review: the genesis of misery by neon yang
the genesis of misery is a sci-fi / fantasy mech novel from the author of the tensorate series of novellas. this review is quite spoiler heavy but i'll preface by saying i really disliked the book and do not recommend it, so i think you won't be losing anything. it did get a fair amount of praise? but i felt very similar to the house of hunger (bad).
i am notoriously bad at summaries, but i'll give it my best shot:
the book follows misery nomaki, who has stonebending powers that they shouldn't have. they get arrested, pretend to be the next messiah, find out they might well actually be the next messiah for real, kill a bunch of people, get send to a military base where they become a mech pilot in the fight against the Heretics (<- capital H so you know it's serious), awaken their divine mech, break a siege, find out the siege was kind of a fluke, get arrested again for messing up the plans of a truce / peace treaty, and is handed over to the heretics. then the book ends by teasing the angel who's been guiding misery all this time is probably an artificial intelligence (which is prohibited), and the holystone is probably alien tech. because this is gonna be the first of a series.
my first impression, noticeable fairly early on, is that this book is really lacking in grit and grime, especially since it's a mecha. definitely missing a first chapter introducing the protagonist in their home planet, or just at least some semblance of description. the environments and settings and characters are all left severely underdescribed. the writing style is uninteresting. this is my main criticism — they forgot to put the book in. it reads like a first draft, not because it's sloppy, but because it's comprised mostly of a core structure without any fleshing out in between. i'll bring this up a lot.
story and pacing
the pacing is such a mess. it takes so fucking long to get going. none of the time pre-mechs is properly spent setting things up and showing the setting. misery is always being pushed here and there and complaining and we never get a sense of how things are. the story kinda wanders around, never with a clarity of purpose and stakes, but seems uninterested on actually getting places? there's several time skips where we're told what happened in a very matter of fact way and then jump to the next plot point, but this sort of downtime is so so important, specially in scifi. every single of the ten interludes should have been at least one nice beefy chapter. i don't really like waving cliches around like "look! you have to follow these!" but uh. show don't tell at its most basic form. everything that'd really make you connect with these characters and setting happens in these interludes! the meat of the book is hidden away on timeskips! i'd like to get a feel for the routine, understand what's the baseline of this world, get some goddamn characterization.
one could (watsonianly) argue this is all like a hagiography, of course it's only centered on the main beats, but this doesn't match the writing style and more importantly, doesn't excuse a book being plain old dull. it's not a fun book to get through! this review was mostly written simultaneously because i just couldn't keep my brain from going places other than the story itself!
and i'm not trying to argue the book should tell me everything directly, lore dump the answer to all my questions. because i'm normal. but i'd very much like to ruminate on these things because of the text, instead of its absence yknow? it's cool to piece things together yourself, but there needs to be something to actually work with.
and the story is such a straightforward chosen one narrative. misery nomaki is the specialest little birthday boy, prophesized to become the ninth messiah since before her birth. she has powers, but she barely needs to use them, because things always go her way in the end, it's the will of the forge! the woman she thought hated them is quickly revealed to not even really be a rival, and before you know it they're dating and she'd go to the ends of space for misery.
i'd really have liked to see the messiah as another pawn. not just to the demiurge, but to the mundane power of bureaucracy and politics. it feels like such a given for the genre! hands tied, they may be all powerful in battle but still a cog in the murder machine. it's uninteresting when they get everything they want!! where's conflict!!
characters
too many of the characters feel like stock, the protag feels like every teen dystopia i ever read. the book seems to rely on the reader's familiarity with tropes. look, it's sci-fantasy catholicism, badass princess that immediately rivals the protag, out of touch high tech rich people in the capital, weird clones, protag from the boondocks. tropes and archetypes can be useful but here they just kept me from actually viewing these characters as themselves, especially when they're so underdescribed.
every character, whether secondary, supporting or background, is nothing but set dressing; the protagonist isn't much more than that either. it seems that they're there because someone needs to be or there's no story.
gender
one thing is the base truth in this universe. read the book's blurb. "misery nomaki (she/they)". that's not a quirk specifically for the summary; pronouns are essentially part of your name, like a title. characters introduce themselves with name and pronouns, and so does the narrative. hud implants? name and pronouns. even before our pov character gets her implant, we always get that info, and if we don't it gets brought up ("zie wasn't wearing a tag" or whatever). that's cool. i'm neutral on it as a worldbuilding thing. but how does this relate to the culture of the empire, the church and the heretics (which we know very little about, but that's the norm for the book)? you get them assigned at birth, are they part of your basic citizen info? when you change them, is there bureaucracy?
the book supposedly has all this gender (and the author themself is nonbinary) but seemingly not transness? am i in too deep with deeply physical and carnal transexual art? (read body after body btw). do any of these characters even have bodies and hormones and surgeries, desire to modify themselves, presentations confirming or not (and what is gender non conformity like in a setting like this?). does this woman have stubble, this man breasts? or are they just a name and pronouns?
there are exactly two trans moments, and they both feel weird.
first: at one point in the military base, while getting to know her squad, ghost, a cloned character, (we'll get to them) asks misery about them using two sets of pronouns, and she just looks at the camera and explains it. no joke, comes out of nowhere, never happens again (thank god). could we not have done that a little more elegantly at all. the book itself literally calls it an infodump (yes the writing has its the locked tomb out-of-place 2020s internet lingo moments. because we can't have shit). and! it raises the question for the first time. if misery was raised called 'she' and chose to add in 'they', they were assigned something (at birth?). why? don't presume anyone's pronouns but sure give your kid something other than default zie?
and then later, on page 361 of this 370 page book (page counts kinda weird because i read on kindle, but regardless), the sentence: "both of us transwomen". it takes this long to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and it's a throwaway phrase?
grabing neon yang by the shoulders and shaking them desperately. explain me the fucking setting!!
the fucking setting: religion and culture
the matter of gender leads me to culture and religion in general as well. because that's kind of a microcosm of the larger issue of this severely underdeveloped setting.
what is the culture of this empire that's so spread out physically, while also having near instant travel? how do the outskirts compare to the cosmopolitan areas? we are meant to believe church and state are more or less separate but that's so patently false given they're in the midst of a holy war. but well, against what exactly? what is the religion like to begin with? core tenets and philosophies. what do the places of worship look like, and how does worship happen within them. are there no named angels or archangels? holy texts? do people worship the original eight messiahs, what are their names even. what's iconography and religious art and music like? are there holidays, and what do they celebrate or memorialize? what are the sects, are there any other religions at all in the empire, whether repressed or tolerated?
no one even fucking prays.
and honestly this religion / culture seems pretty fun, all in all. gender is apparently over and the pope is nonbinary. they're drinking and fucking at the military base / prison, no problem. and if you're lucky you even get stonebending powers and cool iridescent hair out of it? i'd go to mass if that's what it was all about. what exactly are the heretics condemning and rejecting?
i feel the author kept us blinded to the heretics' entire deal because that's what the sequel is for, but i won't be reading that for this very reason. misery feels naive and grating and the stakes feel nonexistent all because The Baddies are just a nebulous and entity that's always, no exceptions, no nuance, treated as pure 100% no questions asked evil. but all we ever learn about them is that they can manipulate holystone in "unholy" ways; as in, they turned religion into science? i believe? that doesn't sound very bad at all. we don't even see them commit any atrocities or anything. and you can see from light years away that this is setup to making them more sympathetic or complex by going against misery's preconceptions, but it doesn't work! because i'm not gonna read the sequel! because the first book is bad!
and look, as misery embraces their messianic nature it could be cool to see them become more zealous and manichaeistic the way she is. but there's no progression building up to that, and when compared to the rest of the characters, it doesn't even serve as a contrast.
i mean, i say she is zealous but she doesn't enact her religion any differently at the start (opposed to her preacher brother and believing herself voidsick (possessed?), "lying" about being the messiah) than at the end (fully embracing her role as a savior). god, laying them out like that they almost sound like a good character huh. they had everything to be interesting and complex: growing up believing to be possessed and doomed, ressenting the religion that tells them that's what they are in the first place, their mother rejected by their preacher brother for that same sickness that eventually kills her. no matter how much they want to reject the church that calls them sick, it does not leave them. and then being told they are the messiah. well that's not misery nomaki though.
saints, cloned saints and ghost
dunno how to cleanly segue to ghost, but i really wanna talk about them and that couldn't quite go along with the characters subsection because it also has to do with culture and religion.
let's talk about holystone, which i name dropped but haven't explained. these are simply stones that can be manipulated by saints, and have different properties, such as gravity control, teleportation, whatever. it's fully fantasy (not like in the broken earth trilogy where stone is just stone). mechs are holystone as well.
so. being a saint and thus able to manipulate holystone is supposed to be something you're born with. but 1) misery isn't a saint, 2) the heretics aren't saints and can still manipulate holystone (which is why they're deemed unholy in the first place), 3) when she's at the capital, misery sees a lot of identical albino (?) saints. she even overhears people say parents get these saints (look it is, as with everything, unclear whether this is slavery) as babysitters to try and get their children to turn into saints.
in the military base, one such clone is a member of misery's squad. their name is ghost and i clapped and cheered when they showed up because that'd mean that thread of the narrative getting explored and explained, and also because. well, the parallels with rei ayanami are so obvious. there's even interpersonal conflict there for once! another member of the squad says "You're a freak. You're a reject from those disgusting cloning projects the Throne thinks we don't know they're running".
to me, they were the single compelling character, but i don't think the author shares that opinion! cloned saints are heavily emphasized when misery is in the capital, then ghost gets a fair amount of screen time all things considered, their mech training score is tied with misery (the messiah!), and then they simply disappear from the narrative. the author forgor :(. it drives me nuts because this had the potential to really explore someone like rei, a character whose treatment in rebuild of evangelion: 3.0+1.0 hasn't left my mind since i watched that movie (she should have gotten to choose her own name!!!). ghost presented such an opportunity to explore the setting, but the systems in this universe are never really interrogated. having powers is desired (but who knows how that interfaces with society and hierarchy) but artificial saints are frowned upon, and cloned saints are… what exactly? and why is ghost a reject? what's different about them? iunno. and won't find out.
conclusion
yeah the book is not good. in the afterword, the author says "this book was a long, long slog that spanned many years" and "my agent spent years patiently guiding me through the process of revising this book, with multiple complete restarts". reading this made some things kinda click a bit. i think the genesis of misery bears the marks and scars and vestigial limbs and stuff. i suspect that their vision and focus for the book shifted with time and that made the final result this muddy mess. maybe they also have a robust understanding of the setting that they simply chose to omit for some reason.
all in all? it's the first of a series and nothing interesting happens in the book to make me want to read more. all the tantalizing stuff is in the goddamn epilogue. SAD. well there's other books.
thanks for reading this far! after this disappointment i'm still very hungry for transgender mechs so reccs in that front will be appreciated too :)