The Serpent (Atlan #1) in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

Apr 12, 2021 Joseph rated it really liked it · review of another edition

(n.b. This edition takes the first volume of Gaskell's series (confusingly also called The Serpent in its original publication) and splits it into two volumes -- The Serpent and The Dragon)

I'm not entirely sure what first drew me to these books back in ... high school? maybe even junior high? I'm guessing that it was just seeing Atlan on the public library shelf, thinking, "Atlantis, huh? OK, that's cool," and working my way back to the first in the series. I'm also not sure, across these vast g (n.b. This edition takes the first volume of Gaskell's series (confusingly also called The Serpent in its original publication) and splits it into two volumes -- The Serpent and The Dragon)

I'm not entirely sure what first drew me to these books back in ... high school? maybe even junior high? I'm guessing that it was just seeing Atlan on the public library shelf, thinking, "Atlantis, huh? OK, that's cool," and working my way back to the first in the series. I'm also not sure, across these vast gulfs of time, how far in the series I actually got back in the day; and there's a whole lot of stuff in these books that would have just whizzed right above my 14 year old head.

But anyway. Regardless of how much I did or didn't actually read back in the day, parts of the story have always stuck with me, so I decided that it was time for a revisit.

The series is presented as a diary written by one Cija, daughter of the Dictatress of a small nation (city-state?) on the eastern seaboard what would be the present-day continent of South America, although the story takes place in a distant, mythical prehistory when, amongst other things, there was a small continent called Atlan out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; and those Atlanteans, clever buggers that they were, had sealed their island off from the rest of the world behind a mile-wide shell of vacuum.

Cija has been raised in isolation her entire life, living in a tower on the seacoast, tended only by women, and told (slight fib) that the men of the species had become extinct. She is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, kind of a brat and a terror. Then at the age of 17 or so, she discovers that her mother hasn't been entirely truthful with her; and that not only do men still exist, but that she, Cija, is going to be given as part of a party of hostages to the notorious general Zerd (a northerner whose skin is blue and finely scaled like that of a serpent), who is passing through the area on his way to cement an alliance with the Southern Kingdom, with the ultimate intention of breaching the vacuum barrier and conquering Atlan; but Cija's mother the Dictatress has a secret mission for her daughter -- seduce Zerd and then kill him. Easy-peasey!

Or, perhaps, not. This is, as mentioned above, just the first half of the original first volume, and follows Cija on any number of scrapes and escapades as she keeps escaping, being captured by some other party, being kept as a concubine or a plaything, escaping again, being recaptured again, etc., etc. (And oh, yeah, this is one of those books that kind of plays fast and loose with the whole idea of consent, and takes a certain amount of sexual assault as just kind of par for the course; so if that's not your thing, then steer clear.)

This is a series that seems to have kind of fallen by the wayside over the years, and that's a bit of a shame. I know that Michael Moorcock regards it highly, and it was influential on Tanith Lee, amongst others. Cija has a very breezy narrative style (which presumably Gaskell was "translating" into 1960s vernacular) and everything is filtered through her (often naïve) perceptions. The world is just kind of sketched in -- in fairness, most of it is unfamiliar to Cija, who's often kind of just along for the ride -- but fascinating nonetheless, filled with cavalry riding large (now extinct) flightless terror birds and the like.

Worth a look if you can accept a few infelicities. ...more

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Sep 18, 2013 Aaron Meyer rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

A pretty good book. Going in to this I really didn't know what to expect from it so I was pleasantly surprised with it. Cija's situation is definitely an interesting one, and seeing how she grows throughout all the stuff that happens to her is cool. It is obvious that the author definitely intended this to be a much longer work considering the cliff hanging and abrupt ending. ...more

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