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The Ascent to Godhood Ends the Acclaimed Tensorate Series on a Powerful, Personal Note
The Protector is dead. After decades of ruthless rule, the tyrant is no more. Millions struggle to process the passing of such an iconic figure, but for one woman, the loss is much more personal. She drowns her sorrows, drinking to lessen the pain of the death of someone dear to her. What does it matter that it was she who led a rebellion against the Protector? Does it matter that they became the bitterest of enemies, when they were once as close as two people can be? There is a history to be unpacked here, and Lady Han, the leader of the Machinist revolution, will tell you the whole thing—just buy her a damn drink first, won’t you?
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JY Yang returns one last time to the Protectorate for the final installment of the Tensorate novella series. Though the trappings of Asian-influenced epic fantasy as as present as ever, The Ascent to Godhood ends the series on a personal note: it is an intimate story of love, friendship, sorrow, and survival.
While the first two books of the Tensorate are told in a traditional third-person style, Yang switched things up with their third novella, The Descent of Monsters, which unfolded in epistolary format, via journals, records, investigation notes, and more. The Ascent to Godhood is another inventive departure: all of the details of this story are told from the very limited first-person narrative of Lady Han, while she is drunk and in mourning, speaking to an unnamed other who has asked her to share the tale. Though there are hints as to the interviewer’s identity—vague suggestions of how this stories interlaces with the others in the series—the novella belongs to Lady Han alone.
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The earlier novellas largely stand alone, fleshing out Yang’s fantasy world via stories told from the viewpoints of the youngest children of the Protector, or from that of an outsider, or even by one of the workers within the machinery of the Protectorate. Through them all, the true feelings of the Protector have always remained mysterious. At times appearing cold, at others, quite brutal, the Protector has been an unknowable quantity throughout the Tensorate series. Through the eyes of Lady Han, we finally learn of who the Protector was before taking on the mantle—what made her the ruthless, calculating, and dangerous ruler we came to know in the previous books. Yang also threads through her story the origins of the Protectorate itself, revealing how the land itself changed along with the people ruling it, and explores the story of Lady Han herself: a young girl born on the outskirts of the world, sold like a commodity into a strange and secret world of royalty and espionage. Han’s world changes when she meets the woman who would grow to be the Protector. The roles they play in each other’s lives set the stage for revolution.
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Yang’s prose weaves sorrow into every page, never letting the reader forget the narrator is in great pain; every moment recounted is another in which Lady Han misses awoman she loved with all her heart. The story is wound tight, never lingering too long on a single moment, suggesting recollection is a painful act for Lady Han, whose relationship with the Protector is striated with veins of privilege, power, and emotion. As Lady Han recounts their love, the struggles they endured, and the final injustices that split them apart, we discover the seeds of a revolution within a deeply personal tragedy. The choices we make determine who we are and how others see us; some loves cannot stand up to the choices those involved feel they have to make. It is this inevitability that sets the Protector and Lady Han down their respective roads, and knowing where they are going to end up doesn’t make their journeys any less painful.
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The Ascent to Godhood brings a brilliant story cycle (the recipient of Hugo and Nebula award nominations, among many others) to a powerful end, but not a final one. There is still magic and advancement in this world, and neither will slow due to the death of a monarch. There are still struggles on both sides, and neither will pause for the changing of a guard. There is still love and loss; neither stop for a woman drinking herself into oblivion over her own grief. There is still a Protectorate, and there is a new Protector, and neither will mourn for long, because power doesn’t stop for anything. But in this moment, this night at a bar, a woman remembers the one she loved. The least we can do is stop for a moment, and hear her story.