2025 book bingo: #3, fantasy, "In the Lives of Puppets" (2024)

[dorinda]

Book 3 for 2025 book bingo: "In the Lives of Puppets” (2024), by TJ Klune.


I chose this for the “Fantasy” square—it has the stage dressing of a far-post-apocalyptic US, with AI/robots and so forth, but it markets itself as a fantasy, and that’s much more its vibe. One of its blurbs calls it “Inspired by Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, and like Swiss Family Robinson meets Wall-E”. That all comes across spot-on, and I would definitely add The Wizard of Oz, plus the Fallout video games.

It's the story of a young human, Victor, who lives in the forest of “Ory-gone” with his robot father Gio, and two robot companions Victor scavenged and repaired from the giant scrap heaps. The robot companions are a lot of the comic relief: one is Rambo, an anxious and childlike Roomba vacuum; one is Nurse Ratched, a big rectangular health care robot, who issues a lot of deadpan violent threats (especially to Rambo) a la GladOS from the Portal videogames. The inciting incident is Vic uncovering an unfamiliar masculine-humanoid robot in a scrap heap and bringing him home to repair, naming him Hap. Hap’s secret past ends up disrupting the safe forest haven, and they all have to go on a journey of rescue, discovery, and memory.

I wish I had enjoyed this book more! I really am in the mood for gentleness, working together, loving and helping one another, etc. And this book is primo Found Family from the get-go—conflict comes from the outside and from the past, while the group all tries their best to survive together and protect each other and all that good stuff. I liked the fairy-taleish touch to the sci-fi, with Vic repairing/creating robot power sources with elegantly shaped wood and setting them working with a drop of blood; it had some lovely imagery. I liked the depth and warmth of the father-son dynamic between Gio and Vic; I liked the Rambo & Nurse Ratched banter at first, although it’s so largely one-note that it did get tiring before the end.

But what I really missed was any actual characterization to the central pair (who become a pairing), Vic and Hap (Hap especially). I like a well done romance! But I didn’t enjoy this one, sadly. They don’t change from the start to the end, so there’s no motion to their dynamic, what should be a mutual discovery and coming-together. If this were fanfic, I might be bringing my own knowledge of the characters and pairing with me, but as it is, the book needs to construct it for me or give me the material to do so, and it doesn’t.

Hap in particular—he starts out as, and remains, a stereotype of a tall-dark-and-grumpy love interest, always surly and scowling (the word scowl is used SO MUCH in conjunction with Hap throughout the book that I was allergic by the end), while occasionally displaying a desperate (surly, scowling) desire to protect Vic. Vic is fascinated by Hap and physically flustered by closeness to him; Hap’s protectiveness makes him squirm and blush. Rinse and repeat. Eventually they kiss.

As someone who’s written fanfic of human/robot ships, this book could have been right up my alley! But it doesn’t seem to engage with free will at all, the question of AI and consent, robot subjectivity, etc. In fact, Hap’s only character note, protect Victor, is actually given to him explicitly very early on in the book by Gio! So how much am I supposed to understand Hap’s protectiveness as part of a personality and a harbinger of loving emotions, the way Vic reads it? The book doesn’t help me out there.

It has some classic tropes, especially “there was only one [confined space] and they have to snuggle in it” (a crate, a bed). But even though I do love me a trope, I wasn’t enjoying them here, which is disappointing. I wanted some of this unpacked, I guess… I wanted the characters to unfold and blossom, I wanted their interactions to become more complex thus making their connection more layered. But as with the sidekick robots, it just hits the same note over and over.


This book Wasn’t For Me in the ways described above, but also in other very irritating ways, like the weird asexuality infodumps it kept doing. For instance, in a memory of Vic’s, he remembers how Nurse Ratched ‘said it wasn’t unheard of for people to identify as asexual , meaning those who were “ace” didn’t experience sexual attraction in the same way others did.’ The book does this sort of thing like five or six times.

And besides me really not thriving on Infodump Literature, I got frustrated with it narratively. Why do we care that Vic is asexual? If we do care, then why do we need to be told it in so many words six times? What if we learned about Vic’s sexuality from being inside his 3rd person POV, as he encounters Hap, who he has a lot of somatic responses to when their eyes meet or they touch or There Is Only One Crate? What does it mean to be asexual, when he's literally the only human in a world of machines, and the single youthful experience that this designation is apparently based on is him finding m/m porn in a book when he was 15, asking Nurse Ratched about it, and her giving him a long lecture about the topic with photos and videos—‘and by the time she was finished, Vic was sweating, confused, and—per Nurse Ratched—did not appear to be experiencing the feeling of arousal’.

Like—it just seems so strangely parochial and insistent about sexuality, and how its concept of asexuality exists as an external definitive a priori box that a person lives in. Rather than sexuality being something complicated, an ongoing experience expressed and understood in more nuanced ways. Is asexuality concretely diagnosed from being weirded out at one’s first sex-ed audiovisual lecture at age fifteen (never having met any other humans ever)? Why is “asexual” Victor having various physical responses to Hap—does the definitive “sexual” response absolutely require his dick to get hard? Why is he repeatedly moved to kiss Hap—is “sexual” carved off from kissing, is kissing its own definitive box that has no spectrum of sexuality? Why are we carving human experience down into so many small noncontiguous slivers, and once carved up small enough, what is left of sexuality except an imaginary Straw Man?

I was talking to the_shoshanna about how I’d compare this ham-handed characterizationless portrayal, to Mary Renault’s characterization of Alexander in Fire from Heaven especially (though it continues to develop in The Persian Boy as well). His sexuality is undeniably complicated, and inextricably woven in to all kinds of aspects of his character, from his family to his spirituality to his construction of self. It's important, and it’s never told to you as an assigned box--it’s a part of him, full of nuance, differing over time as he and his context change, and affecting others in various ways whose own experiences of sex and sexuality aren’t the same as his.

So if Vic’s sexuality is important, show me in the characterization. If it isn’t, then don’t worry about it. Weave him to life out of his words, thoughts, deeds, context--don’t just plonk a labeled box down over his head and be like WELP THERE YA GO. It really makes the book title ironic in unfortunate ways.

Comments

[marycrawford]

omg, wtf. "does not appear to be aroused while being lectured on gay sex by a nurse" - there's a reliable diagnosis for you. And I don't neeeeeed diagnoses in my fiction, sigh.

So if Vic’s sexuality is important, show me in the characterization. If it isn’t, then don’t worry about it. fistbump!

And yes, Mary Renault had her occasional lecturey moments but she also knew how to show so many things so subtly <3

[dorinda]

You know how I love her subtleties! Even the ones where I am like OKAY WAIT MAYBE TOO SUBTLE NOW, I HAVE VERY LITTLE IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON. :D

[sakana17]

Whoa. I liked reading your additional thoughts here which, wow, yes, are best not included on Tumblr, a space that appears to me to be vastly antithetical to nuanced sexuality.

Why are we carving human experience down into so many small noncontiguous slivers, and once carved up small enough, what is left of sexuality except an imaginary Straw Man?

Yes, this.

What sounds very frustrating to me is that a book could do a really interesting exploration into someone's sexuality as the only human in a world of robots and sentient machines, but this book went for ham-fisted infodumps instead.

And reminder no. 11000 to me that I need to read Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. They've been on my to-read list for, umm, decades.

[dorinda]

Yeah, it was such a darn shame. Like, imagine Vic having only seen other humans in the rare old human-created works of art (the family repeatedly watches an old Astaire/Rogers movie, and listens to some old music) and leftover pornography and so forth, and then he meets Hap and starts to fall in love with him, which itself will be new, and through his developing relationship with him, discovers what his sexuality vis-a-vis another person seems to be (which could still include a lack of sexual desire, if that's what the author sees--but we would get it through experience instead of infodump). There of course remains the inference that his asexuality could be merely a byproduct of being the only living human (and thus not ever having had any physical closeness or contact with another human, no pheromones, no biological baseline), which the author might not want to imply--BUT that's also an inference that remains possible in the book as it exists right now, it just skips over the whole issue after the infodump.

There could be some interesting questions to be answered, some even that Hap might worry about (if the narrative bothered to grant him more subjectivity and development of personality), along with the biology question--like, did you maybe fall in love with me purely because I am the only other human-styled creation you know, other than your robot adoptive father? And they could discover the answer together. In a satisfying romance of course the answer would be No, but then I'd need to see why Vic DID fall in love with him. I would love to know why--it's a question the existing book does not answer. Because he's tall strong and handsome, is all that's currently implied, and there's also Hap's protectiveness, although as I mentioned that might just come from Gio's command.

Anyway, harrumph.

I do recommend Mary Renault's historicals...she has her ups and downs, but overall I find that her work is really up my particular alley.