Hugos 2022: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

This was my antepenultimate Hugo novel for 2022; in fact, my antepenultimate piece of Hugo reading altogether, since I ended up leaving a bunch of novels for the end this year. She Who Became the Sun is a piece of historical fantasy, a fictionalized depiction of Zhu, the person who would go on to be the Hongwu emperor and found the Ming dynasty; Parker-Chan suggests that he was actually a she in disguise, and adds some mild fantasy elements, mostly that Zhu can see ghosts.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: June 2022
Read: July 2022

I can see why people really like this. I wanted to like it more than I did. It begins very arrestingly, with young Zhu a member of a starving family of peasants. A fortuneteller promises her brother will acquire greatness, but that she will amount to nothing. When the rest of her family succumbs to hunger, she assumes her brother's identity in a desperate bid to live, and in hope of acquiring her brother's fate as well; she lives in fear that she will do things her brother could not or would not have done, and thus no longer be able to lay claim to his fate of greatness. These early parts of the novel, foregrounding Zhu's desperation and deception, are the strongest.

As the novel goes on, it widens its cast of characters, and unfortunately, spends much time on various male warlords who I found it difficult to invest it or even distinguish in terms of personality. They are all nasty, conniving people working to undermine one another, and these sections were much less interesting than the sections focused on our protagonist, who seemed to vanish from the narrative for annoyingly long periods of time. I found it hard to follow the politics here; whether that was because I didn't care about the people, or if my inability to follow the politics made it hard to care about the people, I couldn't say. I think Parker-Chan was trying to depict a species of toxic masculinity, but it soon grew repetitive, and her take on it wasn't very insightful.

There is a very striking moment at the end, harsh and terrible, that really worked for me, though; Zhu is a very interesting character. The triumphalist tone to the marketing around this book is very wrong; at least one blurb I read compares it to Mulan, and it is nothing like Mulan. This is not a story of female empowerment. This is a story of awful people doing awful things to accumulate power, and even if we understand why Zhu does them, she is still awful.

So, decent enough, and I can see why other people might gravitate toward it, but it's a two-book series (at least?), and I can't imagine myself picking up book two unless it also becomes a Hugo finalist.