Where The Shadows Quiver Like the Static of Lightning Behind Clouds - A Review of Ai Jiang's "A Palace Near the Wind"
Look out Fantasy, there's a new rambunctious Lefty joining your ranks...
As I read Ai Jiang’s upcoming fantasy novella, A Palace Near the Wind, I was struck with an emotional realization, which I proceeded to impart to Ai because I’m a sap.
You see, Jiang’s Bram Stoker Award winning novella Linghun was the first book I reviewed as a bookseller. After a soul-crushing period of unpaid unemployment from Fall of 2022 until the Spring of 2023, Lahaska Bookshop brought me aboard, where I got to work with fellow horror-reader-in-crime, Peg Turley.
When I was being onboarded, Peg showed me a little stack of novellas sent to us by a new speculative fiction author and the marvelous indie press, Dark Matter LLC. I was immediately enraptured by Linghun’s cover, so I took a copy home and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ai Jiang is one of those authors who seems to come out of nowhere and forever alters how we view—and engage with—genre, as well as what we use said genres for. Linghun utilizes speculative futures to imagine ways in which capitalism and the housing market would continue to exploit the pain and desperation of grieving people and families. Her sci fi novelette I Am AI served similar purposes, highlighting the deteriorating world of tech to engage with never-ending debates surrounding bodily autonomy and transhumanisms. Jiang is a writer consistently concerned with utilizing her voice to speak for those who need their voices heard, while showing readers the power at our fingertips when it comes to molding genre to fit our activism.
Similar to contemporary Margaret Killjoy, whose 2024 foray into fantasy with The Sapling Cage featured themes of revolution, community, and mutual aid, while evoking the emotion of Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Jiang employs similar structure with A Palace Near the Wind. Now, no one should be surprised by any of these comments, given the long-standing history of political resistance through fantasy—Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and so many more. Yet, I evoke these names because so many of them have been lost to time; though in the case of Joanna Russ, this seems to be blessedly shifting.
Fantasy is a genre primed for tales of revolution. In fact, Joseph Campbell, our resident racist mythmaker, spent much of his life detailing the so-called “hero’s journey,” which we’ve seen utilized in just about every genre and Hollywood IP—yet we continue to learn the wrong lessons from them. My point is, fantasy is the perfect vehicle for these themes, and while many fall short due to their reliance on neoliberal forms of resistance and the military-industrial-complex, there are those who seek to utilize the genres revolutionary history to provide readers with lessons in true uprising and world-building. Jiang is one such writer.
Setting the Scene: A Brief Synopsis of A Palace Near the Wind
Before I go somersaulting into singing this novella’s praises, we should set the stage for what’s even going on. Our story centers around Liu Lufeng, a member of a race of tree-beings, also known as Wind Walkers for their ability to control and utilize the wind for their purposes. They live in their community of Feng, acting as stewards for the lush woods surrounding them. However, Liu’s peaceful existence in Feng is constantly tested by their human rulers who seek to build deeper into Feng as a means of building their empire. Sound familiar?
Through a tentative, though exploited peace treaty between Feng and the king, whose palace is not far from Feng’s borders and has already split up Liu’s family by means of marriage and service to their rulers. Again, sound familiar? Liu is currently the eldest member of her family, setting her up to next marry the king, but she has a plan. To save her youngest sibling Chuiliu from a similar fate, Liu plans to kill the king upon their wedding night, believing him to be responsible for the deaths/disappearances of her loved ones. However, upon her arrival into this strange, imperial world, Liu finds there is much to the history of her people, as well as how they came to be colonized, that has been kept from Liu her whole life, setting her up for a series of revelations serving to only stoke the flames of her revolutionary spirit.
“If the natural gods could hear me, I questioned why they would continue to make us sacrifice.” - How Colonialism is Perfectly Illustrated in Feng
For those keeping score at home, Feng’s plight rings incredibly familiar to activists, historians, and anyone with excellent pattern-recognition. Given this book itself is written by a Chinese-Canadian, the country has had its fair share of colonial ugliness throughout its history, but in the context of Jiang’s work, Canada’s treatment of Chinese immigrants is one particularly dark spot. Authors such as Hiromi Goto have explored the cultural schism apparent between generations growing up in Canada, but Jiang’s framing sets imperialism up against some of its most harmful tools: assimilation and destruction of nature.
Chinese immigrants have re-located to Canada for decades, whether fleeing war or looking for a different opportunity. Much like in the US, these people were searching for the ideal of freedom countries like America and Canada so loudly espouse, only to find extreme racist suppression and exploitation. Initially arriving around 1788 as artisans working at fur trading outposts in what we know as British Columbia. With the gold boom coming almost a hundred years later, immigration skyrocketed, and only 30 years later, Canada brought over 17,000 Chinese immigrants to help build and then maintain the Canadian Pacific Railway.
What did these immigrants receive in return? Well, aside from the violent and ego-annihilating racism they faced every day, in 1923 Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, otherwise referred to as the “Chinese Exclusion Act” due to its immense restrictions of who could immigrate from China. Narrow definitions of who was allowed in made it impossible for families to reunite with their loved ones. It would take 20 years before the Act was repealed in 1947, but naturally, much of the damage was already done. It simply wasn’t enough for the settlers. Why do I raise a lot of this history? Well because much of Chinese-Canadian struggle is present in the decolonial assertions made by A Palace Near the Wind.
This is the point where we’ll get a little into spoiler territory, so proceed with caution. Assimilation plays a massive part in the thematic framework of this imagined world. Once Liu makes it to the palace, it quickly becomes evident that not only is her family alive and not sacrificed, but some are even in the palace. In the beginning, the sacrifice is raised as something problematic, but has always been the way of the treaty, however, it appears this is less a sacrifice and more a devotion of fealty. Again and again, Liu questions why her people would choose this life, when their life in Feng was more communal and connected.
Empire will empire though, and it becomes clear even the texts written within the palace and distributed throughout the “kingdom” are reminiscent of the obfuscation of history appearing in most school textbooks. It quickly becomes clear there’s a utopic narrative being sold to her people as a means of control and exploitation. As Liu despairs:
“I wasn’t sure if this was how all textbooks were supposed to be, but the oral lessons passed onto us by Grandmother were nowhere near as informal as this. Descriptions of Gear and Engine felt far from the reality outside Mother’s window. And though Engine was vibrant with its colours and technology, I feared its development, the way it might grow, conquer, destroy.” pg. 128
and
“I’d thought the Land Wanderers wanted to convert us all. But no, what they wanted to do was steal all that made us who we were, use us, then toss us away.” pg. 134
Feng, of course, has rich resources rife for colonial expansion. Plus, with their unique physiologies, they’re additionally rife for experimentation. As history has shown us in horrific detail, oppressive regimes often deploy their cruelty through creativity, finding increasingly unconscionable ways to torture their victims. Even currently in Israel, the creativity with which they starve, assault, and denigrate Palestinian lives for their own perverse ends. Within the walls of the palace, the Land Wanderers are using Feng resources to not only turn members of Feng into an approximation of human, or, enhancing humanity through their access to Feng bodies and blood.
Yet, the most heartbreaking moment in the novella is when Liu is brought to her sisters who are running their own kingdoms within the empire and have completely assimilated, even going as far as sanding down their more Fengian appearances to appear more human. They’ve even anglicized their names, completely renouncing all that made them members of their homeland. Both siblings just about scoff and deride Liu for her concerns, seeking no familial warmth or solidarity with their kind. It’s likely the most devastating scene in the entire book because it so sinisterly encompasses the full breadth of how empire breaks down an erodes at its people.
“Some of the guards and builders were once our neighbors, distant family, friends, but settled on top og Travelers and the Ground Turners, they looked like strangers.” - Nature and Environmentalism as the Background for Magic
Within the fabric of Jiang’s fantasy world, each oppressed section of the kingdom are capable of engaging with an element—Feng can harness and bend wind, with others having control over water and land. It’s naturally the humans who are without any kind of magical ability, hence their desire/need to colonize these regions, stripping them of any sense of self so humans can then feel powerful and superior over them. It’s additionally why they’re so hell bent on experimenting on the colonized bodies, to harness their powers as they take everything away from them.
When Liu is first made to use a Traveler, which are large walking machines used to travel great distances, it feels completely unnatural to her. She can use the wind to travel, but due to human limitation, instead of finding non-militaristic solutions to their problems, they built large, imposing machines that cause more destruction than ease. In the face of biological difference, of their own insecurity within the so-called “racial hierarchy,” they must assert their own dominance, perching them atop the hierarchy they’ve established and constructed on their own.
Additionally, and in the tradition of Le Guin and Jiang’s own contemporaries, the author uses these connections to nature and folklore to make decidedly pointed statements regarding vegetarianism/veganism. Denizens of Feng are understandably stewards of the wildlife and plantlife surrounding them, so Liu has never considered consuming meat, as the animals are in a sense kin to her people. When she arrives at the palace, she’s horrified to learn the Land Wanderers not only consume meat, but very cruelly make sure to show they’re hunting the wildlife around Feng, proving their control extends further than she realized. To make matters worse, Liu is then forced to eat the meat, another form of forced assimilation and destruction of culture. Jiang makes no effort to detract from the truly skin-crawling descriptions of Liu’s experiences/feelings of eating and tasting the meat.
This aspect of the narrative calls to mind Aph Ko’s stellar Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out, a text seeking to reveal the white supremacist roots of meat consumption, as well as a rallying cry for a form of veganism not steeped in class exploitation and its own form of dehumanizing practices. Ko asserts that the statuses western and European cultures placed upon animals in turn led to white supremacists assigning the same designations to enslaved Africans, Indigenous communities, and further non-white communities as well. A large tenant of white supremacy is dehumanization, which Ko calls “Zoological Witchcraft,” itself theorized from writers Claire Jean Kim and James W. Perkinson, who saw whiteness and the ways we assert power over non-white peoples as its own form of witchcraft, as it obscures the truth of colonialism. Ko uses the film Get Out as a backdrop for this argument, detailing the symbols and practices of the Armitage family as their own form of literal witchcraft, despite their methods appearing rather clinical in nature, their practices of inserting white consciousness into Black bodies, plus Missy Armitage’s little hypnosis trick, prove to be more fantastical than one might expect.
It’s work such as Ko’s, and even those of Fariha Roisin, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, and many more, who show us the darker aspects of diets and diet cultures, as well as how food has been used as a colonial tool to assimilate and control populations. In context of A Palace Near the Wind, Liu’s forced-feeding of meat is precisely a tool to assert who is the dominant power between the Land Wanderers and Feng. Jiang even includes Liu’s own conflicted emotions, as after experiencing meat for the first time, her body seemingly “betrays” her by sickly craving the taste, therefore prompting further distress. Utilizing this framework is not often seen in much contemporary science fiction and fantasy, so featuring such blatant depictions of settler colonialism is immensely brave and important in a time when all forms of critiquing settler colonialism is silenced or deemed as “antisemitism.”
In Conclusion - Because Mama is tired and doesn’t have the energy to write an entire thesis, but wants you to read this masterpiece, please and thank you
No matter how much time passes, I never tire of seeing writers stand up for what they believe in, challenging the long-standing “rules” of storytelling, and bringing experience, mythology, and vital cultural context to conversations and stories believed to be immutable. I often struggle with publisher “for fans of” comparisons, as they most often completely miss the mark, but I will say there are two comparisons I find apt, as well as important to the larger revolutionary conversations we’ve had here. Titan Books likens A Palace Near the Wind to the work of Nghi Vo and Neon Yang, two of my favorite contemporary sci fi and fantasy authors, but what is most important is how both writers employ the type of liberation-minded, resilient, myth/folklore-rich, queer, and decolonial fantasy we need right now. Both challenge gender, hierarchy, empathy, and violence in ways that completely rewired my brain—especially Yang, whose Tensorate Series completely changed the way I think about gender.
I praise these comparisons because it shows how successful this framing within writing is. Vo has won awards for her landmark Singing Hills Cycle, presenting worlds where we can find different and more fulfilling, encompassing change. These histories and futures are possible if we give name and credence to what their authors are trying to tell us. It’s writers such as Vo, Yang, and Jiang who remind us of fantasy and sci fi’s liberationist roots, while also calling attention to tropes we’ve allowed to lead us away from liberatory ideology. What Jiang sets up in A Palace Near the Wind is a world where change is not only possible, but is actively fought for, detailing the transgressions of oppressors and how we can challenge them on our own footing.
Blending fantasy, science fiction, theory, and praxis, Jiang has achieved more in a novella than some of the “great men” in genre fiction have attempted in fourteen-book series’, each a thousand-plus pages. Imagination, and its immense power for change, is a bountiful resource throughout Ai Jiang’s career, books, and stories, showing us how accessible our dreams of a better future truly are.
My neverending love and appreciation to Ai and Titan Books for the early review copy, as well as Ai’s positively gorgeous art prints. A Palace Near the Wind will bless the world with its existence on 4/08/25!! READ IT AND WEEP!!
❤️❤️❤️