Last week, while revising Last First Snow, I experienced what I tend to think of as a stepladder (or dim) epiphany, after the great line in Snow Crash:

[Hiro] finally went through a belated, dimwitted epiphany, not a brilliant light shining down from heaven, more like the glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a stepladder…

(Which line I just found in under a minute with reference to a physical copy of a book I haven’t read since China, so score one for codices and the human brain’s contextual search function.  But that’s another essay.)  Some days I wonder whether these kind of stepladder epiphanies aren’t the only kind—that truth, when or if it dawns, does so in the form of statements so basic it’s almost impossible to convey their depth or significance to anyone but the recipient.  So of course I’m going to try here.  Hooray!  (Also very mild spoilers for Last First Snow, my next book, ahead, if you care.)

One central character in Last First Snow is a father trying to balance duty, family life, and religious obligation.  He’s concerned: the world’s changed since his childhood, and the models of fatherhood, husband-hood, and civic duty he inherited from his parents no longer seem valid.  He’s trying to be a good man, but he grapples with the meaning of both those words.

And I realized, amid copy edits, like ten drafts into this book, that this character’s story (or, much of this character’s story) was about gender.  He’s wrestling with questions of gender performance, social roles, moral inertia, and historical demand.  He’s trapped, or at the very least confronted, by gendered terms—father, husband, man, priest, hero, king.

I didn’t have to go back and insert this angle, to be clear.  This stuff was in the book all along.  It’s not the only aspect of his character, and he certainly wouldn’t discuss it in these terms.  But it’s there, inescapable, in the marrow of the story.  And this isn’t some weird insertion of my own.  This is core fantasy stuff.  I intended this particular character’s arc to be in direct conversation with a bunch of trad fantasy and literary fiction.  Which means all those are about gender, too.

As with all epiphanies, this one has many facets, and I’m regarding each in the light, slowly.  Many (most?) of you out there will probably read the above and think, “duh,” or some more eloquent variation on same.  Unfortunately, my ponderous pondering doesn’t lead to a nice snappy sum-up.  If you’re the kind of person who seeks morals in blog posts, here are a few:

· Books are big and complicated and sometimes you don’t realize what you’re writing until long after you’ve written, no matter how much outlining or scheming you perform in advance.

· Gender structures are part of that enormous field of karmic interaction we inherit and manage / mitigate / destroy / maintain / subvert / transcend-through-awareness-of-suffering-&-codependent-origination (choose all that apply or add your own); they operate on deep levels.

· Lots of traditional fictional / literary quandaries are much more gendered than they may appear at first unreflective read.  Or at tenth reflective read for that matter.  (Sorry, Shakespeare nerd here, so these next few parentheticals will go really fast.) (To what extent does, say, Prince Hal’s strategy in Henry IV1&2 depend on the world of gender relationships and signifiers built in the play?  Hotspur is the best jock in Shakespeare’s jockiest environment, but/and that’s ultimately his weakness; Hal uses him as catspaw—yet Hal needs to figure out how to fake certain stereotypical forms of manliness in order to be an effective king.  And in this light it makes sense that so much of Hal’s character in Henry V is explicitly public, that he’s all speeches before armies, that the few times in HV we see him in private it’s like we’re seeing a warped, ruined thing, like Voldemort’s soul under that King’s Cross bench—that the degree to which Hal seems human at all in HV and not some kind of masterful broken puppet depends on the actors’ and directors’ ability & desire to sell the courtship scene b/w Hal and Katharine….)  (For that matter some of the greatest gender/power pondering in Shakespeare takes place in Othello—”not for all the world?“—which also features Iago, dark prince of Shakespeare’s clockwork men, contrasted with lover / dudebro / digital watch Cassio, and Othello himself, basically the most successful performer of manhood in the canon up to a point.)  (And then, Jesus, Macbeth and Lady Mac…) (Sorry, I need to go reread Shakespeare, I’ll be back in a bit.)

· Pace all the rest, that warped ruined thing under the King’s Cross bench is the single image from Harry Potter that stays with me on a gut-clenching personal level.  I don’t know what that says about me.  Nothing good, probably.

· Books never ‘just happen’ to be about, say, only men, or only women, or only genderless beings from Alpha Centauri.  Each option is a choice.  (Some choices may be so karmically conditioned, see above link, that we may not know they’re choices—they may seem to us like sight, or the absence of a choice.  The trolley problem is relevant here.)

· Did you know the trolley problem was first formulated by a woman, virtue ethicist Philippa Foot?

· Our choices have consequences—including the choice to stand by, and / or act in karmically conditioned fashions.  To the extent we are adults and awake, we seek to become aware of & live with the consequences of our choices.

· I’m really excited about this next book.

Housekeeping details: I updated the events page with my schedule for Arisia this weekend.  Also, Last First Snow got included along with a bunch of other excellent books in io9s Books to Watch 2015 Megalist.  And this year looks like it’ll be a killer one for books.  New Karen Lord! Zen Cho!(!!) Elizabeth Bear! China Mieville stories! Stephenson!  Ken Liu! Lagoon in the US with a worse cover than the UK edition but whatever! KSR! Y’all should watch out for Fran Wilde’s Updraft, also!  And Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which isn’t on the list but really should be.  And those are only the ones I know to be excited for.