Windhaven in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jan 11, 2010 Harold Ogle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. "Windhaven" is a collection of three short stories in the same setting, in which a spacecraft finds itself lost and is forced to crash on the closest habitable planet in order for the crew to survive. The planet is mostly ocean, with a few island archipelagos scattered around. The colonists found themselves trying to live on a planet with no industrial base, and no real way to create one with the tools at hand. Gargantuan sea monsters inhabit the oceans, making any sort of sea travel a dangerous "Windhaven" is a collection of three short stories in the same setting, in which a spacecraft finds itself lost and is forced to crash on the closest habitable planet in order for the crew to survive. The planet is mostly ocean, with a few island archipelagos scattered around. The colonists found themselves trying to live on a planet with no industrial base, and no real way to create one with the tools at hand. Gargantuan sea monsters inhabit the oceans, making any sort of sea travel a dangerous gamble, so the colonists were faced with a decision: try to maintain the existing technology in the hopes of a miraculous rescue, or try to survive for the long-term. Eventually, this leads to civil war in the colony, with the win going to the group that wanted to scuttle the wrecked spacecraft and degenerating high-technology equipment in order to make tools that would be useful in a non-industrial society. One of the primary tools is a kind of collapsible wing, which can be used to glide on the ferocious winds of a planet with no major land masses and thus enable communication by courier between the islands. By the time the book begins, millennia have passed, and the culture of "flyers" is set in stone: each flyer learns to use his wings in the service of his home island, which he continues to do, traveling the world as no one else can do, until his or her first-born offspring reaches 13 years of age, when the wings are automatically passed on to the child. There are many flaws in this system of primogeniture, of course, and the book explores how a rural society hide-bound in such traditions reacts to change. This change comes in the form of Maris, a commoner who is so passionate about flying that she is adopted by a childless flyer on her home island...but then she is forced to relinquish the wings that would have been hers when her "father" has a son in his advancing years.

The three stories of the book are distinct from one another, and work well separately, but they also do come together as a pretty decent narrative, though a great span of time passes between each story. The first story is about how Maris desperately fights for her wings, and changes Windhaven society in the process. She ends up stealing the wings from her brother - who supports her and has no interest in being a flyer himself, calling a convocation of all the flyers on Windhaven in order to plead her case, and how she scrambles to invent a change that all the flyers can accept which will allow her to keep her wings. This story is the most enjoyable of the three, and the court-room drama at the end is nicely realized. In the end, Maris stumbles onto the idea of creating a challenge system, where the "land-bound" can challenge existing flyers at annual tournaments, and the better flyer in these challenges is the one to get the wings...thus allowing the wings to pass onto families who were not "born with wings". The second story is seven years later, when Maris is fully adult. It's about how Maris reacts to the inevitable, logical extension of the challenge system: that someone without any honor or respect for the rest of flyer culture learns how to fly really well and challenges for the wings. It's an interesting moral conundrum: Maris despises Val, but she is committed to being just, and so she supports him in any case, even when all the other flyers turn against him. She never thought that someone so reprehensible, so lacking in respect, would become a flyer, but she cannot deny the right of anyone, no matter how vile, to try to be a flyer. The third story takes place more than thirty years later, when an island's ruler attempts to control his island's flyers so that he can instigate a war with another island. It's a power struggle between the flyers - who fancy themselves impartial couriers above petty politics - and the rulers of the land, so see who has the more power.

The book is particularly well done in that Maris' voice is so different with each story, reflecting how her attitudes and experiences have changed over time. In the first, she's hungry, desperate to fly, and full of vigor. In the second, she is a celebrity and ruler among the flyers, and in the third, she is a bitter, sick old woman. Like all GRRM, this is grim stuff with a lot of complicated character motivations, but readers expecting the intricacy of "A Game of Thrones" aren't paying attention. George R. R. Martin is and has always been primarily an author of morally ambiguous short stories, like "Sandkings". The Song of Ice and Fire books, as a full-length fantasy series, are a fluke in his career, and this may explain some of why it takes him so long to complete each one. "Windhaven" is an effective character study told across three separate stories in the same setting, which were written separately over the span of several years in the 70s. For me, it was also interesting to read this, as I recently read C.J. Cherryh's "Foreigner", which starts with a very similar premise of a spaceship getting way off course and having to settle on an inhospitable world. They make an interesting comparison, because the three authors (counting Lisa Tuttle) chose very different directions to take the two stories, despite their initial similarities. ...more

1 like · Like · see review