In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu

Published by Tor.com on August 31, 2021

The Gleaming, like the Force from Star Wars, is a connective energy shared by all living beings, although only a few have the ability to access its power. Anima, a node in the city of Ora, has that ability. Ær job (æ being the pronoun that Anima uses to describe ærself) is to watch over Ora and protect its inhabitants, a job made possible by ær ability to (1) access the Gleaming, and (2) transfer her consciousness to animals and control their movements while æ inhabits their bodies.

Anima’s ability to body-hop might make her a valuable protector if she kept a gorilla handy, but she’s usually jumping into birds and lizards, critters that contribute little value to a rescue. Anima is frustrated when she tries to prevent a suicide by drowning and learns that it isn’t easy to herd a school of fish. A node named Enigma needs to remind her that she can’t protect everyone and that her real duty is to “create a society that provides for its citizens . . . where no one is invisible, where we can meet the needs of every one of our people” by “protecting our sovereignty.” Just how hopping into dogs and frogs might accomplish that lofty goal is unclear. It seems very much like an excuse to maintain a surveillance state, but the purpose of surveillance is equally obscure.

Anima is a node in Ora, a city on a world with squirrels and geckos that might be Earth but for its two suns and the Skylands. Nodes can “fold the Gleaming” and thus look through the eyes of anyone who is infused with the Gleaming, but only nodes in the inner sanctum can body jump. While Anima is jumping among animals, her body rests in an amniotic bath that apparently moisturizes her skin. Anima’s jurisdiction as a protector of Ora ends at the “aerospace border” that separates Ora from the Skylands above. Like much of the novel, the Skylands are too underdeveloped to add anything but question marks to the story.

A visitor named Vessel escapes Anima’s notice, a feat that should be impossible, when he enters Ora with a collection of mementos. Each memento comes with a story. Vessel relates some of those stories to Anima. A fish scale, for example, leads to a story about a woman’s moral dilemma as she decides whether her personal comfort should be derived from the exploitation of mermaids. A cup inspires that story of an athletic competition that sparks a riot. A marionette controller leads to the story of a man who tried to bring his dead brother back to life. The stories, each complete with a teaching moment, are more interesting than the novel that surrounds them.

Vessel wants a memento from Anima, but she attaches a condition to her willingness to part with it. Like so much else in the novel, Vessel’s reason for needing Anima’s memento to complete his collection is unexplained. Anima’s decision concerning her contribution of a memento is the story’s final dramatic moment, but it is underwhelming. What will Anima do? is a less important question than Do I care? S. Qiouyi Lu’s enviable prose stye fails to overcome the story’s failure to amount to much, but some of the internal stories are worth reading for their standalone value.

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