This novella details an exchange of stories investigating colonization, freedom of migration, surveillance, human agency, and generational identity. It marinates in tragedy, sorrow, and injustice, but never in a way that feels voyeuristic or nihilistic. Instead, the text seems constantly in a search for meaning, and its protagonists driven by hopes abstract and tangible, impossibly distant and just within reach. As a reader, I too felt hope in the fragmentary beauty laid out before me, knowing that each segment was only a part of a larger story and that acceptance, love, and sight were all possible in those characters’ untold futures.
S. Qiouyi Lu demonstrates an unusual capacity for describing strange concepts with stunning clarity and beauty. Characters have weight and texture. East Asian culture provides much of the basis for the setting, but without the fetishizing lens of the colonizer coloring the world with stereotype and caricature as happens all too often in English language speculative fiction. The ending achieves the rare accomplishment of leveling me with a sentence; it does so twice in the final page. In achieving all of this, In the Watchful City reminds me why I read genre fiction and inspires me to continue writing it.
Content warning: suicide, mutilation, violence, sexual content
Plot: 7
Characters: 7
Themes: 10
Prose: 10
Overall score: one hundred mementos.
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