Other than winning the Tiptree and Aurealis (Australia), Rupetta by Nike Sulway has received little attention. The original print run came out of a specialty press from the United Kingdom. A paperback edition came after the Tiptree award, but it still hasn't received the same publicity as other, less ambitious speculative fiction novels of last year. I find this to be a shame, because I find it to be one of the most interesting releases of last year, a speculative fiction novel that's as ambitious as Left Hand of Darkness or Lathe of Heaven. Thankfully, the publisher has ebook editions and paperbacks can be found at the usual online locations. I was encouraged to write this up possibly for the LGBT Lit reboot.
The title character, Rupetta introduces herself with fraught epistolary frustration and despair. The novel begins with a quest to find a child, frustrated by the slow progress of a ship:
If I were human I would weep.
If I were a goddess, I would step over the railing into the ocean. I would wade, hip-deep, through the water. I would be terrible and tall, my hair flaming behind me, my skirts awash with blood and churn. My eyes burning through the dark like the lamps of twin lighthouses, a thousand feet tall. I would tether the ship to my shoulders with steel reins, and haul it into port. I would drag the ship onto the stony sand, beach her there and thunder up the cliffs to the city. I would stand at the gate and sing a note so true that the stones of the walls would shudder in their footings. The wood of the gates would split, their hinges would shatter in their locks. I would make the walls of Angarok fall.
I would flock through the ruined city to find her: lift her from a cradle of rubble, white and unharmed. Her arms would slip around my neck, the bird-weight of her head would rest once more on my chest. I would never let her go.
Rupetta the character is not human and she is not a goddess. She is a clockwork being of leather, wood, and brass, constructed in 1619 (the same year as Descartes's dreams that led to "cognito ego sum"). She is self-aware as a person who is equally cognitive, emotional, and female. Her existence over the centuries is dependent on a number of human Wynders, a symbiosis that is equal parts mechanical and mystical.
However, the second voice of the narrative is the inquisitive Henri, a woman who enters college in the hopes of joining a select religious sect that is the keeper of the official Rupettan history. The oppressive religion of Rupetta seeks imortality through the clockwork replacement of human organs, and political control through the imposition of the "Rupettan Laws."
Life is Death.
The Earth is a Grave.
The Body is a Machine for Dying.
Knowledge is the Path to Immortality.
Many of the conflicts of the novel center on personal truth of Rupetta as a person vs. the dogma of the religion that rose around her. Sulway uses these conflicts to explore a number of ideas about history, religion, gender, politics, "the singularity," and consciousness. In a twist on the usual polemics of religion in science fiction, the schism is humanist and biophillic, not theological. In her Tiptree acceptance speech, Sulway admits to wanting to put "I feel, therefore I am" forward as a counterpoint to the cognitive bias of Cartesian ideas about consciousness.
What fits this book onto my LGBT bookshelf, is that the deeply strange turn of clockwork alternate history (cyber-camels!) creates an environment in which same-sex relationships exist entirely without taboo. As part of her coming of age story, Henri falls deeply in love with a woman of heretical sympathies. This pushes her to dive deeply into the historical mystery of Matilda and Emmeline Salt, a couple tragically separated by religious persecution Unlike many narratives about LGBT people, Rupetta does not try to justify that same-sex partnerships can motivate deep and passionate resistance to political and religious oppression. Sulway's story demands that truth from the reader.
This is something that I consider to be a key aspect of the LGBT renaissance in science fiction and fantasy currently well underway. Rather than treating LGBT people as a metaphorical object lesson, token or a symbol of contrasting difference, newer science fiction works position us as protagonists within settings and conflicts where many of our early 21st century concerns about civil rights and identity can be taken for granted or viewed as secondary to many of the "big ideas" that science fiction and fantasy handle so well. In the Rupettan world, heterosexism simply isn't one of the many battles that the characters need to fight. However the existence of various forms of love and devotion among the characters is the antithesis to the state religion dedicated to order and the search for immortality.
In short, Rupetta delivers what I want from LGBT focused science fiction and fantasy: works in which LGBT people act as protagonists in trying to figure out to be "big ideas" of conflict and setting. Having LGBT characters a minimal bar for me on SF&F recommendations these days. Rupetta succeeds because it has interesting things to say about history, religion, and non-human intelligence.