Marie Brennan's Blog, page 26

New Worlds: On the Hunt

Have you ever been hunting? This week the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to the sport of kings — which is also the feeding of hunter-gatherers, the hobby of modern people, and many other things. Comment over there!

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there’s room for one more . . .

As of today, you can read my flash story “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library” for free at Lightspeed Magazine! (And if you like what you find, you can buy issues or subscribe to the magazine.) There’s even an author spotlight to go with it, if you want a bit of a glimpse behind the scenes!

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New Worlds: Animals and Their Meaning

Do you like to think of a particular animal as representing you? The New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at animal symbolism — comment over there!

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all the news that’s fit to announce

I have several things for y’all today!

The big one is that Stage Two of my Onyx Court re-publication quest is complete, with a print edition of In Ashes Lie now available. (Stage One was, of course, Midnight Never Come; several more retailers links have been added to that page since its release, if you haven’t yet acquired it.) Stage Three (A Star Shall Fall) and Stage Four (With Fate Conspire) will follow in March and May, respectively, with a break in the middle there for New Worlds, Year Six, and then I’ll finally stop having eighteen balls in the air at once.

I’m also very happy to announce that my creepy folkloric story “Silver Necklace, Golden Ring” is now available to read for free on the Uncanny Magazine website. This is the piece that started off as a retelling of a particular folktale and wound up being a mishmash of five different influences headed in a direction I didn’t foresee until it happened.

And then finally, I also have a story out in Lightspeed! You can buy the issue (or subscribe to the magazine) to read “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library,”, which I believe is my first ever listicle-style flash story, and is definitely a nerdy love letter to the quirks and weirdnesses that library used to have.

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Books read, January 2023

Much of this month’s reading was All Japan, All the Time, as I got started on the draft of The Market of 100 Fortunes (my third Legend of the Five Rings novel). Some of that was direct research; some was just me getting my head back into the correct cultural gear; some was me figuring, well, I’ve got a bunch of Japan-related books that have been piling up on my lists, so why not use this as an impetus to read some of them.

Prince of the Godborn, Geraldine Harris.
Children of the Wind, Geraldine Harris.
The Dead Kingdom, Geraldine Harris.
The Seventh Gate, Geraldine Harris. Not Japan-related; reading these was kind of a present to myself before I really buckled down for a month of hard work. They got their own lengthy post, which I will not attempt to recap here.

Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868, Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. Gerald Groemer. I find it interesting that Groemer freely admits in the introduction that he’s not merely translating Nishiyama’s essays; he’s materially altered them to provide context or transitions or conclusions that an Anglophone reader might expect. Since he did so with Nishiyama’s approval and vetting, though, it’s all above-board. Meanwhile, the book itself is a collection of some of Nishiyama’s work, much of it written at a time when Edo-period culture was still being sneered at by Japanese literati as crass, cheap stuff compared to the glories of earlier eras. Since I’m viewing it all from a more modern perspective where of course such things are worthy objects of study — value judgments aside, how can you ignore the cultural products of such a new and thriving society as early modern urbanized Japan? — that part was a little eyebrow-raising, but the material itself was interesting.

Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period, Mary Elizabeth Barry. Same era of study, different era of studying. (Far more engaging on the level of the writing itself.) Barry’s very interested in the publishing boom of the Edo period and the mentality that had writers cataloguing and categorizing basically everything they could, and how this both was born from and contributed to the changing understanding of Japan and where people fit into it. Really interesting for getting a more commoner-level perspective on things, since as the period went along, rising affluence and the changing balance of economic power meant that townspeople developed their whole own culture — which is exactly why I wanted to read this book.

The Easy Life in Kamusari, Shion Mura, trans Juliet Winters Carpenter. A novel, for a change of pace! This reminded me of nothing so much as a kinder, gentler, Japanese counterpart to Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster. The narrator, Yuki, is less a delinquent and more just aimless enough that his family peremptorily packs him off for a year of working as a forester in rural Japan. He learns a lot about trees, and moons after a girl in town, and every so often magic wanders through and waves hi at the rest of the plot, and it’s all extremely cozy, even when death-defying stunts are involved. The title page said this is the first in the “Forest Series,” so I’m looking forward to more to come.

Shinto: The Way of the Gods: Introduction to the traditional religion of Japan, Vincent Miller. Dear god, this was not a well-written book. I don’t just mean I side-eyed the presentation of certain concepts — though that, too — but that on the level of organization, prose, grammar, and even formatting, it was an ongoing train wreck. I usually roll my eyes when people say “this didn’t get proofread” because I know what can slip past even diligent eyes . . . but when you have section headers and even the start of a new chapter sitting in ordinary type one blank line after the previous paragraph, when you have sentences like “Team is a collective noun, which is singular, so it needs singular verbs” and “(not uncommon is a double negative)”, then it looks a hell of a lot like somebody just poured the text into a PDF, complete with comments from the copy-editor they ignored, and sent the thing to print without a second glance. But this book does make liberal use of highly specific terminology (even if it doesn’t mark the long vowels, another decision I side-eye), which is useful to me in doing further research in other, less train-wrecky sources. That’s pretty much the only reason I’m keeping it.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Randall Munroe. Hey look, something not about Japan! This was actually a Christmas gift to my husband, and I suggested to him that it could live on the kitchen counter, because it’s the ideal sort of book for reading a few pages here and there while you’re making tea. Munroe is best known for the webcomic xkcd; here he puts that to use illustrating exactly what the subtitle says, very well-thought out answers that use math and physics and so forth to answer questions like “could we build a Lego bridge from New York to London?” and “if you call someone random up and say ‘God bless you,’ what are the odds that they’d just sneezed before answering the phone?” Many of the answers are hilarious, even while they’re describing how the scenario sketched by the questioner would result in the annihilation of all life on earth.

One caveat, though: the book was published in 2014, and there are two places where it unexpectedly stepped on pandemic-related buttons. One is the question of whether getting everybody to quarantine for a few weeks could eliminate the common cold (which leads Monroe to make some breezy estimates of how such a “pause” would affect the world), and the other is a footnote commenting on how a sudden increase in the human death rate would affect the answers he’s giving above. Neither is offensive or anything like that; they were just buckets of cold water poured over an otherwise entertaining experience.

Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life During the Age of the Shoguns, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis. I did not look closely enough when buying this book, and I didn’t realize it’s a textbook. As in, complete with sections for “Ask Yourself” and “Topics and Activities to Consider” and “Further Information,” including referrals to films and websites, for each chapter. (I skipped basically all of that in reading.) I’m really unclear who the intended audience for this is; mostly I assume that the sorts of people interested in primary documents from hundreds of years ago are not the sorts of people who need sidebars to helpfully explain what brocade is or gloss the word “missive” as “letter.” But who knows . . .

Anyway, primary documents! I am a nerd and honestly loved reading a lot of this. It’s one thing to know that people needed travel papers to get through checkpoints on the highway; it’s another thing to get an actual example of what travel papers said. Or divorce documents. Or a note recording a loan and the terms of repayment. Or sumptuary laws (which turn out to have often been quite vague!). Many of the things here are either very brief or excerpted to be so, which in a few cases I regretted; I also wish that it hadn’t quite so obviously been designed for a course where maybe the professor is only assigning a few selections, leading to some pieces of information being repeated a lot throughout the book. But if you’re my brand of nerd and think it’s super-cool to read the official letter authorizing two brothers and their uncle to hunt down and kill their father’s/brother’s murderer, or a petition from peasants to the lord of a neighboring domain, then this is kind of awesome.

A Thousand Steps Into Night, Traci Chee, narr. Grace Rolek. Another novel! I had assumed from the cover copy, which refers to Miuko living in the land of Awara, that this was going to be set in a close analogue of Japan. Those influences are certainly here, but I think it would be more accurate to call this Asian-inspired fantasy in the way that a lot of fantasy is European-inspired without specifically modeling France or Germany or wherever. (Certainly the phonology does not restrict itself to Japanese forms; the magpie spirit, for example, is an atskayaki-na.) Not a problem, of course — it just means I got a bit more leavening in my literary diet this month than I expected.

The story itself was delightful. Early on, Miuko gets cursed by a shao-ha, a type of malevolence demon, and starts turning into one herself. But her quest to find a way to lift that curse before she transforms is complicated by the presence of another malevolence demon possessing the prince — and in a refreshing change from a lot of YA, the demon prince is not a love interest, not even in an “antagonist who will pivot at the end” kind of way. In fact, romance is basically not the point at all here. Halfway through the novel, the plot pulls a stunt I did not see coming, which addressed the weird odds and ends that had been accumulating along the road, in a very entertaining fashion. If there’s a flaw here, it’s the frequency with which a given plot segment kind of ends with “your princess is in another castle” — but since I enjoyed the ways in which that sent Miuko off on interesting new trajectories, I didn’t mind too much.

I can also recommend the audiobook to anybody who likes that format. I don’t know if this would have evoked Avatar: The Last Airbender to me quite so strongly without Rolek’s narration, but the magpie spirit in particular has serious Aang energy from time to time (albeit a little brattier than Aang tended to be).

Kojiki, trans. Donald L. Philippi. This is one of those things I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and now I’ve done so, and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the need to come back to it. The Kojiki is one of the oldest Japanese texts and one of the two main sources for early Japanese mythology, but, well . . . it reads like a very old mythological text. Which is to say, not at all like modern fiction. Even skimming the chapters that dutifully list out all the wives a given emperor had and what children they bore (which was super important for organizing the court in the days when status depended on being able to trace your ancestry back to an imperial relative), there’s a whoooole lotta somewhat baffling incidents made comprehensible only by footnotes.

And oh, the footnotes. Philippi managed to defeat even my relatively completionist tendencies. There’s hardly a single page here without at least one footnote; it is very common for those to take up roughly half the page. Some of the footnotes then refer you to the Additional Notes in Appendix A, which go into greater detail than would fit underneath the actual text. And then the various proper names and terms and so forth are written in small caps if they’re explicated in the Glossary — which most of them are. The Glossary is nearly two hundred pages long. That’s the bit I gave up on. I looked up a few words, mostly ones that seemed to denote ranks or court positions, but the names . . . no. There’s a limit.

I should note a second limit here, or rather one which came first: my original intent was to read Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation, which I picked up at Kinokuniya one day. I made it through his introduction and translation of the Author’s Preface, got to the first page of the actual Kojiki text . . . hit the bit where he gives the names of the first three deities as “High-Deity Master-of-the-August-Centre-of-Heaven,” “High-August-Producing-Wondrous Deity,” and “Divine-Producing-Wondrous-Deity” . . . realized he was going to do that for all the names . . . and bailed for Philippi’s translation instead. I mean, not that it’s all that much easier to cope with Amë-nö-mi-naka-nusi-nö-kamï, Taka-mi-musubi-nö-kamï, and Kamï-musubi-nö-kamï — in small caps — every time they’re named — but Chamberlain also praised this wonderful new theory called “solar mythology” in his introduction, which made me laugh like a drain, so yeah, I opted to borrow my sister’s copy of Philippi instead.

(Short form of solar mythology: everything that doesn’t run away fast enough is a solar deity. The two capstones of that concept in folklore were 1) when a solar mythologist, in all seriousness, tried to argue that a mythological hero’s horse being named “Black” somehow constituted proof of the solar origins of the hero, and 2) when somebody mocking the concept used its methods to argue that the guy who originated the theory was! himself! a solar deity!)

Japanese Myths, Legends, and Folktales: Bilingual English and Japanese Edition, Yuri Yasuda, ill. Yoshinobu Sakakura and Eiichi Mitsui. Wow does Yasuda have connections — or somebody at Tuttle does. The inside cover flap has blurbs from Her Imperial Highness Princess Chichibu; Elizabeth Gray Vining, former tutor to the Crown Prince of Japan; Mrs. Joseph C. Grew, Wife of former American Ambassador to Japan; Lady Gascoigne, Wife of former British Ambassador to Japan; and Count Makino, former Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal to the Imperial Court of Japan. There are more blurbs elsewhere, too, of similarly shiny provenance.

As for the stories themselves, they’re largely the ones you’d expect if you know Japanese folktales at all (e.g. Kaguya-hime, Momotarō, Shita-kiri suzume, etc). But unlike the other kids’ books I have, the Japanese text is written with kanji, which . . . honestly makes it easier to read? I don’t know all the kanji, because I’m barely 5% literate in the language, but it’s way easier to parse the sentences when they aren’t just an undifferentiated smear of kana. I won’t actually claim I read through all the stories in Japanese this month — just bits and pieces, and then the English — but I have it on my shelf now for when I’d like some reading practice.

Labyrinth’s Heart As is traditional, my own work doesn’t count. (But boy howdy did this eat the last week of the month.)

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New Worlds: Invasive Species

We’re in the final month of Year Six (!) of the New Worlds Patreon, and for our last topic, my patrons have voted for some essays about the interactions between humans and animals/the natural environment more generally. We begin with invasive species — comment over there!

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New Worlds: Illicit Goods

Sometimes the organization of the New Worlds Patreon doesn’t work out as tidily as I might like. Since I’ve said my bit on violent crimes (sexual assault having been covered previously), instead we’re wrapping up the month with something that more belongs back with the theft essays from the start of this Patreon year: smuggling! Comment over there.

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New date for The Game of 100 Candles

Woke up today to an alert from my publisher that due to a COVID outbreak at the warehouse, the release date for The Game of 100 Candles has been pushed back to March 7th. My apologies to everyone, but you know how it goes!

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Geraldine Harris’ Seven Citadels

Yoon Ha Lee has mentioned this quartet of books several times over the years, reminding me that I loved them as a kid and prompting me to re-acquire the series to see if it holds up. (The four volumes are Prince of the Godborn, Children of the Wind, The Dead Kingdom, and The Seventh Gate.) My recollection, at a distance of nearly thirty years, was that it had amazing worldbuilding and an ending that kid!me had kind of a “Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?” reaction to, but which I suspected was actually kind of amazing in ways I didn’t properly appreciate at the time.

Reader, I did not misremember.

Plot summary first: the declining empire of Galkis is under threat from without and from within, and their only hope is for someone to go on a quest to free their prophecied Savior from a prison whose seven keys are in the keeping of seven sorcerers (well, five sorcerers and two sorceresses). This is 100% unabashed Plot Coupon territory, a reason for Prince Kerish-lo-Taan, his half-brother Forollkin, and the companions they pick up along the way to roam through nearly the entire map collecting inventory items until they have the full set . . . but two things significantly mitigate the cheesiness and predictability of that plot. The first is just what it means in practice for them to be obtaining those keys, and the second is how it all resolves in the end, which is not at all what you might expect (hence kid!me’s reaction).

Before I get to that, though, the worldbuilding. When I bought copies of the books, they were shockingly short; the longest is still less than 250 pages. How much setting richness, I wondered, could possibly be squeezed into such a small space?

The answer is, a truly startling amount. Every place Kerish & Co. go is palpably different from the others, in environment, in mood, in customs. No “Planet of Hats” approach here, where everything gets one distinctive feature and the writer calls it a day, nor even the world-and-a-half setup where each place feels rich because you can map it to a real-world analogue; the cultures absolutely complex and original, whether it’s the decaying theocracy of Galkis, the serf-powered mercantilism of Lan-Pin-Fria, the parochial tribalism of the Erandachi, the matriarchal courtliness of Seld (where the Queen of Seld invites her guests to dine inside her future tomb), or any other place.

And what I particularly noticed and liked this time around was that none of these places are special or right. Galkis, as I said, is a theocracy: according to their myths (and those myths appear to be 100% true), their god Zeldin married a mortal woman, Imarko, and their descendants, the Godborn, have ruled Galkis ever since. The Godborn legitimately have magical powers, though very few of them know how to use them nowadays, and one of the first things you see in Prince of the Godborn is a child being subjected to a magical test meant to determine if he truly is a pure descendant of that line. But other lands have other myths, and more than once, we see their myths being true, too: in Gannoth, where the Crown Prince rules on behalf of a King who ascends the throne by dying, you see the new Crown Prince ritually channel the spirit of his dead father to deliver a series of oracles. In the Five Kingdoms (where they say their goddess Idalla was betrayed by Zeldin in favor of Imarko), men keep their souls outside of their bodies in the form of wooden statues — and although our protagonists think at first that this is just superstition, it appears to be literally true that the statues change in response to the owners’ actions. Yes, the Godborn are special . . . but so is everybody else.

And being special doesn’t make you good or right. One of the key narrative strands here is how badly the Godborn have failed Galkis, as individuals and as a caste. Not only that, but Kerish reflects on how badly the Galkian social structure has failed the Godborn: it requires them to be remote, superhuman figures to the general populace, denying their humanity and fallibility, in ways that don’t do anybody any favors. None of the places he visits are flawless utopias; the one that comes the closest, Ellerinonn, is run by a benevolent dictator who has made a peaceful, enlightened society . . . at the expense of denying his people full autonomy over their lives. Every place has problems, and every place’s problems are different.

The books also include stuff that is, for lack of a better word, gratuitous. But I don’t mean that as a criticism: while it’s true that we don’t need half the details that appear throughout, to me they’re a feature rather than a bug. That applies most particularly to the weird-ass underlayer to the setting, wherein the entire human species appears to have migrated from another continent off to the west, displacing some truly alien non-humans (who may, themselves, have also originated on that other continent). Why the heck is that in here??? I have no idea; it only crops up in fragments here and there until you get to the final sorceress, and even her situation could have been redesigned to not incorporate that element. But it is here, and all I can think is that Harris found it cool, so why not. (I wonder if she ever planned to write more about it.)

All of this fits into such short books in part because there was a lot more tolerance back then for the narrative to just say stuff outright, in ways we’d find infodumpy today. But it also fits because Harris so thoroughly marinates her characters in their surroundings, very much building the story through the setting rather than placing the plot atop the world like the latter is a stage. In hindsight, I am absolutely convinced these books had a significant influence in shaping my preference for plots and characters that are deeply intertwined with the features of their worlds.

(The map is . . . not great, though. And the naming system could have been better, in that it could have felt like there was a system, rather than just syllables tossed around for fun. With a bonus salt-shaker of Z for anything related to Zeldin.)

But anyway, the plot.

I’ll give spoilers in a bit, but the part I don’t consider spoilery has to do with those seven keys. Once Kerish sets out on his quest, he learns that the keys the sorcerers hold aren’t just keys to the Savior’s prison; they also make the sorcerers immortal. So by taking them, he’s guaranteeing that those seven people — well, six; one of them’s a special case — will begin to age and die. That adds a whole moral dimension to the quest that is usually absent from Plot Coupon stories, as Kerish worries about the effect his quest will have on not just the sorcerers but the lands around them: Ellerinonn’s idyllic-seeming society, for example, is 100% dependent on the sorcerer that rules it, and may not survive once he’s gone. And while he’s able to get some of the keys by having a rational conversation with the holder, others require deceit or manipulation in ways that leave him wracked with guilt. (None of them require heroic battle, which is another departure from many Plot Coupon stories. Kerish is . . . not much use at heroic battle. The closest he comes involves him stabbing his half-brother.)

As a side note, I also find it startling to look at the ways that ideas about “kids’ books” have changed over the last forty years. Kerish is I think seventeen when he sets out on his quest, and nineteen or twenty when it ends; there is definitely a strand in here about him growing up from being a bratty, sheltered prince to somebody of greater depth and maturity. But apart from that (which could also go into an adult novel), there’s no real sense of this being “a story for kids,” except insofar as that’s who it got marketed to. Galkian internal politics, for example, are driven by factors like the Emperor being in constant mourning for one of his dead wives, the Empress resenting that wife for wrecking her relationship with the Emperor, various people scheming for power through adultery or manipulating who gets appointed to what position, etc. The external threat to Galkis is driven by religious resentment and one man’s bid to unify an otherwise fractured land by pointing everybody at an external enemy. I can imagine a version of this story being written now, but it would be profoundly different, more strongly filtered for a youth-centered view of the characters and the world.

(Also, the perspective is omniscient. That helps both with delivering exposition about the world and with making other characters, particularly Forollkin, something other than mere props to Kerish’s quest, but it’s a vanishingly rare choice nowadays. I hope it comes back more into style, since I think it offers a lot of benefits.)

Now, I will say that the structure of the plot is rather lacking — very much not helped by the divisions of the books themselves. Yoon and I have both independently speculated that maybe Harris wrote this as one continuous narrative and then chopped it up into volumes; it would have been a long book, but on the other hand it would explain why each installment just kind of . . . ends. There’s no sense of larger shape to the arc here, just Kerish interacting with each key-and-sorcerer plot, then transitioning through the journey to the next one, and the books ending more when they’ve reached their allotted page count than when they’ve reached a meaningful stopping point. Emotional growth happens here, but plot dynamics do not: the most thrilling and challenging key to obtain is the fifth one (followed by the second), and from a conventional perspective it almost feels like that plot runs out of steam in between the sixth key and the seventh. I don’t think that’s actually true; instead what happens is that the narrative begins shifting focus to its actual goal all along. But it explains why, as a kid, I never liked the fourth book nearly as much.

At this point I’m going to begin discussing spoilers. I was going to rot-13 them, but it would be a massive block of gibberish for people to cut-and-paste, so instead I’ll say that if you wish to avoid spoilers, skim down for the next line of bold text and just don’t read anything in between.

So, as a kid I felt betrayed by the sense that Kerish succeeds in his quest, but fails in what both he and I thought the quest would do. The fourth book gets remarkably dark, with the siege of Viroc, the forces of Fangmere and the Five Kingdoms overrunning southern Galkis, Zyrindella’s rebellion in the north of Galkis, etc. Wasn’t the Savior supposed to, y’know, save Galkis? Yes . . . but not like that. Which is where I think these books firmly transcend their Plot Coupon approach: you might guess early on (especially if you’re not a kid) that Kerish is the Savior and that you’re watching him grow into that role along the way, but I doubt most readers would guess that his job as Savior is to be a beacon of hope and change to the Galkians either living as refugees in exile or under the yoke of their new rulers. Or that he’d, y’know, die alone in the desert on his way to that destiny.

As a kid, I found his death horrifying. It’s still kind of horrifying now! But I can also see how much of this final book in particular is about preparing Kerish for his eventual role. Returning to Galkis, he begins interacting with the ordinary people that his previous life as a sheltered Godborn Prince kept him away from; he sees their feelings toward the Godborn, their faith in Zeldin and particularly in Imarko. The long time spent traveling with the troupe of sacred actors, which from a conventional perspective feels like a long and not especially tense delay between escaping Viroc and encountering the final sorceress, is deeply important for Kerish, most obviously highlighted by the moment where he steps into the role of Zeldin and gives the chief actor that moment of divine transcendence that has escaped him his entire life. Kerish is absolutely the Zeldin-Imarko bridge, neither wholly divine nor wholly mortal, and I love that. And then his own faith gets tested when Tebreega sends him out into the desert with the sole instruction to keep walking and not turn back: his decision to keep going through the wasteland after the point of no return is harrowing, but it is also (of course) the final proof that he will do anything that might help his people in their hour of need, no matter the cost to himself. Because of that, it’s nearly a foregone conclusion that when Imarko offers him a choice between going to heaven and returning to the world, he’ll choose the latter . . . but the glimpses she gives him of the lives people are leading because of his quest strike a beautiful balance between showing him the need for his presence, and giving him the sense that he’s changed enough things for the better that he can rest now if he wants. (It genuinely did make me cry.)

If there’s something I found dissatisfying on the re-read, it’s Gwerath, Kerish’s Erandachi cousin who joins them on their quest. The love triangle between her, Kerish, and Forollkin doesn’t play out with the standard dynamics, and I like that; what itched at me was the feeling that once Gwerath left her circle (another moment that proved the metaphysical legitimacy of other people’s beliefs, and that I did enjoy), she just . . . never found a place, never truly managed to be happy. We’re given every reason to believe that Gidjabolgo is right about the real nature of the feelings between her and Forollkin, i.e. it wasn’t really true love — yet Gwerath insists on staying with them (and gets killed as a result) because, as she says outright, she has nothing left except her love for Forollkin. She’s not a meaningless adjunct to their quest; she does help in important ways. But none of them add up to me feeling like Gwerath ever achieved wholeness in herself, from the moment she found out her Goddess was a sorceress onward. (Though . . . was that actually true? Yes, Sendaaka is the one who visited the Erandachi to reshape their society — but also Gwerath exhibited magical abilities that came from somewhere, and that somewhere didn’t seem to be Sendaaka. Since we never get an explanation of how sorcery or anything else magical works, it’s ambiguous.)

Basically, this is not a fantasy series that ignores women. They’re not hugely central for the most part, but they’re present and meaningful. Yet I walked away feeling that Gwerath was done a bit dirty by the narrative.

You can come back now if you were skimming!

The characters are an interesting bag overall, in that they’ve got very distinct personalities that do grow and change, but — due to the shortness of the books — you’re more invited to read into what you get than given the kind of deep exploration that I’d expect from a modern adult novel. The one I found most striking on a re-read was honestly Gidjabolgo, who fits into the slot of “malformed misanthrope” but (and this is crucial) gets to stay there. Although he does soften up a little over time, you still have to read between the lines of his cynicism and prickliness to spot it, instead of him getting a personality makeover as a result of his interactions with Kerish and Forollkin. The series even manages to fit in some philosophical comments on the nature of beauty, which I think is kind of important when your central character is the supernaturally beautiful descendant of a god. And Gidjabolgo’s interactions with the hideous sorceress Tebreega are great.

Some books of my childhood I re-read, smile at, and donate to the library. This series is gonna stay on the shelf. I’m even contemplating requesting it for Yuletide next year, probably asking for exploration of the sorcerers’ backstories (though if this series had any modern fandom at all, they’d be shipping Kerish/Forollkin by express mail). I really want to know more about the Ferrabrinth, the non-humans in that weird setting under-layer, but it would very nearly amount to original fiction, which wouldn’t really scratch the itch of wanting to know what Harris had in mind with them.

If any of you remember these, or wind up reading them as a result of my post, please let me know!

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New Worlds: Murder Most Foul

No discussion of violent crimes would be complete without murder, so this week, the New Worlds Patreon takes a swing in that direction. Comment over there . . .

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