“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole. No finalists will be announced until Team Bookend Elves has read all of our books!
REVIEW
As Born to Rule the Storm is a time-travelling dystopian sci-fi with romantic elements that will have you rooting for its characters while feeling its depressingly contemporary themes in your bones. Baumer deftly incorporates an anti-war message in a way that feels honest, raw, and specific rather than cloying or preachy, interweaving a sophisticated perspective on human nature and our relationship to government with what to me read like a deeply-felt expression of contemporary anxiety and the burden of living with mental illness during turbulent times. While the novella is marketed as adult, I do feel like it will have cross-audience appeal with YA readers. The concepts and ideas Baumer is playing with are unquestionably dark, but I’ve never been someone who believes that teen audiences can’t handle rich, deep subject matter, and in fact, my experience has been that I was much better able to handle the rough stuff as a young adult than I am now that I’m middle-aged. Regardless of your age or your status as a YA or Adult reader, however, As Born to Rule the Storm is an important book that feels both relevant to the present moment, and which will simultaneously sweep you off your feet as you frenziedly turn the pages. Fans of The Hunger Games, Your Blood and Bones, and This is How You Lose the Time War should especially take a second look!
ABtRtS follows a conscripted soldier named Lottie as she struggles to use her time-travelling abilities to stop a simmering cold war from igniting and killing everyone she loves. Lottie and many of her fellow conscripts were specifically enlisted due to hereditary magical abilities that are passed on to living family members when one of them dies. Long ago, Lottie’s grandmother and the ancestors of her colleagues essentially gave themselves over to the state in a desperate attempt to protect their country from destruction. As it’s turned out, however, the governments of both warring nations are just as corrupt as each other and ultimately care little for lives on the ground. Lottie remains loyal to her government out of self-preservation rather than any sense that her side are the good guys, and indeed, Baumer paints a very grey picture of both sides in the conflict. Of more immediate concern to Lottie are the human beings she loves and wants to protect, namely, her friend Min and her lover, Stephen. Lottie’s love for Stephen in particular was the beating heart of the story for me. I’m a hard sell on straight-passing romances (Baumer is a queer author and therefore I consider this a queer book), but Stephen isn’t the bland, generic male love interest typical of dystopian, romance-adjacent books, nor is Lottie the generic dystopian heroine. Part of what adds to the depth of the characters is that Lottie feels much older than her young years, and in a sense, this is because she is older. Lottie’s time travelling ability/prescience works in a way that veils the story in grim tension. It isn’t just that Lottie can see the future; each time Lottie “returns” to the past/present with new information and insight it’s because she’s lived out a possible future in which she (and usually everyone she cares about) dies. Every life lived contributes to Lottie’s knowledge and her trauma, and if that wasn’t enough for stakes, she also loses years from her lifespan when she uses her ability. Lottie has seen Stephen, Min, and other, even closer family, die in any number of ways, and the story is quick to make it clear that each of these aborted lifetimes was real. Lottie’s duty to her government and to the military is therefore enforced in part by her desire to keep those she cares for from harm. It’s this bleakness and forced loyalty that actually occasioned (in part) my comparison of the book to The Hunger Games. Much like Katniss, Lottie’s heroism is less glorious and more based on survival than is that of your typical fantasy hero.
It’s difficult to discuss some of ABtRtS‘s more nuanced, war-oriented themes without spoilers, but one thing that struck me early on in the novella and that I think carries throughout, is that Baumer perfectly captures what it feels like to live with anxiety (and in particular, to live with anxiety at a time when it feels like we’re on the precipice of world-ending events). Lottie’s ability to see and experience the future involves constant slippage between the reality she currently occupies and endless variations in which she witnesses Stephen’s death, Min’s death, and even the death of her mother in the past. In my experience, my own anxiety disorder often manifests in the form of envisioning worst case scenarios, many of which involve the deaths (sometimes worse) of people I care about. Speaking frankly, living in a moment when the worst things I can imagine seem no longer to be the fevered imaginings of an overactive threat-response, but genuine possibilities for the near-future, Lottie’s struggles and the toll taken on her mental health really spoke to me. This, along with Baumer’s wise choice to focus on a very small cast so that she had room to develop the characters within the short word count, made sure that I was deeply invested in the outcome of Lottie’s story. Its final thesis, that our governments and those with the money and power to influence them, don’t care at all about the rest of us, and that the solution to war-mongering must be radical in less obvious ways, is both needed and appreciated.
I will say, the first two or three chapters of the novella were harder for me to connect with because of the prose. The book undeniably starts with a bang, but I did find that the prose was initially a little precious and self-conscious in a way that hurt immersion and clarity. Sometimes, it felt as though surface-level beauty was being treated as more important than the content, with the effect that I was at first very worried the book would prove shallow but pretty (with some questionable grammar). This was anything but the case once I was past those initial few chapters. As the story progressed, I found that Baumer’s prose became more confident, marrying story with a graceful and measured style. If, like me, you find the first part of the story a little clunky, I would encourage you to read on. The prose is incredibly strong in the rest of the book, with an elegance and emotional weight that will have you unable to put it down.
Only two books into my semi-finalist reading and I’m already floored by the quality from both. If these two have been anything to go by, I’m in for a treat in terms of the rest of our assigned batch. On its own, As Born to Rule the Storm is a beautiful and insightful book that I can’t wait for more people to read just so that I have the selfish opportunity to gush about it with others. It’s the kind of ambitious, uncompromising work that I hoped to find as a judge in this competition, and that I’d love see get embraced by the indie community.
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