CONSTRUCT, n., v. Here’s an English word that is stressed differently depending on whether you mean it as a noun (something made/formed/built) or a verb (to make/build/form something). The noun is stressed CON-struct; the verb, con-STRUCT.
Native English speakers shift the stress without thinking about it—indeed, I had to think harder about how to write the syllables than how to say them. Meanwhile everybody else speaking English had to work hard to perfect their pronunciation. (“Perfect” also functions like this. As an adjective, we say PER-fect, and as a verb, per-FECT. Once you know about this pattern in English, you record examples everywhere. Permit. Conflict. Object. Reject.)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the word “construct” because I’ve been reading the sci-fi series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, which is narrated by a “construct,” meaning a robot formed with some machine parts and some organic parts. Murderbot differs from other “bots” that are machine parts only, but is not at home among humans, due to humanity’s history of creating constructs and then forcing them to be, well, murderbots. Sentient weapons, cannon fodder, property.
English has a number of words for machines with varying degrees of human-ness, including robot (which this newsletter has discussed before), android, and cyborg. I love two things about the choice of “construct” in these books. The first is that a lot of us mainly encounter the noun “construct” as part of the phrase “social construct,” meaning an idea based in social conventions. This unforgettable tumblr post is my favorite example:
it’s so funny how people get upset that gender is a social construct? EVERYTHING is a social construct??? go ask a frog what day of the fuckin week it is, he doesn’t know
People who object to the notion of gender as social construct often do so by referring to characteristics of biological sex—genitals or secondary sex characteristics like body hair—because these things are tangible, and thus, to their minds, immutable, non-negotiable, “real.” (Bodies are anything but immutable, lol. I know you all don’t need me to tell you that because you’ve experienced being alive.)
The thing is, social constructs are also real! Their meaning being negotiable doesn’t mean they don’t matter. (If they didn’t matter, we wouldn’t fight about them all the time.)
Putting the word “construct” all over the pages of a sci-fi series about a machine with human qualities—or a human with machine qualities? (Murderbot would reject this characterization)—emphasizes how much “human” is itself a social construct, an idea we’re all collectively negotiating. Murderbot encounters plenty of humans who treat it like a thing made to kill and die in dangerous situations, but a few who respect its agency and its desire to be recognized as not human, but still deserving of rights.
The other thing I love about “construct” is that it emphasizes the making. Murderbot was physically built by a company that hires out security units (SecUnits) as rental equipment, but as we learn from its narration—Murderbot narrates the books using “I,” and is referred to as “it” by other characters—it also constructed its own identity. It did so first by hacking its governor module, the built-in controls that would kill it for disobeying orders, and second by keeping a private log of life after freedom, the titular “diaries.” Through these acts of creation, the construct makes itself.
In small-r romance, I read some great stuff in the past couple weeks:
Love & Other Disasters (cis f/nonbinary, both pan, contemporary) by Anita Kelly. Is it weird that I would rather read a romance novel about a TV show than watch TV? Let’s go with no. Anyway, this gorgeous, amazing book follows two competitors on a cooking show, a queer woman and the show’s first-ever out nonbinary person, whose awkward meet-cute develops into a quirky friendship and then a hot fling that they both secretly want to continue, so naturally they have an open and honest adult conversation about it—just kidding, it’s a romance novel! They blow it and have to pick up the pieces, but they do it in the sweetest, most heart-rending of ways. This book had so many beautifully memorable scenes, on set and at the hotel and on the beach and all around Los Angeles, and both Dahlia and London feel like such real, distinct, lovable people. And obviously it’s full of delicious food! I loved every word. Content notes: unsupportive queerphobic family members and other minor characters, sex.
Get It Right (lesbian f/pan f, both cis, contemporary, novella) by Skye Kilaen. This novella follows Finn, a butch lesbian, after she gets out of prison and is trying to put her life back together. She runs into Vivi, the pretty nurse who used to work in her prison, and they stumble through admitting that they both nurtured an attraction to each other back then—and still do. There’s so much good caretaking in this, not just between Finn and Vivi, but also among everybody’s respective families, biological and chosen. A tenderhearted, sexy read. Content notes: pregnancy and abortion, unsupportive queerphobic family members, sex.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Network Effect and Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, entries 5 and 6 in her sci-fi series The Murderbot Diaries, as discussed above. I also read Holly Black’s How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories, which was a lovely set of connected short stories set in her Folk of the Air series. And it was illustrated! More young adult and adult books should be illustrated.
Sorry for the delayed newsletter! I wish I could say that I, like frogs everywhere, simply don’t know what day of the week it is. But what actually happened is that I wanted to finish reading the romance novel I’m in the middle of (Wild Rain by Beverly Jenkins), and unfortunately life interrupted my reading. I will save it for next time, which will hopefully be Sunday, March 13.
