Review: “In My Country” by Thomas Ha

I bounced off of this one, which is a magical realism political allegory that reminded me of the writing style of Gabriel García Márquez. I’ve known more than one booknerd who embraces that style but for me it evokes all the crappy twee poetry I read as a kid in the ‘70s, which I later realized was lesser writers trying to imitate people like Márquez, with a side sprinkling of hippie/beat poetic novelists like Richard Brautigan. 

In fact, one of the reasons I never quite embraced literary studies is my tendency to have strong opinions regarding writing. I’m the same way with music; there are songs I actively love and songs that slide through my head without catching on anything for mysterious reasons, and I find it difficult to engage with the kind of art that’s intended to be enjoyed by somebody else. 

I actually think that’s where media is headed, to a place where people have few common references. It has happened with science fiction. In the recent past, with publishing gatekept by the approved boffins, everyone was on the same page and it was quite possible to keep up with all the science fictional literary output for a given year, making it much easier for people to vote on Hugos. These days, we all have hundreds of channels to choose from and quite possibly celebrations of the general audience concept, like the Hugo Awards, are a relic from a brief historical interval in which the state of technological development compelled us all to read, watch, and listen to the same media. Sometimes I think the Sad Puppies thing a decade ago was one of those harbinger moments, where people realized the general audience is dead and what we have left are various subsubcultures fighting for market share. 

So in the new ecosystem, there are microbiomes for things like magical realism science fiction, twee beat poet inspired science fiction, mystery science fiction, and you can probably list twenty more off the top of your head. At that point, awards become more like tribalism, like the instance I wrote about, where I voted for a book not out of appreciation for the writing but because I wanted to compensate someone who had experienced impolite behavior from a different subfaction. 

The only honest thing for me to do when encountering art that I bounce off of, that comes from people infatuated with an art style that doesn’t move me, is to move along, and reserve my judgment for things that are sufficiently within my realm of experience where my opinions mean something more than “ugh, pizza, I was craving a cheeseburger.” 

So I am going to do that with Thomas Ha’s story. If you like politically infused magical realism, you’ll probably appreciate it more than I did. Here it is if you want to check it out.