There’s something unsettling about the one nonbinary character choosing not, or not being able, to talk for the vast majority of the story, and Elliot fits the easy mold of white, slim, short-haired nonbinary person. The result is a book that reflects the safety I feel when writing for WWAC and our sister site Sidequest: a comfort in knowing that here, at least, you are among peers and can let the pressure of being compared to the men melt away.Īll of this is not to say that the book is perfect, idyllic, or free of error or weird gender politics. But it’s that wordlessness I feel compelled to talk about: what Walden has accomplished with this five-hundred page brick of a book is the revolutionary act of rejecting a paradigm by simply refusing to acknowledge its existence. On a Sunbeam’s utter lack of men is so wordlessly effective I feel I’m doing Walden’s world a disservice by stating it explicitly. This is a story about people, and none of those people happen to be men. Elliot, one of the people on Mia’s construction crew, is nonbinary, and their pronouns are established immediately and decisively. The women in On a Sunbeam are purposefully women, and to be a woman is not the only option.
That’s not to say gender is irrelevant, though. Whether or not men exist in On a Sunbeam’s world is irrelevant, because even if they do, this story isn’t about them.
We don’t see any men, no one talks about them, and “he” is not a pronoun that comes up. She’s got two moms (and the only parents we ever hear about are also moms), and the construction crew she lands on after high school is made up of three women and a nonbinary twenty-something. All the students we meet in her school are also girls. Mia, the protagonist, starts out as a twitchy, frustrated teenage girl. On a Sunbeam is a glorious sci-fi adventure story in which the very concept of masculinity just isn’t important. And there isn’t a man in the whole story. People are more important than propriety, and family has very little to do with blood. The world is awash in rusty reds, sunny yellows, and dusky blues, and construction workers fly from world to world in spaceships that look like fish. In Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, kids go to school in giant floating buildings.
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