enne📚's status - The Library of the Uncommons

enne📚 reviewed Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

Welcome to Tiankawi – shining pearl of human civilization and a safe haven for those …

Fathomfolk

4 stars

Fathomfolk is the first book in a fantasy politics duology, set in a partially flooded city where humans and magical sea creatures called fathomfolk (sirens and sea witches and kelpies) try to live together in the city of Tiankawi. It's a story about rebellion, power dynamics, and exploitation.

I quite enjoyed all the various perspectives in this book. There's Mira the half-siren captain of the guard, who is trying to make it in the human world but gets disdained as the airquotes diversity candidate. There's Nami the rebellious dragon child who gets exiled to Tiankawi and gets caught up in the currents of rebellion there. Finally, there's Cordelia the sea witch who is mostly out for herself, making bargains and pulling strings.

The ending sets up quite a bit for the final book in terms of large scale changes and future plot hooks that will need to be dealt with, …

The ending sets up quite a bit for the final book in terms of large scale changes and future plot hooks that will need to be dealt with, and I'm very curious to see how everything will shake out.

I have some more spoilerly rambling thoughts in this post.

enne📚 replied to enne📚's status

Content warning major spoilers for Fathomfolk

I did appreciate the capitalist bent on Omelas here. (How many Omelas stories have I read in the past year? It seems like a lot.) However, it's not just that that the city is powered by extracting fathomfolk magic, it's that fathomfolk are in such dire straits that they airquotes choose to go have their magic extracted because it's the best option they have available to them for survival.

I will also say that this is an interesting book to set against Babel, both in terms of what perspectives it centers and who it blames. One reason for this is that it feels like it focuses on Drawbacks more directly. We see Ministers and the Council, but largely at social events from the perspective of Cordelia, rather than making decisions directly. The plans of the Drawbacks are foregrounded but the Council just feels like a fixture that exists in the background where we see little of their decisions directly. To me, this makes the book feel like its loudest critique is of direct violence, and it takes a harsher view of the Drawbacks' retributional hatred than it does the more structural (economic, environmental) violence of humanity. I think that's true even if you ignore Lynnette's genocidal actions at the end.

Minorly, and perhaps this is just me, but I found that I could easily suspend my disbelief that this world is populated by fantasy sea creatures that can also interbreed with humans; however, something about drinking out of glasses inside an underwater bar was too much for me to handle. Most of the story takes place out of water, and so this sort of thing didn't happen too often, but it still caught me off guard. I might be judging too early--maybe this detail will pay off with some future revelation that fathomfolk were once human and that's why they don't have an alien sea culture that's distinct from humanity.

My final thought is that I'm not sure what to think about the ending. As a fantasy twist to transform humanity to save them, I think it's cool. As a way to end discrimination and hatred, I'm much more suspect especially in a realm that talks so strongly about fathomfolk hierarchy. I hope the next book will get into this a lot more, as surely there will be a lot of fallout from these changes.