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WoGF Review: The Etched City by K. J. Bishop
Stephanie (Rhetori_Cat), became a fan of science fiction and fantasy when she convinced her dad to hand over his copy of Ender’s Game by creepily reading over his shoulder until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Since then, she’s turned her love into a research interest as she works on her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition (don’t worry, nobody knows what that means). Her blog, Speculative Rhetoric, focuses on the relationships between speculative fiction and theories of gender, language, communication, and rhetoric.
Magic and Metaporphosis
K. J. Bishop‘s first novel, The Etched City, appeared in 2003 and is her only novel to date. I had read a couple of her short stories, most notably “The Art of Dying” from the Vandermeer’s The New Weird anthology, so I was somewhat prepared for Bishop’s world of gunslingers and duelists, artists and prostitutes. At the same time, The Etched City is a novel that I can’t get out of my head and that I have trouble explaining to others when I try.
The Plot: After years of fighting a military dictator, former compatriots Raule and Gwynn leave the desert for the exotic city of Ashamoil. There Raule is shunned from the school of doctors despite her extensive knowledge of field medicine and instead takes a post in a religious hospital in one of the poorest districts of the city. Gwynn takes work as a hired gun for a slave trader, to Raule’s disgust. As Raule and Gwynn see each other more and more rarely, Gwynn begins an affair with a young artist named Beth, and at this point, the novel starts getting weird; Gwynn’s work situation becomes increasingly unstable as his girlfriend’s mental state appears to be deteriorating as well (at one point he goes to her house to find her with a bunch of strangers sewing together different parts of dead animals to create chimeric creatures). Beth eventually leaves the city, and shortly thereafter, Gwynn and Raule both decide to do the same, though separately.
