Jason Dias's Blog - Posts Tagged "epic-fantasy"

History
Jul woke up from a nightmare. Fires. Walking over hot coals, being chased by his mother in her headdress and golden beard, many big men behind her, all with gold and turquoise headdresses.
Awake was hardly better than asleep. The soles of his feet hurt not from his dream but from his punishment. And the room was full of thunder. It rolled off his door, over his rugs, into the softness of his bed, and into his aching head.
No, not thunder.
Someone was knocking on it. Someone strong.
“Come,” he said, voice weak with self-pity. And, when they kept knocking, “Open the door, damnit!”
The door creaked open, letting in a cool draft from outside. Jul pushed his feet out from under his furs and let the breeze caress them. Then he looked at the man who filled his doorway.
He was not tall, at least not compared to other men around the palace. Maybe for a peasant. But he was wide, as wide as two men. And old: at least fifty, twice Jul’s mother’s age. Bald head, lines around his mouth and eyes, broken teeth in his smiling mouth. And a limp.
His skin was dark as Jul’s own, palms golden. This marked him as one of The Blood. But his clothes...
“What are you?” Jul said.
The man laughed. “Not what, fool. Who.”
“Fool?” Jul started to get indignant.
“Ah, be calm. I am a Prince as you are a Prince, boy. Yes. You have neither sisters nor brothers, have you? You mother could not bear to have to kill them, or watch you do it. You’ve never met someone so high in The Blood as you, have you?” He laughed again.
“A Prince? Really? I do not believe you. All my mother’s family are dead. And you are too old.”
“Too old to be a prince? I suppose you’re right, boy. I’ve been away. Slaving, trading. Exiled. Your father’s brother, not yours or your mother’s. See these furs? Ice bear, this one.” He pointed to his cloak, an extreme affectation in this hot place. “Wolf here.” The skins that covered his chest and arms. “Plain cow for the leggings and boots. Good Northern steel in the scabbards.” He wore several knives and swords – in the presence of the heir.
“My father? You knew him?”
“Oh yes,” he said, coming in. He sat on the end of Jul’s bed. It sank under his weight. His eyebrows raised, and raised more as he glanced at Jul’s feet. “Your mother did this to you?”
“Punishment,” he said. “Slaves did it.”
“Oh. Well, your father was no better, in the end. It was exile for me, or else death. That’s the way of it here. And make no mistake, boy: those are your choices, too. You kill her and you do it her way, or else she’ll murder you out of hand. She won’t like it, no, but she’ll do it.”
“You came to tell me that? I have ten years. This much I know.”
“Well,” the man said. “A smart boy, then. You will know to keep me a secret, if you’re that smart.”
“She doesn’t know you’ve come back?”
“She thinks I’m dead. They all do. I played them a game. A lifetime ago. Now I’m just a poor trader named Chans. Haha. Soon, though, maybe I’ll be Ergol once again. Ergol with the club foot.” He reached under his fur shirt and pulled out a pouch, tied around his neck with a strip of leather. “Bones, boy. Ankle bones. Whole thing hinges on these.”
While Jul’s eyes were on the bag, the Chans’ other hand slipped to his waist, loosened a knife. He pulled it, tossed it onto the boy’s chest. It dropped into his lap.
“Always watch both hands,” Chans said. “Never look where you’re told to look.”
“I won’t.” He took the knife in one hand, found it to be sized and balanced for a child. Steel, rippling in the light. “Good knife.”
“Worth more than your ass,” Chans said, and laughed at Jul’s shocked look. “Told you, I’m a common sort, have been since before your mother’s mother snuck into her father’s bed. Oh yes, more secrets, boy. She told you your father was her father, didn’t she? Stupid cow. She never saw it. I saw it. Or my spies did. No matter. You can shake this place up, if you want to. I’ll help. Only, don’t tell anyone about me yet.”
“I won’t,” Jul said.
“I’ll be off now. Guards will be by this way soon and if they find me here, they’ll ask some questions I can only answer with murder. It isn’t time yet for any murder.”
Jul did not want him to go. Only a few minutes, but more words, more honesty than he had ever known. A peer, even an ancient one, was something he had missed from his life and never known. But Chans was up and gone before Jul could mount much of a protest.

The notion was not so foreign, not so alien. Kuzan was not a person. People did not live in imaginary spaces under the world. Monsters from stories came from those places. Or gods.
Chess used to tell about a queen who, to save her people, battled hoards of monsters trying to erupt out from under the ice at the top of the world. She fought them with a sword made from the tusk of a walrus that was itself a god.
So what was Kuzan, if not a person? A spirit? A monster? A god?
Seta returned, interrupting his thoughts. “I had your clothes cleaned. And I picked some leaves to make a tincture. But your fever might be made of myths and magic, in which case no leaves dissolved in spirits will avail you.” She set down a bundle on the table next to Guarl’s cooling breakfast. “You should eat.”
“I thought I was eating.”
“You are from far away, so maybe your customs are different. Here, when we eat, we do so by putting food into our mouths and chewing it. Perhaps in Hitai you eat by sitting still and exuding weird blue lights. Let me feel your forehead. Hm. No need for medicine, after all.”
“But I could use the beer. If it isn’t too much an intrusion on your hospitality.”
“For a consort of women from Sheol, I will extend however much hospitality keeps my skin on my back.”
Guarl raised his eyebrows. He could only guess what Sheol might be. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Not afraid of you, boy. Heh. We spent the night together, after all. That thing you came in with, though…”
“Thing?”
“Made of fire and darkness. Evil. There are three powers in the world: madness, rule, and evil. That’s a dark one you truck with.”
He thought some more. Tried to match those ideas up with what he already knew. Seta went into the back room and came back with his pack. She stuffed his clothes into it, then poured him a horn of beer from a gourd over her mantle.
Guarl said, “I know about chaos and order. The blue light you saw is the lake spirit from my home. It rides me like a man might ride an ass. It likes fire and water.”
“Things that boil, that can’t be foretold.”
“Yes. And opposite that spirit, we might imagine there is another kind of spirit. It lives in stone and steel, in things that are hard to change. Things that endure.”
“More than a supposition.” She sat on her low stool next to him. “Long ago and miles away… well, the god that fell into your lands wasn’t the first.”
He stared at her until he was sure she wasn’t going to say anything more. “Now you imagine that the worst impulses of people are a spirit of their own.”
“Imagined it until last night. Then I met the spirit.”
“She would want murder.”
“Stillborn children and curdled milk, fear, slavery.”
He took a deep breath. “Why would a thing like that want to rescue someone like me from under the world?”
“Drink your beer, boy.”
He sipped, then did more than sip. The taste was musty and good. “Is there a fourth spirit? One of virtue and kindness to stand across from evil?”
Seta laughed and spat.
“I should go.”
“I wish you would.” Then, seeing his hurt look: “Sorry, boy. But Hitaians know this thing: when gods walk about on the world, the little people get crushed underfoot. With all the love I can muster, I just want you to go walk someplace else.”

Who Fears Death
It’s a question, if you were wondering. As in, “Who fears death? I don’t.”
How to sum up this story? The Okeke women, as part of their ritual of adulthood, are given a small stone to keep under their tongues. In Onyesonwu’s village, that stone is a diamond. But your basic American wouldn’t know it was a diamond if Onyesonwu didn’t name it as such. It isn’t cut the way we cut diamonds for rings and necklaces and so on. It’s smooth, polished and milky.
That’s this novel. The legendary Donald Maass is somewhere in the background of this work and has done the author the wonderful favor of letting her own voice and style shine out. Okorafor doesn’t write like other fantasy writers, and that’s great.
What I mean is, there are some recognizable tropes, but she breaks a lot of literary conventions. Those conventions tie down cookie-cutter, Nordic-mythology fantasists. They don’t hold down Okorafor.
I enjoyed this story from the first page to the last. It took a minute to adjust to the voice but Onyesonwu’s voice comes through clear and bright and strong. The story twists and turns but, at the same time, drives straight at a beautiful, tragic ending that left me in tears. This is a masterpiece and I hope it leaves a stamp on the genre of epic fantasy. The genre needs this kick right in the pants.
I also have to tell you, the events described in here are pretty uncomfortable. There’s violence against women including sexual violence. It’s there for a reason and that reason isn’t just exploitation or drama. There’s slavery and not to play some stale narrative about breaking bonds. There’s an indictment of post-slavery culture. I read about the Nuru town where Nurus were learning to get along without their slaves only because slave labor had provided them comfortable lives, peace and prosperity, reading in my nice house in the suburbs in a country whose economic position in the world depends entirely on the slavery we ostensibly ended in the 19th century.
Truthfully, some of these elements are present in many epic fantasies. In this one, though, they’re a little closer to home or seem that way.
My advice, read it anyway. Anything worth doing is going to involve a little pain. Okorafor faced her pain to write this thing. Her character, Onyesonwu, seems to want all of us to take a good, long look at ours.
This isn’t some simple plea for diversity for its own sake. It’s more complicated than that. It’s more to do with, who gets to tell stories? Who decides? And who profits from the telling? When I wrote For Love of Their Children, I wanted to be inclusive. I was tired of stories about white guys with swords fighting dragons (or orcs or whatever) in rune-bound frozen countries. To get more than that, I had to write it. But in writing a story in part about black Africans, I managed inclusion but not representation. Because it was me doing the writing, with all my associated baggage. I profit from sales of the story, and black Africans had no part in shaping how they wanted to be represented.
Nnedi still gets referred to as an outsider author, but truly very little about this work justifies that status. For pork’s sake, her editor is Maass. It hardly gets more insider than that – or than Martin working on the screen adaptation. Indeed, Okorafor is an insider to the material she’s written. She’s speculating about the future and about magic, but the people – well, she knows them. She IS them.
I’m autistic and increasingly open about that. I see a lot of autism inclusion in modern narratives… but very little autism representation. How many autistic characters on the shows you watch and in the books you read were actually created by, acted by, autistic people? When I wrote For Love of Their Children, I went deliberately out of my lane and did the best I could. When I wrote Finding Life on Mars, a story about neurodivergent characters relating to their neurotypical parents, I was in it.
I can relate to the representation problem because I see these unrealistic, sappy, Mary-Sue autistic characters all the time. I imagine how it might be to be gay, or trans, or black or Hispanic in America and maybe you like the epic fantasy genre, but when you see yourself, it’s through this lens of how straight, white, cis guys see you.
So, this novel to me is five stars. It’s unusual in a genre that’s become staid and predictable. It’s about something. You could read it for fun, but it’s more than frivolous entertainment. And it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for most American fantasy readers to get outside our bubbles for a second.
Here’s a video version of this review.

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