What I really love about the Archivist Wasp books by Nicole Kornher-Stace is the way that the genre mash-up is tied together by characters. The ghost is a supersoldier trained from birth, a character who resides in a science fiction story. Wasp/Isabel is a priestess-archivist who hunts ghosts and her world is a cultic, fantasy-tinged dystopian where the old order gave way to a new age of hauntings and constellation-gods. And they find each other on an underworld quest, a katabasis, a kind of story that calls back to Greek and Roman epics. They’re characters from two different genres who find each other in a third one, but they ultimately come together because I think they understand each other on some deep, personal level. They’ve both been raised in ruthless worlds and thrust into dehumanizing roles–supersoldier, archivist–that have attempted to strip them of their agency, their personhood, their identity, and even their names, but they fight back against that, uncovering their pasts and hope for a better future on their quest. Wasp/Isabel and the ghost originate from somewhat different genres, but they reach across the gap between them and clasp hands because they’ve been acting out the same story in different ways.
Alternately, I’ve described Archivist Wasp as “What if you put Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Mad Max: Fury Road, and a platonic version of Hadestown into a blender and it works because the real magic is the friends we made along the way” and I still stand by that.
