Review: The Wings Upon Her Back

The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know how many users of this site follow the Hugo Awards, but last year's ceremony in Chengdu, China, was a total clusterfuck. As a result, Samantha Mills, winner of the Hugo for Best Short Story for "Rabbit Test," disavowed her win.

Which is her right and her choice, of course. But I will say that I both nominated and voted for her story, and notwithstanding the backdoor shenanigans of the Hugo administrators, I think "Rabbit Test" would have been a worthy winner. All the strengths I saw in that story are on full display in this, her stunning first novel, which is one of the best books I have read so far this year.

It takes place in the city-state of Radezhda, where hundreds of years before, its people's gods existed in physical form, walked the earth, taught the city's inhabitants--and withdrew as abruptly as they had come, going to sleep in an interdimensional rift hovering above the city. There are hints that the five "gods" are actually aliens, interstellar travelers that have been abandoned on this planet and have retreated to their rest to await rescue. This is never determined for certain, and it ultimately doesn't matter, as it's not the theme of the story. The overriding theme, one among many, is the chaos the "gods" left in their wake: their human worshipers, traumatized by their abandonment, build up Radezhda as the centuries pass, adding story after story to the five towers (one for each of the gods): stories of stone, brick, wood and metal--representing the city's technological advancements--with the singular goal of reaching the rift and communing with their gods again.

Our focus is on the mecha god, and one of her worshipers, Winged Zemolai. Zemolai is called "winged" because she was modified to be just that: ports implanted in her body and spine to support and link her to a set of artificial metal wings, which enable her to fly and protect her city from external and internal threats. Zemolai has been serving the mecha god in this capacity for twenty-six years. As the story opens, she is returning to the mecha god's tower, Kemyana, from a month-long border patrol. She is dragged into a surprise inspection of one of the lower worker floors, looking for forbidden idols, which she finds. In an impulsive act of mercy, she frees the worker and scholar who has the banned idol. This one act sets the plot in motion, results in Zemolai's downfall, and remakes both our protagonist and world from the ground up.

There are so many layers to this story. It's a study of slowly encroaching fascism and how one charismatic person can manipulate both her sleeping "god" and the people around her to maintain the "order" she sees as solely responsible for the city's survival. This person is Mecha Vodaya, Zemolai's mentor, trainer, and tormentor. The two of them are bound together in a complicated relationship that the author explores thoroughly, through the fascinating technique of a dual storyline: present Zemolai and past Zenya, the young girl whose sole wish was to gain wings and fly. Zenya gets her wish, at a terrible cost, and we see the full depths of the price she has had to pay.

This book also examines the nature of devotion and worship, and what happens when said worshippers gradually realize their gods not only abandoned them, they never loved their people at all. This is told through "interludes" scattered throughout the story, showing the history of Radezhda:

If a city is a story, than ours was beautiful in its simplicity: they came to us, they loved us, they showed us how to live.

We defined ourselves by our gods!

And then our gods went to sleep.

The reader gradually realizes these "interludes" form the MacGuffin that drives the plot: the banned work of the heretical scholar Vikenzy, who wrote down a long treatise questioning the gods and the people's worship of them. Zemolai's brother finds Vikenzy's writings and spreads them among the city's lower classes, stirring up a rebellion and civil war that Vodaya and her Winged are fighting to put down, resorting to increasingly brutal methods. After the incident that opens the story, Zemolai is stripped of her wings and cast out, and falls in with a small group of rebels. This book is the story of Zemolai's disillusionment with all she has been and done, and her gradual deprogramming from the cult of the mecha god to a person who desires something different, both for herself and her people.

This is a mature, thoughtful work that definitely deserves the reader's time and contemplation on its ideas and themes. I have pieces of paper stuck throughout its pages, marking passages that stood out to me. It's also one of the few books I can say that as soon as I closed the back cover, I wanted to return to the beginning and start again, as there are so many nuances I felt a second read would make me understand better.

It's just fantastic. It's my hope that by trumpeting its excellence, Samantha Mills might get a chance at a second Hugo to make up for the one cruelly taken from her.

View all my reviews