Book Review: Her Voice is a Backwards Record by Ozy Brennan

Wow, first book review! I’ve kinda wanted to try out doing these for a while (I love talking about interesting books I read), and when I saw the notification in my RSS reader that Ozy had written a novella, and was interested in sending advance copies to blogs, I figured it was a perfect time!

So, disclaimer: I received my copy of this book early and for free, and while there was no specified expectation of a good review (and I imagine Ozy would be uncomfortable with there being one), it’s worth saying here that my review could be being at-all-affected by: vague social pressure, the positive feelings that go along with getting to read something early-and-for-free, and/or some level of want to impress or be nice to a person whose blog I read and like.

All that said, I asked them for an early copy, because I was already interested in reading the story, and if I have any want to impress them, it’d be because I like their writing, so you can probably consider this review to be fairly honest and reflective of my genuine reading experience.

Spoiler-Free Recommendation

Her Voice is a Backwards Record is a story about a teenage girl who’s stuck in a horrible “troubled teen” camp - enduring what is not generally legally considered torture in the United States at the moment, but absolutely fits any reasonable definition - who talks to her acausal alternate-universe girlfriend (herself trapped in an unenviable situation, at the lowest rungs of the Emperor’s harem in Space Imperial China) each night.

I’ve actually been thinking about acausal reasoning a lot recently, so this book was very well-timed for me. I’ll probably write more about that and some timeless decision theory stuff in another post in the (I hope) near-future, but for now I’ll say that any form of acausal “interaction” is less about acting on something else and more about what sort of person or entity your actions make you into.

The story’s concept of acausality revolves around Neil Sinhababu’s concept of Possible Girls, itself dependant on the concept of Modal Realism, under which theory all physically-possible worlds exist, but are fundamentally impossible-to-interact-with from our own world.

In Possible Girls, Sinhababu posits that, in a near-infinite multiverse of possible worlds, there must exist many worlds in which identical-or-compatible versions of Modal Realism have been invented, and in them girls who love hypothetical people from other worlds - and further that some of those hypothetical girls love some hypothetical person in another who is identical to you in every way.

It gets somewhat more complicated than that, but the idea is that, if you love someone in another hypothetical world, and they love you, then you are in a loving mutual relationship with them. The story (and to a lesser extent, the paper) further stipulates that if you specify a girl who is expecting to hear exactly the words you mean to say to her, and who is saying exactly the words you expect her to, then you can have conversations with that possible girl!

So, in Her Voice, the main character (Ana) is in a relationship with a possible girl (Yuya) in another world. Their lives are both difficult, but in different ways from eachother’s, which allows them each to function as an escape from the other’s otherwise-painful life. It’s dark, it’s painful, it’s adorable, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I was hoping it’d be.

If you like stories about extremely nerdy protagonists, incredibly traumatized lesbians, torture (but not the hot kind), extremely steamy acausal sex between two people who are technically not interacting at all, and/or escapism, you’ll definitely like this book. It’s my favorite type of ratfic, and I really enjoyed reading it.

It’s relatively short, at just under 20k words (on my phone’s e-reader that’s about 100 pages, but my phone is very small), and when it comes out on the 10th it’ll cost $2 (although you can preorder it now if you’re so-inclined), so it’s a very low-commitment read.

This story particularly reminded me of This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Nevada by Imogen Binnie, and (unsurprisingly¹) basically everything I’ve read by Greg Egan. If you read and liked those, you’ll probably enjoy this, and vice-versa.

I really liked it, and if you’re reading this blog, you probably will too.

If you want to preorder or buy it, you can find links to a large variety of sellers at the top of the author’s announcement post, but I would recommend reading the section below this before you do, just in case.

Content Warnings

This section contains mild spoilers, if that’s something that might bother you.

Ok, so I really like the book, but there are some things you should probably know before you read it, in case they’re things that’ll make you regret it:

• Troubled teen camps are awful, and the book doesn’t pull its punches describing multiple forms of outright torture.
• The book is about escapism, but it is definitely not, itself, escapism.
• There is at least one sex scene in the book. I liked it, but its not everyone’s thing, so your mileage may vary.
  • To be clear, given the aforementioned torture, there is no non-consensual sex in this story.
• It’s first-person and contains some altered-perspective/state-of-mind / cult-indoctrination-ish stuff. I don’t think that’s a thing that’s a problem for most people, but it can specifically be a problem for me, so I aught to mention it.
  • This wasn’t as much of a problem for me here as it usually is, but it’s still worth mentioning.

If none of those things are a problem for you, go check it out!

Spoiler-Containing Discussion

In Her Voice is a Backwards Record, Ana and Yuya use their relationship as a form of escapism from the troubles of their lives. However, escapism isn’t enough: Ana’s real life is slowly destroying her, and Yuya’s threatens to do the same to her. They have a fight, and stop talking to eachother for weeks. I really appreciate this about the story: Ana and Yuya can’t escape their realities with eachothers’ comfort, and while it helps them cope, it also lets them avoid difficult choices - until they stop letting eachother avoid those choices.

Another interesting thing about the escapism and acausal relationship in the story: While we learn a lot about both of their lives, and follow both characters through their struggles, the story’s point-of-view never strays from Ana’s head. We learn about Yuya’s struggles when she and Ana talk, but we never see Yuya’s world through her actual eyes.

I like this because it leaves the story open-ended on whether Yuya does exist: While Ana believes that all possible girls exist in their possible worlds, she cares a lot about those worlds and their girls actually being possible. It’s very easy, she says, to specify a world or girl who, while they might seem possible, isn’t actually. She tells us that she knows enough about physics to avoid the common pitfalls, and that she’s quite confident that Yuya exists, but we and the story don’t necessarily have to agree with her.

Maybe it’s fundamentally impossible for a world to exist in which one empire spans so much of the stars, maybe possible worlds just aren’t real in the way that Modal Realism postulates, or maybe there’s something else about Ana’s relationship that makes it in some way “not real”. Either way, Ana experiences the relationship, and it affects her life in the many ways it does in the story, so for her it’s as real as she says it is. I like that this means the story doesn’t at all require the reader to believe her or agree with her about the reality of her relationship in order to get exactly as much out of the story as if they do.

The entire time Ana is in the camp, she talks (to herself, Yuya, and others in her camp) about how “nobody cares about you” and “nobody will help you, unless it’s to get something from you or so you’ll leave them alone”, but the first person (a stranger) she meets after she escapes the camp immediately gives her food and water at cost to themselves, and is clearly very concerned for her.

I liked how this illustrates that, while under some circumstances, people may not be able to afford to care for one-another, when they can afford to do so, most will and do. Ana has developed and adopted a pessimistic worldview in order to cope with her circumstances, but it is not reflective of reality and it immediately shows itself to be false when she escapes her artificially-created and controlled environment.

Ana herself actually goes against this worldview at her camp: repeatedly helping a fellow camper, even when it costs her her own limited food. Her worldview exists to help her deal with her reality, but it does not accurately describe even that reality, and does not help her make good decisions, even within it.

This reminds me somewhat of something I heard about Nazi concentration camps: Some of the prisoners-cum-guards (“kapos”) would occasionally help the prisoners they were guarding². As I understand it, these guards aided their fellow prisoners more often than those who didn’t work as guards^{[citation needed]}. This is not because the prisoners who agreed to guard their fellows were somehow better people than those fellows, but because they had enough that they could afford to help them. When people have so little that they can’t afford to help eachother lest they starve, they’ll fight eachother for scraps - but when they have even just enough beyond that, many will immediately use some of that to help those they can.

The end of the book includes author’s notes and the sources for many of the ideas in the story, including information about troubled teen camps. I really appreciated Ozy taking the time to inform the reader that “no, the things depicted in the camp are not fictional, and all of them happen in real troubled-teen camps”. While the story is fictional, and Yuya’s world doesn’t (necessarily) exist, Ana’s world is exactly like ours, save for her existence and the existence of her specific camp.

Rationalist fiction (and that’s unambiguously what this is) that focuses more on personal struggles than on fixing the outside world is a rarer sort than the norm, and it’s a breath of fresh air that I definitely appreciate. Where much ratfic is larger-scale and focuses more on Mending That Which Has Been Made Wrong, Her Voice instead focuses on two girls’ struggle for survival, and not much wider than that scope.

While the world is broken and it’s right to want to mend it, for many people, the most they can do is to survive.

If you liked this post, please tell me! I’d also love to discuss things in the comments! This is a new sort of post for me, but it’s been a lot of fun, so if you want to see more of this sort of thing, be sure to let me know!