Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male is thoughtfully executed

Maggie Shen King’s look at a potential future for China, An Excess Male, unfolds beautifully and feels very grounded, making for a solid dystopian fiction.

Admittedly, I’m a bit biased in this review, because instead of having to try and discern authorial intent, I had the chance to ask about it! But even before talking to Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male came with the kind of concept that had me intrigued, because it’s (very purposefully) rooted in reality — and the saying is still that “truth is stranger than fiction,” isn’t it? 

Sometimes in science fiction, developments can seem almost too advanced for the year given, and though An Excess Male doesn’t specify how long its version of China has been operating the way it has, it’s so settled and ingrained that it’s not the central conflict. In my conversation with Shen King, she emphasized that this book is a “marriage tale” at the heart of it all, and that actually made the book make more sense.

There’s a lot to balance here, and perhaps almost too much to balance at points — four main characters means that An Excess Male doesn’t always have neatly intersecting plotlines, even though May-ling, Hann, XX, and Wei-guo are about to become one family. (You can see where the human element/wedding plot comes back into play, I’m sure.) And perhaps that’s not a bad thing. They’re supposed to be one unit, but there’s not a family out there that doesn’t disagree or keep things from one another, and it’s well done here.

Perhaps one thing I found that I would have liked more of was simply world-building. This was something that Shen King also mentioned as something she added in — so I suspect a second novel will make that a greater focus from the beginning. But then again, the book feels like it’s at a fine length, so … you see the dilemma here, I’m sure.

But for a first published novel, An Excess Male is pretty impressive. That might sound a little like a backhand compliment, but the way that things develop feels organic in the best way — it makes sense for things to go on as they do, and those tangled relationships tighten or loosen at just the right time for the plot to keep moving.

Next: A conversation with Maggie Shen King

Although An Excess Male isn’t our Book-Thirsty Thursday choice this week — that’s Iraq + 100 — a lot of why you should read that anthology also applies here, and though it didn’t leave me quite as shaken as Iraq + 100, An Excess Male still has me thinking and wrestling with the points it makes since I’ve read it, and that’s some high praise.