Bergin, Virginia: Who Runs the World? (The XY)

As usual, I read books because I go conventions; this year, I went to WisCon and moderated a panel on the 2017 Tiptree Award and Honor List. The winner is Virgina Bergin’s Who Runs the World?, which will be published in the U.S. this November under the title The XY.

This is a very interesting book that is fundamentally not to my taste. I appreciated how hard it worked to avoid “all the men die” cliches, and its worldbuilding is very thoughtful. (For one thing, it acknowledges that “possessor of a Y chromosome” and “man” are not synonymous.) It has particularly nice intergenerational relationships, which are refreshing. I quibble with the authorial decision to elide all racial descriptions, because intersectionality exists and means that one can’t really focus just on gender; but I will handwave that those kinds of conflicts would have been worked out as part of the mass restructuring of society that took place well before the start of this book.

Unfortunately, the voice is just not for me; this is a YA book, with first-person narration, and, well, here’s the opening of the first chapter:

The hand is across my mouth before I can even scream, the other arm wrapped tight around me and my brain is exploding – instantly – with shock and horror and fear and anger and confusion CONFUSION CONFUSION because who would just ATTACK another person and –

‘Who’s with you? Huh?!’

The voice! Growling and sick and deep and broken and stinking.

MAN
MEN
MURDER
GUNS
WAR
KILL

Every strange and scary thing I’ve ever half heard said about XYs comes bursting into my head, but it cannot be. It cannot be.

I am too old for that narration, and generally for a whole book of a fourteen-year-old discovering that gender is a thing that exists and is socially constructed. As a result, I think it ends just as it’s getting interesting, but I admit that the next things would have been extremely difficult and possibly an entirely different book.

If the description at the Tiptree Award website sounds interesting to you, and the voice is not offputting, I do recommend checking it out.