Tag: fantasy

Short Story Club 2

Many thanks to everyone who offered suggestions in the earlier discussion — and here’s the schedule. I’m planning to keep the same arrangement as last year: I’ll post a reminder of the week’s story on a Friday, and then a discussion post on a Sunday that rounds up as much comment as I can find (with a link from thist post to the discussion). And since we went in alphabetical order last time, I figure we’ll go in reverse alphabetical order this time.

Without further ado, then:

And there’s a wrap-up discussion here.

Under Heaven

Under Heaven coverCasting around for a way to start to convey what Guy Gavriel Kay gets up to in Under Heaven, I found myself thinking of another recent fantasy novel. Jo Walton’s Lifelode (2009) is a rather different kind of book, one that does not attract adjectives like “sumptuous” so readily — it is, for not quite enough of its length, a beautifully low-key rural-domestic fantasy, set in a world in which time moves faster, and life is more wild, the further East you travel. Perhaps partly in response to this flux, and the effect it has on people as they travel, the characters in Walton’s novel have a word to describe someone who is being utterly, characteristically, themselves: truly embodying a quality. No such word exists within the world of Under Heaven, and for a reader looking in from outside the reason seems clear: it is unthinkable that any character in Kay’s novel could act in any way other than to be utterly, characteristically, themselves.

The daunting clarity of Kay’s vision extends beyond the individual. It’s probably well-known by now that Under Heaven tells a story inspired by events that took place in China’s Tang Dynasty — it’s certainly not a secret, since a letter to readers at the start of the Roc ARC sets out to justify this choice. And in fact, I’d argue that any solid understanding of the novel must confront and absorb at least the implications of Kay’s approach. (A deep reading would consider the details of the execution as well, but that’s not something I’m competent to attempt.) Under Heaven’s debt to history is heavier than most epic fantasy seeks, and evident in its choice of setting, story and characters, most of which have real counterparts; even if you don’t accept Kay’s assertion that this is a more moral strategy than straightforward history would be, it’s worth recognising how it shapes the narrative and tone of the novel. Precisely because it is a fantasy novel, and not a historical novel, Kay’s creation can be what you might call a platonic ideal of Tang China: a world of heart-stopping beauty, home to humans capable of astonishing subtlety and cruelty, all described with precision and thoroughness. Or to use Walton’s term, Under Heaven seems raensome.

This affect — magic but little mystery — is familiar from the other Kay novel I’ve read, The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), and from what I gather it’s an increasingly prominent feature of his work. But it seems particularly useful here, given the particular history being reworked, in defusing the notion of inscrutability. Characters outside the empire of Kitai — Kay’s Tang — are liable to find its citizens as baffling as Western stereotypes assert in our world, complaining of “the breeding and courtesy” that Kitai citizens “donned like a cloak” (29). A courtesan known as Spring Rain, brought to the very heart of Kitai from Western lands, reflects that she could study her masters until she was “bent like an ox-cart wheel” without understanding them, “or how the Celestial Empire dominates the world they know” (148). And Kay’s superlative-rich style risks beauty fatigue; there are more than a few moments when it seems the extravagance of his vision might be better expressed as one of the poems whose cultural importance he so openly admires.

But we readers are led into the minds the outsiders cannot know: so we can appreciate how the elaborate dances of the Kitai Court are designed to both channel and restrain human responses, how they perpetuate themselves and how human passions, like water from a dammed river, may find a new course. It is an article of faith within Kitai that it represents “the most civilized empire the world had ever known” (79). The intertwined superiority and fear that this attitude breeds snake into every character’s heart, surfacing in the superstitious caricaturisation of the world beyond Kitai; or in the tendency to philosophise about changes in “the world”, as though Kitai were the whole of it. The empire is a weight; a lot of characters spend a lot of time being angry under its burden, or exhausted by the attempt to negotiate the elaborate formalities of their society.

Our guide in this, the figure to which the novel most consistently returns, is so far as I can tell one of the characters that Kay creates from whole cloth. Shen Tai is the second son of a dead general; a man of deep passions and firm convictions. When we meet him he is embarked on a ritual mourning whose duration and ambition would be absurd if not rendered within Kay’s stately narrative. He has travelled to the edge of the empire and beyond, to the site of a great battle — a place whose extraordinary beauty is thrown into relief by the numberless bones that litter it — to bury the dead of both sides. As the novel opens, two things happen that will draw Tai back East, to the heart of the Empire. The first is that he escapes an assassination attempt for which there is no clear motive. The second is that a princess of Kitai’s past opponents, ostensibly as a token of her admiration for Tai’s work, gifts him two hundred and fifty quality horses — “Heavenly Horses”, as they are known, bigger and stronger than any Imperial stock — instantly, and unwelcomely, making him a player in the Emperor’s court.

Although the assassination attempt initially provides the more urgent narrative impetus, in the end it’s the existence of the horses that shapes the story told in Under Heaven as much or more than the actions of any individual characters, providing the new angle on the well-known story. It’s an interesting frame; it keeps some of what might be expected to be big set-piece events off-stage, but I think Kay is less interested in capturing those than he is in describing the feel of a moment of historical possibility. What’s significant about the gift of horses is that it positions Tai as someone able “to play a role in the balance of power towards the end of a long reign” (139). Certainly, Tai himself seems crafted to play this role: his connectedness allows him to slide in and out of the levels of society, while his initial innocence enables him to serve as our guide. It is easy to follow him. But more than that, both Kay’s letter-to-reader and the text of the novel are at pains to point out that creating a fantasy of history such as this is inherently an act that creates possibility. That is, the novel does successfully open up a space between what was and what might happen: enable a sense that, in contrast to the fatalism on display from some in the Kitai court, lives can and do fork, and that there can be, for better or worse, other worlds.

At this point I should probably specify that the historical event from which Kay weaves his story, the narrative through which Tai and his horses ghost, is the eighth century An Shi rebellion, in which a powerful governor of humble ancestry attempted to usurp the ruling dynasty, resulting in nearly a decade of strife and the deaths — as much from famine and disease as anything else — of several tens of millions of people. To set this out is not a spoiler, not just because Kay acknowledges the inspiration, but because of that possibility space, which refreshes the seeming inevitability of history.

But the relationship goes deeper. Kay is scrupulous about emphasising that Under Heaven is a story. We are, he writes, pattern-seeking creatures, and this shapes our approach to history: we are liable to abstract it, to simplify it, to use it for our own ends. Put another way, the creation of a possibility space — the creation of story from history — creates meaning. The novelistic attention to coincidence becomes an illustration of such: “Only a patient historian with access to records is likely to discover such links,” Kay writes; only “someone shaping a story for palace or marketplace … would note these conjunctions and judge them worth the telling” (542). And for all that Kitai is no less concrete than a description of the historical Tang would be, for all that the overlap between the two is not nearly small enough for Kitai to be taken as entirely independent — for all that Under Heaven’s raensomeness inescapably makes it a novel “about” Tang China in a way that it is not a novel “about” any specific Tang figures — it is still an abstraction, still a use of history. Under Heaven aims to extract the essence of a time and a place, such that it becomes “universalized in powerful ways”: but it tells you it’s doing it, and argues that if all history is story, there can be no final, specific truth, only degrees and directions of universalization.

Such an argument requires a carefully controlled narrative, and Kay’s control of his narrative is very good indeed; may be the best thing about the book, in fact. He works diligently not just to create but to maintain the spaces he claims, particularly in Under Heaven’s final third, when it is confirmed that the novel is a threnody for a culture at the height of its power choosing to diminish. As the implied narrator becomes a real narrator, and the focus gradually pulls back from the story’s present, we are reminded that this telling is only one among an endless series of interpretations and reinterpretations. It’s a hugely moving and fascinating gambit: never in the novel is the potency of historiography clearer, never the distinction between story and history more important, never the tension between the transparency of Kay’s created characters and the unattainability of the people who really lived more palpable. It is, in many ways, a tremendous achievement.

Return of the Short Story Club

Yes, by popular demand — or at least occasional request — the short story club will return this autumn. I’m thinking of a slightly shorter run (10 weeks?), and perhaps throwing a classic or two into the mix (but still predominantly considering stories published this year). I even have some idea of which stories I want to discuss, but I want more suggestions, so: what standout stories have you read so far this year?

Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

BSFA members should be receiving the latest issue of Vector this week:

Torque Control — editorial
No Easy Choices: Some Thoughts of an Adult Reading Children’s and Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy by Andrew M. Butler
Writing a Ruritania in a Post-Colonialist World by Farah Mendlesohn
Taking Control of the World: Kristin Cashore interviewed by Nic Clarke
Nicholas Fisk: Ten Short Novels by Niall Harrison
First Impressions — book reviewed edited by Martin Lewis
Resonances 59 by Stephen Baxter
Foundation’s Favourites: Catseye by Andre Norton by Andy Sawyer
Progressive Scan: The Sarah Jane Adventures by Abigail Nussbaum

The smashing cover photo is by Tom Ryan. This is Martin’s first issue as Reviews Editor, and he’s instituted a few changes — not least of which is his opening column, which you can read here.

As ever, we welcome letters of comment, or feedback on the forum.

Also of note: you can listen to Jonathan McCalmont’s interview of Lauren Beukes (from last week’s BSFA meeting) on the BSFA website, here.

2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners

The winners of this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards were announced at Readercon last weekend:

Best Novel: Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Speigel & Grau)
Best Novella: Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press)
Best Novelette: “Morality” by Stephen King (in Esquire)
Best Short Story: “The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler (in Eclipse 3)
Best Single-Author Collection: Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson (Harper Perennial), and Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman (Big Finish)
Best Edited Anthology: Poe, ed. Ellen Datlow (Solaris)

I’m cautiously optimistic about the SJAs, which are awarded “for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” This is their third year, and as for 2007 and 2008, the 2009 winners — and even more so the shortlists — strike me as interesting and inclusive. Partly this just means they’re playing to my taste. I’d had my eye on Big Machine, for instance, since Elizabeth Hand’s glowing review; I was half-hoping for a UK edition, but the award has given me the necessary nudge to order a US copy. Several other nominees and winners are also on the “actually, yes, I’d like to read that” list, which gives me a certain amount of confidence that the ones I haven’t encountered before will also be worth looking at. And Richard Larson’s shortlist review, the first part of which is up at Strange Horizons today (second part on Friday) makes all six of the Best Novel nominees sound worthwhile.

I have a couple of reservations. It’s a juried award, which is good, but I believe that two of the judges for this year’s awards also served for the previous two years. I prefer to see a bit more turnover among the judges — a World Fantasy Award or Clarke Award replacement rate rather than a Campbell Award replacement rate, if you like. I wouldn’t want to see too many ties like this year’s for Best Collection, either. And part of me wishes there were fewer categories, if only to increase my confidence that the jurors are making a thorough survey of the eligible work in each category; but this is a genre award, so everyone must get their spotlight. Still, they’ve had a good track record so far, and I look forward to next year’s shortlists.

In a related confession, I’ve barely read any Shirley Jackson. The recent Library of America volume seems like a good place to start; there’s a review of that at SH this week, too, by L. Timmel Duchamp:

Two themes run through most of the fiction in the volume: the volatility of group dynamics and the collusion of social silence with psychological and even physical violence against individuals who are outsiders or have been excluded from the in-group. Jackson’s fiction is for the most part not actually fantastic, but she frequently depicts behavior and psychological violence that is not acknowledged as such at the conscious level of the narrative, and in doing so presents mundane reality as troubled with sinister currents that can lead, unpredictably, to bizarre and even dangerous situations beyond the individual’s control. Jackson’s treatment of mundane reality, that is to say, casts into sharp relief the artificiality of the style known as “realism.”

(I hadn’t realised LoA use such thin paper, though! I’m afraid to start reading my copy for fear I’ll tear the pages.)

EDIT: See also Laura Miller on is Shirley Jackson a great American writer?

Reading List: “Rats”

From a writer whose stories tend to be relaxed about their storyness to Veronica Schanoes’ profoundly anxious tale from Interfictions: “The shape of it will feel right,” the narrator tells us up-front. “This feeling is a lie. All stories are lies […] There is no narrative causality” (142). True, and not an uncommon observation. Scarlett Thomas published a novel about it, just last month. But it’s a big gun to bring out in a short story, and I think Adrienne Martini’s assessment of the story is right: “a raw effort with some truly sardonic moments that never quite moves beyond cliché.”

We open — after further dire warnings that the story-shape will betray us — on a young, sadly childless couple in Philadelphia. They visit fertility clinics, and generally try everything to have a child; and, eventually, they succeed. The “four shadows” — grandparents — visit the newborn and make fairy-tale predictions about her life: “She will have an ear for music”; “She will be brave and adventurous”; “She will always be alone in her suffering”; “On her seventeenth birthday, [she] will prick herself on a needle and find a — a respite, you might say — and after she has done that, she will be able to rest, and eventually she will be wakened by a kiss, a lover’s kiss” (144-5). Sleeping Beauty, in other words.

Lily grows up with a sense of “burning gnawing rats under her skin”. She falls into the punk scene, and the respite-on-a-needle turns out to be the high of heroin. She moves to London. “Can you recognise Lily?” (148) the narrator asks us, and later, “Do you recognise this story yet?” (150). Her relationship with her boyfriend becomes — as we can tell it will — fully abusive. Eventually she asks him to kill her, and he agrees. So is the tragedy of this story “right”? For my money, Schanoes overplays her hand here:

You know the rest of the story. He dies a month later of an overdose procured for him by his mother. Why are you still reading? What are you waiting for? (153)

At which point, I think: I’m not waiting for anything. I’m reading to see if you put any further spin on the tale. Then:

They were children, you know. And there still are children in pain and they continued to die and for the people who love them that is not romantic. (153)

This would seem less trite, perhaps, if the story hadn’t gone out of its way to make us understand that what it was about to show us was in no way romantic — was a lie — from the start. But there’s a fairly substantial paragraph in this vein, and only the story’s very last sentence achieves any sense of real outrage, real force:

Death has no narrative arc and no dignity, and now you can silkscreen these two kids’ pictures on your fucking T-shirt. (153)

“This story is about what it means to grieve for the suffering of a thoroughly unpleasant, even hateful, person”, writes Schanoes in the story’s afterword. I didn’t get a sense that Lily was a particularly unpleasant person. I just thought she was trapped in a particularly unpleasant story.

Reading List: Winterstrike

Winterstrike coverAfter a great splurge in the 1990s — evident in the list of notable works compiled by John Joseph Adams in this 2004 IROSF article — Mars sf hasn’t had all that much play in the last decade, with the most notable recent entry in the subgenre aside from the book on the desk probably being Kage Baker’s The Empress of Mars (2009). The original venue of planetary romance has, perhaps, lost some of its mystique, if not its allure: Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road/Ares Express duology aside, it’s hard to think of examples that don’t make a point of treating Mars literally, now that we know enough to do so.

Winterstrike makes a play to reclaim Mars as a venue for mythic-fantastic adventure — it tells of high adventure and political shenanigans, all set in the far-distant future when a dying sun glowers over a land long since terraformed and colonised, and technology is far more than sufficiently advanced — and arguably its greatest success is as a venue. Its Mars is a vivid place, painted in rich colours and striking contrasts; it opens with a woman in “a mass of vitrified stone striped as white as bone and as red as a still-beating heart” — a tower in a crater at the centre of the city of Winterstrike — wearing, prosaically, “woollen mittens knitted by a grandmother” (1-2). The images we’re familiar with from Spirit and Global Surveyor and the rest are buried by such language, a ghost landscape beyond the novel’s present – several layers beyond, in fact. In a later scene, one of the novel’s narrators uses some of the powerful “haunt-tech” available to the elites of this Mars to view the memories of a ruined city; it is precisely a haunting effect, and in general the deployments of this technology, which also include strange organic machines and space travel that is a kind of death, provide some of the novel’s most visceral moments, all the while contributing to the sense of an ancient world, vastly different to the one we’re starting to know. Perhaps the one attribute retained from our associations with the planet is the chill promised by the title, complete with, wittily, frozen canals running through Winterstrike’s heart.

Across this landscape run two cousins. Essegui Harn and Hestia Mar are noble daughters of the Matriarchy of Winterstrike. The former is the woman we meet in the tower, ringing the bell that marks the start of the midwinter festival of Ombre. Soon after the novel begins, her younger sister Leretui — disgraced since she was caught with a vulpen man-remnant — either flees or is abducted from the lovingly restrictive embrace of her family, and Essegui is not just charged with finding her but cursed to do so by a compulsive “geies” cast by a “majike” in the employ of her family. Hestia, meanwhile, is a spy for Winterstrike; she voluntarily indentured herself to the same majike to escape life as a political pawn for her mother. Sent to the rival Matriarchy of Caud in pursuit of an ancient weapon, she also finds a remnant of an ancient library in the form of a “ghost warrior”, whose flayed body is sustained by more ancient technology — “She moved stiffly beneath the confines of her rust-red armour: without the covering of skin, I could see the interplay of muscles” (14) – and who accompanies Hestia more or less enigmatically through the rest of the novel. Before too long, both Winterstrike and Caud have been attacked, and both Essegui and Hestia are off on longer journeys, relating their various escapades in alternating chapters.

If the greatest strength of Winterstrike is its setting, its greatest weakness is how its narrators both rush across that setting almost without pause. It’s surely telling that even two hundred pages into the novel it’s not clear what the nature of the weapon used to attack the cities is, or even exactly what it did. When they are allowed to reflect on their situations, Essegui and Hestia have fairly interesting things to report, but they’re not often given the time to make meaningful choices. Far more often the end of each short chapter sees them thrown into another peril: kidnapped, chased, shot at or otherwise attacked, and so on and so forth. It’s all beautifully constructed, with the two narratives gracefully converging for the lightest of touches, and then separating dramatically. But it’s also often somewhat unengaging. The amount of artifice involved is clear from the neatness with which the closing chapters reflect the novel’s opening, and it could be argued as appropriate to the tale’s mythic ambitions (not for nothing are fairytales invoked with reference to some character’s storylines), but by virtue of some odd “interludes” that alert us to Leretui’s situation, and the involvement of a faction on ancestral Earth, the reader is pretty much always ahead of the not entirely dynamic duo. The ennui and looming inevitability that result can also be seen as apt for a story that repeatedly emphasises that it’s taking place on an old world, one where “You know how it is, these days […] everything’s breaking down” (160), but it’s still probably the case that neither Essegui’s story nor Hestia’s is as interesting as that of Leretui, who is right at the heart of what turns out to be a plot to restore “balance” to Martian society.

Said balance, as you may guess, has to do with the absence of anything we would recognise as men, devolved in the wake of ancient, unstable genetic adaptations for the inhospitable native Martian surface into what Essegui and Hestia certainly think are various bestial subspecies. Once again, the novel’s present is shadowed by its past: “The oldest legends tell of cycles,” Leretui is told; “first women dominated, and then men, and now women again.” As far as the novel’s prime antagonist is concerned, the citizens of Mars “need to get past that kind of thinking […] need equality” (147). Bestial men is a trope that’s cropped up elsewhere in Williams’ work — it’s a feature of her Darkland/Bloodmind duology — but this is the most interestingly I’ve seen her integrate it into the fabric of a novel, since it’s far from clear that “equality” is a meaningful concept to apply to what’s left of men. That said, it becomes frustratingly clear in the last thirty pages or so that Winterstrike is not a complete story, and I suspect that if sequels ever do get published (and in the end, despite Winterstrike‘s weaknesses, I hope they do), they will gradually move towards the reintroduction of men, not least because it turns out they do still exist elsewhere in the solar system. From another point of view, what the novel’s antagonists are struggling for is an escape from the weight of history that hangs on Winterstrike: this is in very literal ways a book about how the past remains and is reconfigured into the present, and I suspect that sequels would proffer a fatalistic opinion on the possibility of that escape coming good.

Some of the future history behind Winterstrike has, I think, been outlined in other of Williams’ novels, such as Banner of Souls (2006), that I haven’t read. But even beyond this, Winterstrike felt very strongly embedded in the science fiction megatext — perhaps partly because the central trope of a woman-only world has such an illustrious history, from Herland via Whileaway, but mostly, I’m sure, because I just happen to have read a set of contemporaneous books whose themes and content set up interesting resonances. I can’t help thinking, for instance, that it would have been fascinating to have read this novel in the context of the 2009 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist; it could be compared on the one hand with Sherri Tepper’s approach to mythologising science fiction, and on the other with Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns, which also features two first-person narrators drawn from the same clone stock. Williams’ narrators have the same problem as do Reynolds’, namely that they sound the same (give or take slightly more indications of confidence from Hestia, and a slightly less worldly perspective from Essegui), but reading Winterstrike and occasionally being reminded that, yes, everyone is female (for some reason, perhaps not helped by the fact that she’s most often referred to by name or title and not by pronoun, I kept having to snap myself out of visualising the majike as male) is a useful underlining of how Reynolds rigged his set-up. The other book that came to mind while reading Winterstrike wasn’t nominated for the Clarke Award, but did win that year’s Tiptree; it is of course The Knife of Never Letting Go, a radically different planetary romance that portrays a society in which the gender balance is massively lopsided in the other direction, and which is an interesting contrast if only because it makes clear how matter-of-fact Williams is about the fact that her women have spread out into every social role. Perhaps it’s this very backgroundedness, relative to the gothic intensity of the other elements of Winterstrike, that led to the novel’s slightly surprising omission from the Tiptree honour list; but for me such a normalised, grounded imagining makes a significant contribution to the unarguable distinctiveness of Williams’ Mars.

Reading List: The Heritage of Hastur

The Heritage of Hastur coverWhatever the virtues of The Heritage of Hastur — and to my mind they are limited in the extreme, although apparently enough people thought it had virtues to nominate it for a Nebula Award in 1976 (although not, so far as I can tell, the Hugo Award that the back cover of the edition I read claims) — it is a deeply tedious read. This is, in part, because it contains dialogue like this —

“You’re a licensed matrix mechanic, aren’t you, Lew? What’s that like?”

This I could answer. “You know what a matrix is: a jewel stone that amplifies the resonances of the brain and transmutes psi power into energy …” (32)

— despite the fact that “As you know, Bob” must have been a cliche even in 1975. And in part it’s because Marion Zimmer Bradley is careful never to tell you just once what she can tell you three times. For example:

“Give it up, Regis. Only a catalyst telepath can ever do it safely and I’m not one. As far as I know, there are no catalyst telepaths alive now.” (33)

Two pages later, some narration from the above speaker:

Then he had at least latent laran. Arousing it, though, might be a difficult and painful business. Perhaps a catalyst telepath could have roused it. They had been bred for that work, in the days when Comyn did complex and life-shattering work in the higher-level matrices. I’d never known one. Perhaps the set of genes was extinct. (35)

And a scant three pages on, from the same narrator:

A catalyst telepath probably could have reached him. But in these days, due to inbreeding, indiscriminate marriage with nontelepaths and the disappearance of the old means of stimulating these gifts, the various Comyn psi powers no longer bred true. […] As far as I knew, there were none left alive. (38)

Nor is this the last time we are earnestly informed that a catalyst telepath is urgently needed, but that there are none left alive. The problem with this – or at least, the first problem with it — is that it all rather primes the pump, so that it’s no surprise at all when a catalyst telepath does turn up, and so that it’s blindingly obvious who said catalyst is about fifty pages before Bradley will admit it to us. And the whole novel is as thuddingly obvious as this. It certainly doesn’t help that there’s a complete lack of spark in Bradley’s writing. The Heritage of Hastur tells, according to the back cover, this epic, tragic story:

This is the complex and compelling tale of the early life of Regis Hastur, Darkover’s greatest monarch. But HERITAGE also spins the terrifying and heartbreaking story of those who sought to control the deadly Sharra Matrix, and tells how Lew Alton met and lost his greatest love, Marjorie Scott.

The two narratives are told in alternate chapters, Lew’s in the first person, and Regis’ in the third person. Despite the blurb’s emphasis, I’d say the end result is much more Lew’s book than Regis’; it’s Lew who is sent to investigate rumours of an alliance between a rogue Darkovan kingdom and Terrans, and Lew’s decision to try to use the Sharra Matrix that leads to the novel’s climax. But neither strand lives up to its promise. Here’s the young Regis, resentful of the path laid out before him by his heritage, yearning to escape offworld:

Below him an enormous cargo ship was in the final stages of readying for takeoff, with refuelling cranes being moved away, scaffoldings and loading platforms being wheeled like toys to a distance. The process was quick and efficient. He heard again the waterfall sound, rising to a roar, a scream. The great ship lifted slowly, then more swiftly and finally was gone … out, beyond the stars.

Regis remained motionless, staring at the spot in the sky where the starship had vanished. He knew there were tears in his eyes again but he didn’t care. (45)

Do you feel moved to tears by his experience? ‘cause I don’t. There’s no specificity in this image, no gnarls or details to really ground it; it’s just a generic ship, going through a generic takeoff procedure. There’s nothing to really evoke the gap between Regis’ experience of life and the life he dreams of – or rather, there’s a huge gap, indicated by “… out, beyond the stars”, that we’re left to fill ourselves.

Lew, meanwhile, is our vehicle for experiencing Darkovan psychic life. But here too Bradley’s writing is flat:

His pain tore at me; I was wide open to it. Through the clawing pain I could feel his emotions, fury and a fierce determination, thrusting his will on me. “You will!”

I’m not Alton for nothing. Swiftly I thrust back, fighting his attempt to force agreement. “There’s no need for that, father. I’m not your puppet!” (55)

To anyone who’s read – to take a recent example – Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking books, such exchanges will seem rather lacking in intensity, and even plausibility. We’re told that there was “clawing pain”, but the experience is distanced: there’s no sense that Lew still feels that pain, looking back on it, just that he knows it was there at the time. “There’s no need for that, father”, meanwhile, sounds like a polite disagreement over tea, not a fierce riposte in the middle of a psychic duel. (Mind you, this is a novel in which the naughty words are literally censored: “He used a word which made Regis, used as his was to Guard Hall coarseness, gasp aloud and draw away, shaking and almost physically sick” [139]. So perhaps the politeness here shouldn’t be a surprise.) Later, Lew notes that in Darkovan psychic circles you have to get used “to knowing that everyone … can share all your feelings and emotions and desires”; but if there’s one thing that’s notable about Lew’s narrative, it’s that he’s locked inside his own head, with little sense of the experiences of others.

What energy the book does possess comes not from its sentences but from its melodrama; unfortunately, this is almost all psychologically unconvincing. Most notable is the aforementioned relationship between Marjorie – very nearly the novel’s only significant female character – and Lew, which is one of those supremely unconvincing romances in which the participants fall madly in love (and, inevitably, we’re told over and over that they’re madly in love) on the basis of no obvious fellow feeling whatsoever, and which consequently has absolutely no impact when it ends badly. But it infects other relationships as well: we will pass lightly over the honourable but unfortunate attempt at including gay characters, save to note that the insistence that the bad gay is bad for reasons that have nothing to do with his gayness comes, precisely because Bradley repeats it so often, to have an air of protesting too much, while it’s noticeable that the good gay remains chaste for the entire novel.

All of this is a tremendous disappointment. I did not want to dislike The Heritage of Hastur; I actually wanted quite badly to like it, since the planetary romance itch – taking the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s definition of the form, as “Any sf tale whose primary venue (excluding contemporary or near-future versions of Earth) is a planet, and whose plot turns to a significant degree upon the nature of that venue” – is one that I don’t find contemporary sf particularly effective at scratching. And in the abstract, the Darkover setting sounds fine and interesting. Here’s how the Encyclopedia describes it:

[…] perhaps the most significant planetary romance sequence in modern sf […]

Darkover’s inhabitants — partially bred from human colonists of a previous age — successfully resist the Empire’s various attempts to integrate them into a political and economic union. Darkovans have a complex though loosely described anti-technological culture dominated by sects of telepaths conjoined in potent “matrices” around which much of the action of the series is focused. Increasingly, questions of sexual politics begin significantly to shape the sequence, and to cast an ambivalent light upon the gender distortions forced primarily upon women (and the androgyny required by all aspirants to a higher state) through the strange exigencies of Darkovan culture.

[…] Shadowy, complex and confused, the world of Darkover is increasingly a house of many mansions; a few (either writers or readers) seem to feel unwelcome.

This is, indeed, what I want from a planetary romance: a full exploration of an alternate human society. Unfortunately, little of the sophistication claimed here is in evidence in The Heritage of Hastur. The central conflict of the book – and, I gather, the series – has to do with the relationship between Darkover, an early colony that developed its psychic potential as a result of a lack of the materials needed for more mechanistic technology, and the rest of human space, and in particular whether Darkover should join broader human society, or remain separate. This has potential — there is an obviously useful frisson to be generated from the juxtaposition of higher and lower-technology societies, not to mention the more general questions of community identity that this set-up raises – and Heritage is not entirely without moments when you can feel the weight and frustration of, as one character puts it, “living inside a dead past”, the cost of an enforced societal stasis. Even with the flatness of Bradley’s writing, it does add some shading to Regis’ otherwise by-the-numbers reluctance to embrace his destiny.

But there’s a wearying thinness to the cultural construction. We’re told that Darkover’s culture is descended from a mix of Spanish, Gaelic and English colonists; it’s good that we’re told, because to that point, names aside, the lands of the Seven Domains are to all intents and purpose a generically ersatz feudal setting. And while it is rather wonderful, in a pomp-deflating sense, that among all the grandly named nobles there is one that the text regularly insists on referring to as “Bob”, the court of which he is part, which should be (we’re told is) the best of a fusion between Darkovan custom and Terran tech, feels little different to every other place we see. And so on and so forth. Even ignoring the wince-inducing comments about “alien blood” in human lines – I hold out some faint hope that this is explained in other Darkovan books as simply a family mutation, and that Bradley isn’t actually trying to offer up human/alien interbreeding as plausible – it becomes increasingly clear that The Heritage of Hastur is not, in any meaningful sense, science fiction. The Darkovan psychics are functionally wizards, and the Sharra Matrix is your standard immensely powerful but corrupting magic item: what we have here is the most generic of fantasy narratives, complete with a map to travel across, and even some ballads.

This last problem, of course, will only be a problem for some readers. Those who see fantasy and science fiction as straightforwardly interchangeable will (assuming they can get past all the other flaws chronicled above) not be bothered by the idea that Darkover is generic fantasy with sf window-dressing. Me, though, I can’t see the point of it; and to be clear, the problem is not the fantasy so much as the generic. A large part of the point of setting a society such as Darkover within a science-fiction context – for me, the major attraction of planetary romance, which I would not dispute is a kind of fantasy – has to be that it creates a distinct perspective from which to interrogate that society’s values. But all Bradley seems to be interested in is the recreation of too-familiar tropes. In this as in other things, repetition is the novel’s undoing. As The Heritage of Hastur wears on, we’re told with increasing frequency and emphasis that Regis Hastur really is born to lead, while others are born to serve (when a friend offers him his service, it is “a pleasure and a relief” for that friend); and while we may well be meant to greet such statements with scepticism, with Regis only once allowed the faintest of twinges that something might not be right with the distribution of power in his society, clumsiness can’t help but start to look a little like convenience – or even, whatever the Encyclopedia may say about the Darkover series in the round, an endorsement.