero, five million dollars and a finger is not really that high a cost. Okay, let's take that as given. Do we expect hostage-taking to be more or less prevalent, in this world? What happens to the economy, the political system, to society as a whole when the default rationality is "you'd better give me what I want or else, what's a few digits between friends?"
I recognize that I'm defending the status quo, which again, is probably a function of my position in the world; the USA's "we don't negotiate with terrorists >:( " is in many ways screwed up! But having reached this conclusion, I'd expect some level of "okay, well, the superheroes are a net negative for the world, utilitarianly speaking...what about the supervillains?" And the book doesn't really go there, except indirectly. We learn that there's a "Draft" government agency that finds and trains any potential superheroes; those who follow the system are praised, those who try to go their own way are deemed "villains." In which case, yeah, it's the system itself that's bad and needs to be fixed or burned down! But in that case, I would not have expected Anna to be the first person to ever come up with that idea...?
I've been pretty harsh so far, so let's talk about some of the fun stuff. On the first page, we learn that our narrator's full name is "Anna Tromedlov" and her original choice for a secret identity was "the Palindrome," nice! Although she now finds that cheesy and juvenile. For a long time I just rolled with the theme of "most people doing boring day jobs don't care enough to learn the right way to pronounce any slightly unfamiliar last name, if someone gets it right the first time, it means they're serious and care about you"--so it took me way too long to realize that "Tromedlov" is just "Voldemort" backwards. This has no plot relevance, it's just hilarious.
Cheesy hero monologuing:
A lot of the timeskips felt jerky--like, she'd be interviewing for a job, then suddenly she'd be at the new job, and only later do we get a rushed transition of "and this is how I got the job." Among the other squicks you might expect, there's a lot of threatened loss of bodily autonomy (the antagonists don't seriously screw Anna up permanently despite trying to, but her allies trying to come to the rescue do have long-term consequences), and more body horror inflicted on an antagonist.
I should say that I have very little familiarity with superhero comics/movies/culture in general. From what I've osmosed from being in fandom, superheroes are absolutely divas with a lot of dramatic bisexual love triangles, so "Hench"'s personalities seem entirely appropriate in that regard. Both this book and "Steelheart" (the "Reckoners" trilogy by Brandon Sanderson), I think, are deconstructions of superheroes where the antagonist dude is patterned on "what if Superman, but evil." It's possible that someone more familiar with the stereotype would enjoy the deconstruction more than I did.
I'm not sure if "Hench" is trying to say more about #metoo or #allcopsarebastards or #thegigeconomyisprettybadactually, and it's possible it isn't saying any of these! It might even be stronger if it wasn't? But ultimately, it's the utilitarianism that's the make-or-break for me. And whether it's fiction or RL, my instinctive response is "okay! I see I have had way too much good and happiness in my life, this is quite unfair! Please direct me towards the grinder where I can be ground down into happy utility particles that are redistributed to those more in need! Thanks in advance! :D " Which...doesn't really get results. And ironically, by writing this out, I'm just as awful as the annoying guy from the board games event--maybe worse, because at least I have the self-awareness to realize I'm annoying.
Bingo: using this for Anti-Heroes. Would also count for No Ifs Ands or Buts, Mental Health (Anna spends a lot of time processing the trauma she's been through, this was too verbose for my tastes but I appreciate I may not be the target audience), Reddit Readalongs, Award Finalist but Non-Winner.
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What does Greg do? While talking on the phone with his boss, a hapless supervillain who needs to be reminded to try turning the death ray off and on again: "He caught my eye and mimed shooting himself in the head, his first two fingers pointed to his temple."
Why did this line grab me? Because I've been in what's supposed to be a fun, social situation with board game friends and friends-of-friends, where one person did this all the time. His job? Awful. His love life? The worst. The fact that he's stuck playing this stupid game where he doesn't feel like he has much agency? Hell on earth. (Of course, he won.) Again, as someone who's been dealt a luckier hand in life than him, it's not my place to criticize. But if everything going on makes him performatively act like "I just hate life and wish I was dead, tee hee hee!", it's never going to be "my turn" to speak up or even to mention that it's making me uncomfortable (who am I to add more problems to the pile?) And the reactions of everyone else, acting like we're all friends and everything is fine, feel like self-delusion.
After a short-term gig in data processing goes well, Anna is invited to go join her villainous employer in the field. Only when she gets there does she learn his newest evil scheme: kidnapping the mayor's son and mind-controlling him in the hopes that he'll obediently cut his own finger off--if the mayor pays $5 million in cryptocurrency, he'll let the kid go with no further damage! But before the mind control kicks in, a mighty superhero comes to "save the day," shoving Anna out of the way while he takes down the villain. By superheroic standards, this is a relative "success," with only a few henchpeople killed and maimed. But for Anna, even a very brief injury leads to a serious leg fracture requiring hospitalization and a long time recovering--no fun for anyone, but particularly if your economic situation was already precarious.
So Anna, being a smart twenty-first century nerd, turns to...utilitarianism! Yes, that's right; she's going to expose how terrible superheroes are in a quantifiable way, by measuring the toll in death, injury, and property damage, and converting this all to a single scale by using the unit of "disability-adjusted life years." But don't worry, she cites her sources (two paragraphs from the European Centre for Economic Policy Research are quoted verbatim, with a footnote).
I side-eyed this for several reasons. First of all, anyone who's this tendentious about "my ideological frameworks, let me show you them" should in a work of fiction should be taken with salt. Not disregarded altogether--there are plenty of enjoyable works of fiction that have very explicit didacticism!--but taken with salt. Secondly, the quantification of "disability-adjusted" is something that's gotten rightful pushback. It's certainly true that if I was badly injured or disabled like Anna had been, my reaction would be, like hers, "well this sucks and I sure wish it hadn't happened!" But the implication that people with long-term physical disabilities or illnesses are worth "less than one healthy person, per unit of lifespan remaining"...like, I don't have to describe why that's a yikes?
And if you're going to go utilitarian, you'd better go all the way. Anna points out that compared to the DALY toll exerted by the superhero, five million dollars and a finger is not really that high a cost. Okay, let's take that as given. Do we expect hostage-taking to be more or less prevalent, in this world? What happens to the economy, the political system, to society as a whole when the default rationality is "you'd better give me what I want or else, what's a few digits between friends?"
I recognize that I'm defending the status quo, which again, is probably a function of my position in the world; the USA's "we don't negotiate with terrorists >:( " is in many ways screwed up! But having reached this conclusion, I'd expect some level of "okay, well, the superheroes are a net negative for the world, utilitarianly speaking...what about the supervillains?" And the book doesn't really go there, except indirectly. We learn that there's a "Draft" government agency that finds and trains any potential superheroes; those who follow the system are praised, those who try to go their own way are deemed "villains." In which case, yeah, it's the system itself that's bad and needs to be fixed or burned down! But in that case, I would not have expected Anna to be the first person to ever come up with that idea...?
I've been pretty harsh so far, so let's talk about some of the fun stuff. On the first page, we learn that our narrator's full name is "Anna Tromedlov" and her original choice for a secret identity was "the Palindrome," nice! Although she now finds that cheesy and juvenile. For a long time I just rolled with the theme of "most people doing boring day jobs don't care enough to learn the right way to pronounce any slightly unfamiliar last name, if someone gets it right the first time, it means they're serious and care about you"--so it took me way too long to realize that "Tromedlov" is just "Voldemort" backwards. This has no plot relevance, it's just hilarious.
Cheesy hero monologuing:
"In chess, a pawn is the feeblest piece, and the most vulnerable--the most expendable. It's easy to ignore a pawn, to take it for granted while you concern yourself with the more powerful pieces. However, a pawn is also the one and only piece that, if left unchecked for too long, can become a queen."
I stared at him. "I am aware of what chess is."
I stared at him. "I am aware of what chess is."
- "Supercollider had a great deal in common with a diamond: aesthetically tacky; value artificially ascribed by corporate greed; cultural significance vastly overinflated; and incredibly hard to damage."
- "The old man chose ideas over the boy he'd loved, because that's what heroes always choose: their ideas and ideals."
- "we should change the name of our department to Negligence or Malice, considering how often our activities were thus attributed in the media."
- Anna quotes Farscape when heading into a dangerous conflict, love to see it! :D
A lot of the timeskips felt jerky--like, she'd be interviewing for a job, then suddenly she'd be at the new job, and only later do we get a rushed transition of "and this is how I got the job." Among the other squicks you might expect, there's a lot of threatened loss of bodily autonomy (the antagonists don't seriously screw Anna up permanently despite trying to, but her allies trying to come to the rescue do have long-term consequences), and more body horror inflicted on an antagonist.
I should say that I have very little familiarity with superhero comics/movies/culture in general. From what I've osmosed from being in fandom, superheroes are absolutely divas with a lot of dramatic bisexual love triangles, so "Hench"'s personalities seem entirely appropriate in that regard. Both this book and "Steelheart" (the "Reckoners" trilogy by Brandon Sanderson), I think, are deconstructions of superheroes where the antagonist dude is patterned on "what if Superman, but evil." It's possible that someone more familiar with the stereotype would enjoy the deconstruction more than I did.
I'm not sure if "Hench" is trying to say more about #metoo or #allcopsarebastards or #thegigeconomyisprettybadactually, and it's possible it isn't saying any of these! It might even be stronger if it wasn't? But ultimately, it's the utilitarianism that's the make-or-break for me. And whether it's fiction or RL, my instinctive response is "okay! I see I have had way too much good and happiness in my life, this is quite unfair! Please direct me towards the grinder where I can be ground down into happy utility particles that are redistributed to those more in need! Thanks in advance! :D " Which...doesn't really get results. And ironically, by writing this out, I'm just as awful as the annoying guy from the board games event--maybe worse, because at least I have the self-awareness to realize I'm annoying.
Bingo: using this for Anti-Heroes. Would also count for No Ifs Ands or Buts, Mental Health (Anna spends a lot of time processing the trauma she's been through, this was too verbose for my tastes but I appreciate I may not be the target audience), Reddit Readalongs, Award Finalist but Non-Winner.