Behind the scene in Sartorias-deles

Inda, Sherwood Smith

Inda is the first volume in one of several series set in Smith’s fantasy world of Sartorias-deles. Like several other fantasy authors who have spent a great deal of time developing a complex history and cultural geography for their alternate universe (Lackey’s Velgarth and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover come most quickly to my mind), Smith has written several books and series set in different times and places in this world, which is probably both effect and cause of the truly admirable breadth and depth of her worldbuilding.

In many ways, one would think that Inda would be just the right sort of fantasy for me. Complex world building, multiple well-developed cultures, lots of political intrigue, some interesting gender politics – it certainly has many of the things that hook me in. And I was expecting to find this volume – the first of Smith’s fantasy novels I’ve read – to be a pleasurable introduction to a new series of books I would eagerly consume.

Unfortunately, Inda did not engage me. For quite some time, I wasn’t sure why I was finding myself vaguely dissatisfied, yet continuing to read it – looking for something that I felt should be there, but wasn’t. And then I realised that Smith was telling a very fine story, by all objective measures – but it wasn’t the story I wanted to hear about these people.

Smith is writing the story of a young boy from a noble family (the eponymous Inda) who, in a time of threatened war, discovers his gift as a military leader in a brutal school for warriors, all the while surrounded by political intrigue that, fed by personal jealousies, leads to treachery and betrayal and sends Inda into exile, where he learns to survive as a member of a band of mercenary marines.

However, behind the story of Inda and his friends and enemies, I kept catching glimpses of another story, one about the secrets being kept by the women of Inda’s culture and class, who seem to be doing something that the men don’t know about, developing their own language of codes and allusions based on their studies of history, teaching traditions and a secret method of fighting to each other. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was just reading some vast conspiracy of women into these small glimpses of women’s culture that Smith was giving me. Then about halfway through the novel, there’s one scene that explains what is going on among the women – and after that, nothing more of any substance about it.

And I realised that this was that story I want to read, not Inda’s. He’s a nice young lad, with lots of dangerous adventures and shattering reversals of fortune and coming-of-age stuff to deal with, but I didn’t want to read about him. I wanted the story of this secret quest among the women.

I did finish the novel, and it is a very well written example of its genre, and I have no doubt that anyone who is looking for the kind of story it is will enjoy it immensely. I might even have enjoyed it more myself if not for the tantalising hints that something more interesting (to me, at least) was happening mostly off stage, just over there where the girls are talking quietly in the library while Inda and the other boys are on centre stage doing military drills. (although the girls drill too, and often beat the boys – like I said, the book has interesting gender politics).

I will have to explore some review of Smith’s other books set in this world, to see if she is telling the story I want to read somewhere else, but there’s not enough of that story in Inda to tempt me to read the remaining volumes in this series.

Hark, the herald angels sing

Archangel, Sharon Shinn

This was my first introduction to Sharon Shinn’s writing, and I was quite enraptured. The book itself is one of those “looks like fantasy but it’s really science fiction once you realise what’s going on” stories, which can be very interesting reading when you know that you are seeing in action highly developed technology that is, to the people in the story, indistinguishable from magic – or in the case of Shinn’s Samaria novels, of which this is the first, divine providence.

As the novel begins, Gabriel, leader of the angels’ hosts of the Eyrie – one of three angelic hosts whose responsibility it is to care for the people and the land of Samaria – is preparing to assume the position of Archangel, the most senior position among angels and the one who must – with his pre-ordained, human spouse, the Angelica – preside over the annual ceremony of worship that prevents the god Jovah from destroying all of Samaria. The only problem is that when Gabriel goes to the oracle of Bethel to find out who he is to marry, he discovers that the village she was born in was destroyed years ago, and no one knows where she is. And he has six months to find her, marry her, and make sure that she is trained and ready to sing the Gloria with him.

Archangel is on the one hand the story of Gabriel’s search for Rachel, his destined bride (but destined by whom?) and his attempts to build a relationship with her once he finds her. It is also a novel about abuse of power and the struggle for social justice in a corrupt regime – for in the process of learning who Rachel is and what is in her past, he learns that even the highest and mightiest of angels can fail in duty and compassion. falling from the heights to the depths.

Alternatively, it is the story of how a woman who refuses to follow custom blindly, who demands justice for all, can change the heart of a ruler and the course of a world.

It's also an interesting look at society under a theocracy (that may not actually be a theocracy at all, and in the absence of a god at the top, what is a theocracy but a dictatorship, no matter how well-meaning), and at the reality of politics and oppression in the nice little feudal fantasy lands that some SFF writers are so fond of setting novels in.

I’m looking forward to reading the remaining books in this series.

On not writing “Westerns and the White Man’s Burden in Outer Space”

The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh

This is a collection of short stories by the most remarkable Vandana Singh, whose work I am growing more and more in love with the more of it I read.

In these stories, Singh writes about apparently quite ordinary people – specifically, people who are often women and often Indian – who find themselves in strikingly unordinary situations and circumstances, or who suddenly feel distanced, alienated as it were, from what once seemed normal and familiar. Her gift for delineating character with subtlety, precision and sometimes gentle humour is in peak form here, enabling us to understand and identify with the rich humanity of her characters, and thus experience a universe much larger and richer than we normally encounter – learning greatly thereby.

As Singh notes in the essay that concludes the collection:

Speculative fiction is our chance to… find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe.

Singh sees another function for speculative fiction (beyond the simple fun of it all, which she also celebrates), one that is also at the heart of many of the stories in this collection:

Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be. Before we do, we must dream.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a few favourites from this collection to talk about – they are all very, very good.

There’s an interesting review of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet here.

In my end is my beginning

My Death, Lisa Tuttle.

Lately I seem to have been reading, by happenstance I presume, books that in one way or another make me think about what I can only describe as the secret history of women, and the ways in which women as whole, real individuals are erased in our culture and its products. Sometimes it’s been an obvious theme, the writer’s intent being to examine either the reality of women’s lives, or some aspect of how women are disappeared and what they may have been doing that no one wanted to, or was able to, record. Sometimes – as in some of the classic SFF (written by men) that I’ve been re-reading of late - it has been about the total absence of women, or the absence of independence and agency in the women who are represented. Sometimes, it’s just been about a sense that there are untold women’s stories behind a narrative that’s focused more on the stories of men – something that would be less problematic if only there were as many narratives where men’s stories were left in the background in order to tell the stories of women.

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is very much a story about ways in which women’s stories are erased – and reclaimed. It is also at some levels a vast metaphor for the act of creation when artist and subject merge in order to create a new vision.

In this novella, an unnamed narrator, an author still working through her grief at the death of her husband, is led by a series of apparent coincidences to embark upon writing a biography of an earlier novelist (supposedly a contemporary of Virginia Woolf et.al.) who influenced her when she was younger and which whom she has always felt a strange sense of connection. This novelist – Helen Ralston – had served as model and muse for her older lover and former teacher Willy Logan, whose paintings and novels became well-known, while Ralston’s slipped into obscurity. Ralston, thus, is simultaneously the women whose work is overshadowed by the man she is associated with, and the woman whose individuality is erased by her assigned function as inspiration.

The narrator’s quest to discover what happened to the real woman behind the muse leads her to the discovery of a painting by Ralston, titled “My Death,” which is a visual paradox, simultaneously picturing an island that she and her lover visit; and a woman’s body with the focus on her exposed vulva – yet another form of disappearing of the real woman, this time through the classic tropes of woman as the earth/the land/the soil and woman as sex.

There is much more to this novel, including a profound shift in perspective near the end that cannot be logically reconciled yet illuminates the core truths that Tuttle has to offer about the distinction between Woman as muse and women who themselves create art, between women who are observed, submerged, erased, and women who are seen, known, remembered for who they are as individuals and what they do for themselves.

It is only after this shift takes place that the speculative elements of this work emerge, but once they do, it becomes apparent that this novella – one of the Conversation Pieces series published by Aqueduct Press – lies securely within the scope of literary speculative fiction.

This not a book that can be understood wholly from a rational perspective, for like the painting that give the book its name, the story itself is more than one thing at once, and at the same time symbolic of other things entirely. But it works, and powerfully so, as a an exploration of women and their relations, historically and potentially, to art.