Ace Book Review: "Archivist Wasp" by Nicole Kornher-Stace

There was a certain agreeable novelty to having value attached to her actions. Not her actions as Archivist... but her actions performed through her choice, her risk, her boldness.

As a lover of sci-fi and fantasy, I constantly keep my eyes peeled for any type of world where I can find representation, only to be disappointed to discover that in worlds containing dragons and magic, or spaceships and androids, the only impossible creature is an asexual or aromantic character. Such has been my fate for a while now, reaching back to my teen years, in which I found myself constantly disappointed by my favorite genre. So, as I began making a list of books to read for this blog and discovered the existence of 2015’s Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace, my inner teen still desperately searching for a good non-romantic/non-sexual book to read vibrated with excitement.

Archivist Wasp is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel set in a far-future world where ghosts roam the landscape. Their existence is documented, studied, and kept in check by the Archivist, a position held by a young woman who acts as the emissary of a goddess known as Catchkeep. The main character, Wasp, is the most recent Archivist and, although she shares this “sacred duty” with four-hundred years worth of predecessors, right away we see that she is different.

As the book starts, we see Wasp fighting for her life in a kill-or-be-killed battle to keep her title – the same type of battle she herself won against the previous Archivist years before. Neither Wasp nor the young women she’s had to fight and kill chose this way of life; rather, they are said to be marked by Catchkeep for service. But Wasp has had enough. As the battle ends with Wasp as the clear victor, rather than kill her opponent, she spares the girl, and in doing so shows her character to us as the readers. But more than that, this one action unwittingly sets up the beginning ripples of the long journey she will undertake to discover the secrets that lurk behind the society she lives in and the secrets of her own past.

In Wasp, we see a character who is on the brink, desperate to get out of a system she never wanted to be a part of in the first place, but unable to do so in spite of her best attempts. She is a rebel, dissenting in the only ways she can, whenever she can; but too often her plans seem to crumble around her (something that’s well-highlighted when it’s discovered that the opponent she spared in the arena died of her wounds regardless). We learn that Wasp has often tried to escape only to be captured and sent back to her life of service, much like the ghosts she herself is tasked with catching and studying.

If you’ve read my other posts on this blog (my post about the spirit of compassion Cole, for instance) you know I have a habit of comparing myself to ghosts. Wasp too feels a kinship with the ghost “specimens” she encounters, thinking on more than one occasion that they remind her of herself. She is determined to conduct herself in a manner that respects their existence because, quote, “If she was going to treat the dead the way the living treated her, she’d be no different from everything she was trying to escape.” Like the ghosts, too numerous to truly rout, she is tolerated by the people, taken care of only because she is feared. As the Archivist, she lives in isolation and survives thanks to the offerings that people give her out of a sense of holy obligation, an arrangement that makes her “indebted to people’s tolerance.”

Although my own life is comfortable and safe and I’ve never had to experience the types of horrible trials that Wasp does, I can nevertheless draw parallels between her feelings and my own. I too sometimes feel barely tolerated, pushed away from the rest of the “normal” people to be treated as an object of pity, revulsion, anger, or whatever else suits the needs of the world around me. The ghosts of Wasp’s world are likewise tolerated simply because no one knows what else to do and they are allowed to drift helplessly through a world they can’t truly exist in or else be trapped and studied and used.

Like them, Wasp is trapped in her world and her purpose… until she stumbles upon the ghost of a long-dead supersoldier, the most powerful ghost she has ever encountered. The ghost wants her help to find another ghost and agrees to give her a valuable device he carries, a device so powerful that Wasp is convinced she can barter it for her freedom. What follows is a dark, almost twisted Alice In Wonderland-esque journey through the haunting landscape of the ghost-world, told in beautiful and brutal detail, unfolding like a mystery with worldbuilding sprinkled throughout. It is a journey that begins when Wasp becomes a quasi-ghost herself, entering a sort of in between state in order to enter the ghost-world, and begins uncovering truths of all kinds.

The world has been in ruins for so long that no one remembers the world before – no one living, at least – and the things Wasp uncovers shake her to her core. As the journey progresses, she slowly begins stripping off the parts of herself that her society has placed on her until she is left with a more genuine authentic sense of self than she’s ever had. It’s a journey that hits home on a number of levels; as someone who has likewise needed to strip off what the world has placed on top of me, I can definitely feel the aspec parallels in Wasp’s personal journey.

While the last book I reviewed starred a canonically asexual character whose orientation made up the backbone of the story, Archivist Wasp and its titular protagonist are examples of “Word of God” representation. In response to a reader question on GoodReads inquiring whether Wasp is aromantic or asexual, author Nicole Kornher-Stace replied, “Due to her upbringing there is a lot of vocabulary Wasp just doesn’t have – about herself, about her world, about other people in it – and the words ‘aromantic’ and ‘asexual’ don’t appear in the text as such. That said, romance and sex never once cross her mind.” Kornher-Stace also goes on to say, “there is not sex or romance of any kind in ANY relationship” in the book and asserts that all the relationships that form the backbone of the story are strong platonic friendships.

Now, forgive me while I commit a book review sin and compare this book to a mainstream hit – in this case, the 2008 sensation The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins – but I promise it will be relevant. Like many people, I discovered and devoured The Hunger Games trilogy in my teen years, delighting in Katniss Everdeen as a nuanced and complex female protagonist. However, if you read my aromantic post, you know that I went through a long period when I was a teen where I tended to dislike and avoid anything that featured a romance. I discovered The Hunger Games at the height of that period and thus it was a miracle I read the books at all.

Despite making this exception (and the fact that I do genuinely like both characters), the romance between Katniss and Peeta has always been one of my least favorite elements of the trilogy and I find the ending of Katniss’s story arc somewhat unsatisfying because of this. Although I have learned to appreciate the value of a well-told romance far more nowadays than I did then, I still have trouble fully embracing the Katniss/Peeta dynamic and often find myself wondering what The Hunger Games would look like without the love story.

Although the two stories are very different, I find that desire is completely satisfied by Archivist Wasp. I still love The Hunger Games and appreciate Katniss as a character, of course, but in many ways I am more drawn to Wasp and her story, which makes it a little disquieting to imagine that this book almost didn’t get off the ground. In an interview, the author revealed that she struggled to get the book published because, while publishers liked the story, they claimed the lack of romance meant there was nothing for YA audiences to relate to. While I am not surprised to discover that the book was almost not published because of the lack of romance, it still makes me want to sigh for approximately a hundred years. Not only is the notion that teen audiences can only relate to romance completely cringey and insulting to those audiences, but claiming that readers will find nothing relatable in Wasp is just wrong. The sense of desperation and confusion about her place in the world is something I think readers of all ages and backgrounds can find relatable, an idea that becomes even more pronounced for those of us on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrums.

Furthermore, both of the strong platonic relationships mentioned before in the author’s quote are excellent and make the idea of romance completely unnecessary. The first core friendship of the book involves Wasp and the supersoldier’s ghost; the second involves that ghost and his long-dead partner, another supersoldier by the name of Catherine Foster. As a complete sucker for platonic male-female friendships – especially those involving military colleagues – I found myself completely invested in these relationships. In the case of the ghost and Foster, the two of them have been relying on and protecting each other since the brutal childhood program called Latchkey that made them supersoldiers in the first place. In the case of the ghost and Wasp, Wasp comes to see him as the only ally she’s ever had and eventually as something resembling her first and only friend.

In my post discussing the “Asexuality & Aromanticism = Frigid/Emotionally Stunted” trope, I mentioned that it is quite common for characters who are portrayed as loners to be portrayed as sad, freakish, incomplete individuals. Wasp is not portrayed that way at all. The book makes it very clear that her isolation and stoic nature come with her station. She is neither the top of the food chain (that role goes to the Catchkeep-Priest, who is forced to respect Wasp as Archivist but never ceases to make her life torture), nor the bottom of it (like the young initiates, called upstarts, that she is forced to fight in order to continue being Archivist); as such, it is impossible for her to truly trust anyone or form any real friendships.

But just because Wasp is a stoic does not mean she is unemotional. On the contrary, she feels pity, she remembers kindness, she tries her best to be selfless even though it often times falls apart, and we see countless examples of her trying to help people when she can. From trying to spare the upstart in the arena on Archivist Choosing Day to agreeing to help the supersoldier find Foster in the first place, there are countless events in the book that make it clear Wasp feels deeply and is forced to keep it at bay. The problem is not with Wasp at all, but rather with the society she lives in, which has set her up in a system where she must harden herself to survive.

Another thing I find interesting is that none of this means Wasp yearns for human contact, per se. The things she longs for primarily are freedom, a better life, and someone who will perhaps understand her. As someone who often feels like the fight to be understood is an uphill battle and has had to try to unlearn the impulse to drift through life unseen and unheard, I can understand Wasp’s yearning. And what’s more, it is refreshing to find a character who has this yearning and does not have it met through romance. Rather, she finds her sense of kinship among the ghosts and her sense of purpose in herself. Some of my favorite moments in the book involved Wasp seeing elements of herself in Foster – another woman who was told she was special, hardened for a purpose, and still tried to retain her humanity, all while watching her efforts blow up in her face.

SPOILER WARNING!

In fact, Foster herself is a character that has some interesting aspec parallels. As the journey unfolds, Wasp uncovers memories of Foster’s life – including her final memory of being apprehended after trying to break free of the Latchkey operation and of the subsequent process she describes by saying “they said I was sick and that they fixed me.” Broken now and having lost most of herself, including the memories of her friend and partner, she says she feels as if they’ve made her into nothing. In spite of the fact that she no longer remembers her old partner, she thinks he seems “like her,” and feels like they were probably friends. It’s one of the last things she says to him and the thing that haunts him enough that he wants to try and find her and put things right, even after these many centuries. Wasp’s story and the story of the ghost and Foster have endless parallels that extend beyond just their shared similarities, but extend into the very mythos of the world of the novel. When analyzed from any lens, it’s tragic, but it becomes even more so when analyzed through an aspec lens.

In the end, with this discovery made and her bargain with the ghost fulfilled, Wasp returns to her own world, despite the heart-wrenching fact that she at times feels more comfortable in the ghost-world. This time, she does not try to escape, but returns to help build a new system where she and the upstarts get to be the masters of their own fate. I can’t even describe how much I love this ending, in which Wasp and the upstarts find purpose in their own work, discovering themselves and shedding the holy lie they had been fed for years. But I also love that it seems like Wasp hasn’t entirely forgotten the pull of the ghost-world and the kinship she felt for those who dwell there. The ghost and Foster even return to see her and offer to take her with them. She declines, but it’s clear she feels a pang, and she leaves the door open that maybe one day she’ll take them up on that offer, serving as the perfect bittersweet ending for Wasp’s frightening and formative journey.

END OF SPOILERS

Overall, the book is exceptionally well-written, and I found myself transported while reading it thanks to its intriguing worldbuilding and the engaging, almost mystery-esque way the plot unfolds. At its core, however, the book remains a dystopian thriller and does not shy away from its subject matter. There are atrocities in both Wasp’s time and in the time of the supersoldier that are not sugarcoated, but rather are shown as the disturbing realities they are; innocents, such as children and animals, are not spared from these things. There were definitely parts of the book that made me cringe or mental images I tried not to linger on for too long, but given I am extremely squeamish and I was able to get through the book, I think most people would be able to get through as well. (Just bear in mind that if blood, body horror, or other types of gore are major squicks or triggers for you, you may want to exercise caution.)

So, if you’re like me and you sometimes long for a little less sex or romance in your post-apocalyptic sci-fi (or you just are intrigued by a female ghost hunter surviving on her own merit), I highly recommend Archivist Wasp. While reading it and preparing this post, I also discovered it has a sequel, 2018’s Latchkey, which I will most likely read for the blog at some point in the future as well, since the author has confirmed there is no sex or romance in that book either. I look forward to revisiting these characters, to see the ways in which Wasp continues to grow and develop her true self, and I hope that maybe her journey can inspire other aromantic and/or asexual people to embark on their own personal journeys to do the same.