I didn’t re-read the first three Sharing Knife books before reading Horizon, having re-read them so recently. But I think it’s best to consider them all as one thing, because they don’t in any way stand alone. As one thing, I liked the first two, but I loved the second two. As they widen out, they get better and more interesting, and Horizon, which is the widest so far, is also the best. If you found the first two too slow, that’s not likely to be a problem with the others. They remain resolutely small scale and intimately focused, but that’s a virtue.
In my last post about these books, I talked about how they were Western fantasy, using the early history of the colonization of America to create a solid interesting fantasy world that’s different from all the other fantasy worlds. This time, I want to talk about the influence of Tolkien on them.
Everybody who writes fantasy now is influenced by Tolkien, even if only to violently react against him (China Mieville, Michael Moorcock). Some people slavishly imitate him (Terry Brooks) and others work to do their own thing inside the genre he shaped (Robert Jordan, Patrick Rothfuss). Now Tolkien wasn’t setting out to invent genre fantasy. I suspect he’d have been quite horrified to know that was what he was doing. But what he was doing in writing The Lord of the Rings was so powerful in terms of setting everyone’s imagination alight that genre fantasy followed along as a sort of inevitable consequence. What most people have done with it are variations on Tolkien’s main theme. What Bujold’s doing here is a very interesting extrapolations and variation on some of his minor themes.
In the last thread on these books, at comment 25 Lois says that her character Berry is her take on a “river maiden” in “the American version,” as opposed to Tolkien’s Goldberry. Berry is the boss of a riverboat. Nifty. “Tussling with Tolkien. Aren’t we all?” she writes. Well, yes, we certainly are.
Similarly, the Lakewalkers are a fascinating variation on the concept of Rangers, taken deeper and closer than any Rangers I’ve ever run across. Their whole way of life for countless generations has been dedicated to destroying Malices. In this world there was a great evil, and in defeating it it broke up into thousands of pieces, the Malices of the present day, which remain dormant underground until they erupt and start eating life. There are a lot of them, but not an infinite number, and as long as the Lakewalkers keep destroying them they’ll eventually stop being a problem. Meanwhile, the Lakewalkers are utterly dedicated to destroying them. They fight ultimate evil frequently—Dag can’t remember how many Malices he’s seen, only the twenty-six he’s slain personally. The Lakewalkers are a people who keep themselves apart—the entire personal plot of the books revolves around how unusual Dag and Fawn’s mixed marriage is. They live longer than ordinary people, they have unique Malice-killing abilities, and they have groundesense—magic—which the farmers don’t. They define their houses as tents and their home bases as camps, because at least in theory they are always moving to deal with the Malices.
The Malices are always a threat, and Lakewalker bones and souls are what destroy them, through the sharing knife that is the name and central concept of the books. The Lakewalkers are protecting the farmers they mostly despise and making a safe area for them to live in.
In Horizon we see them in the South, where there aren’t any Malices, where they’ve changed and grown richer they’re fading back into the general population, just as Tolkien has his Numenorians doing. They are Lakewalkers but they aren’t walking around the Lake, because there aren’t any Malices in the South. Dag starts to ask the question of what will happen when there aren’t any Malices left. The Lakewalkers have been regarding farmers as part of their support system. The Lakewalkers have in fact been living in a post-apocalyptic situation, and have formed a post-traumatic stress culture, but the farmers, who have been protected in safe land all this time from what they call blight bogles, and are increasing in population and developing technology hand over fist. So there’s this culture clash, there’s a real threat, and there’s a real question of what happens afterwards.
Also in Horizon we get another really bad Malice outbreak. Nobody writes exciting as well as Bujold does when she’s in good form, and she’s in absolutely breathtaking form here. As well as giving us personal development and a look at more of the world, we also get a hair-raisingly tense story. And there’s a beautiful leathery bat-winged Malice that’s definitely reminiscent of the Witch King of Angmar, but also entirely and horribly itself.
You don’t need to write a quest to get rid of jewelry to be walking in Tolkien’s footsteps, and it’s all the better if you don’t.
How interesting. I’d been waiting on these until they were complete, also the opening of the first one hadn’t grabbed me, but now that they are (thanks for the reminder), it’s clearly time to push them up the list.
I can’t add anything to the above.
The writing is indeed awesome, and there are a couple of quotes in this book that have entered my personal Hall of Honor.
I just finished reading the fourth one, staying up until 3:40 a.m. to do it. I found the first two to be a bit of a slog, but the third and fourth were much better.
My only regret is much the same regret I had at finishing Lord of the Rings: it looks like there’s an exciting time ahead in the culture of this world, a sort of renaissance as evil fades away and people begin to get along better, but we’re leaving it behind after it’s barely even begun.
(And I have to admit I had rather hoped for a sort of climactic ending where they discovered and killed the Granddaddy of All Malices, the heart of the ancient evil that caused them, ensuring safety forever after and perhaps shedding more light on the ancient mystery of exactly what had happened—maybe even reclaiming some of the ancient knowledge that was lost in the disaster. But in the end, I guess that wasn’t the story she set out to tell.)
Robotech: I think it wasn’t the story she was telling, and also it’s a story that a lot of other people have told — the Ultimate Defeat of All Evil and Return of the Old Magic! This was the long slow slog against evil, which makes for something much more unusual and interesting.
Re: Robotech: Yep. Not only was it not the story I was telling, it was the story my entire 1600 page story was arguing *against*.
Most epics are, in one way or another, war stories, and TSK was an epic all about waging peace. (As is romance, as is much comedy.) Which put it seriously at odds with several centuries of Western narrative tradition, I noted while wrestling with it all. I was asked recently in an interview why so little democracy is ever shown in the F&SF genres, and it occurred to me that democracy, too, resists the usual narrative expectations, or at least, habits, because it, too, is all about waging peace. Democracy as an argument that goes on endlessly, and never reaches closure…?
It wasn’t just the minor aspects of Tolkien (and the genre he spawned) I was taking on, here. How successfully, it’s not for me to know, but there you go. There is a trick to deliberately thwarting reader expectations — you have to deliver in the end something as good or better than the reward that was withheld. Which is harder than it sounds — those narrative habits are so ingrained *because* they work, over and over. And over. (Quite like the romance template, I must observe. Which points to something biological, under all the social camouflage.)
Ta, L.
(PS – The wide green world will start to recover its past in about 3 generations, when the farmers invent archeology.)
L., thank you for the explanation.
Broadly, I’d say your take on the ethics of the situation is more typical of science fiction than of fantasy. In science fiction it’s assumed that the world will just keep going, whereas a lot of fantasy has a heavy eschatological (my spell-checker does not believe in that word) freight. Tolkien was influenced by his Catholicism in this; he wrote about a “eucatastrophe” (grumble, gripe, spell-checker) and LoTR has two: a restoration of secular order in the return of the king, and a restoration of spiritual order in the destruction of the ring and the renunciation of the secular power it can bring. Science fiction is perhaps more Buddhist in its eschatology: in most sf, “samsara”–keeping-going–is the order of the day. Or perhaps more Protestant.
PS: Does your PS mean there’s another book in the offing?
Viz Randwolf’s PS to my PS — I am presently working on a new Miles book for Baen, after which I am contract-free, and intend to keep it that way for a while. The wide green world does have other possibilities, but so do my other two series, plus there’s the possibility no one ever asks for — something completely new. So I guess the short answer is “No, not at this time.”
Ta, L.
Hi Lois,
I just lost several paragraphs of my take on why TSK should or could be considred SF rather than F. I will try to do it again in notepad some other time. In case you don’t remember me I’m the guy with Metastatic Prostate CA that you talked to at Denvention. I’m happy to report that my chemo has been OK so far (I still have four more treatments to go). I’m sorry that Amazon wouldn’t let me post a review before the release date – apparently you have to have been anointed with oil or have submitted enough reviews to have made a name for yourself before they will let you do that! I like the whole series a lot and have added my 2c/ worth in a couple of places and may do more now that I have an angle that hasn’t been beaten to death. Thanks again for the Draft.
Keep warm.
…Art Parham
Ah, Art! You’re still with us!
Good. I hadn’t been sure.
I’ll look forward to your reader response, when you get some wordtech that doesn’t eat it. (Hate it when that happens.)
Ta, L.
Lois: I’d like you to write something completely new!
And SF.
Me, too. You write it, I’ll read it.
Actually Lois – I’d be happy for something new. I mean, don’t get me wrong, more Miles is a wonderful thing… but we left him in a pretty good place, all things told, and my little fan girl heart kind of goes eeek when I think about all the things that could go wrong, in order to be explored in a new book.
Gifts are a test. Great gifts are a great test. I’m not going to discourage LMB from achieving greatness at her test. She writes, I buy.
Why?
A decade ago: LMB is leaving Barrayar for a new universe? No! Too many good authors have written one great and several mediocre universes.
Curse of Chalion published: It’s an LMB. Buy it; it may not be great but it won’t be awful.
A week later: Buy another copy to loan to friends. I’m re-reading my copy.
Several years later: “The Wide Green World”? But she still has two gods left in Chalion!
Sharing Knife: Beguilement published: Hmmm. It’s not fantasy. It’s not romance. I have to wait a year for the rest?
My worst thing LMB can do scenario (besides stop writing): LMB is writing a “how to get rich in 21 days” book? Buy it. And read it at least three times before deciding that LMB can write something that’s not worth reading.
But, yes, I am looking forward to seeing Miles at 40.
@vkw Miles at 40 might be fun. But do we know that is what we will get? He was presumably 33 or so at the end of Diplomatic Immunity. Will the next story pick up from there, jump ahead (Miles at 50, 70, 90?) or even go back in time (there are many Dendarii missions that have been merely hinted at…).
I’d think Lois would find it hard to go back to a pre “Memory” Miles- but it would be interesting to see how she did it!
Oo! A new Miles book! I wanna know how Ivan copes with Miles’ kids! (I know it probably isn’t an entire book worth, but I have this picture of the kids running rings around him, and Ivan collapsing on a couch somewhere, muttering, “THREE of him, God, how will the Empire survive THREE?”)
–Phil
phil @15 – Oh, my. I agree. And poor Ivan will only be getting more and more Vor maidens paraded in front of him, so Alys can get him married.
(I hope he remains a bachelor, personally.)
As I recall Lois once said that she was turning to other things because the natural next big event in the Vorkosiverse would be the death of Aral and she wasn’t ready for that yet. In my opinion the next story that needs telling is Ivan growing up (finally). Miles is settling down and Mark is pretty much taken care of.
After that I want a Five Gods book. In them Lois crated gods that were both believable and worth believing in. A feet truly unmatched in modern literature.
I must be the outsider here. I was a tad disappointed by Horizon. It was all a bit too easy. Dag turns out to be not turning into monster, people don’t trust him, but he gets to be gruff and competent, Fawn gets to be sparky and nice and everyone comes round. It was OK as a latest chapter in an ongoing soap, but it lacked the kind of big painful reveal I’d expect from the final volume of a quartet.
In the end everybody turned out to have made just the right choices all along. Compare Curse or Paladin.
I admit I’d love to see a sequel that goes into just what changes start coming about as a result of the new ideas Dag and Fawn have introduced. It looks like Sumac and Arkady plan to try this “raise Lakewalker children among farmers” idea to see whether the idea of Lakewalkers living among Farmers can work or not — I’d like to see how that goes, particularly considering what Dag learned in Passage about separate justice. My first guess says that disputes between Lakewalkers and Farmers ought to be decided by mixed-blood folk, but there’s a lot of room for variations.
For the question of “what happens when a malice emerges under a farmer town,” ground shields look like a big piece of whatever solution is to be found, but I sure don’t see them as the whole thing; I’d guess that most farmers won’t have one, due to the difficulty in making them. (It doesn’t look like any maker would want to make more than one per day, at most, and most camps won’t have more than 1 or 2 makers who can do it.) In essence, this part of the solution is a technological answer; Farmers and Lakewalkers living together in at least some communities is a sociological one. One effect for Clear Creek alone should be a noticeable increase in life expectancy and a population boom….
The technological solution actually looks like a whole new area of magery/medicine making to work in. (In effect, marriage cords are being used to function as batteries to supply power to involutions, so they can be much more powerful than they had been before.) I can easily picture these kind of involutions being made so that they can awaken and respond to asthma troubles, seizures, heart rhythm troubles, and quite a bit more. Dag would probably at some point be interested in making a Farmer-girl-fertile-time detecting one, too…. The shields themselves want a “how much power is left” detection ability in addition to the “turn it off so the medicine maker can help you” one – a nice effect of the “how much power is left” addition is that fake ones are *much* harder to pass off. The total effect on the society ought to be pretty spectacular over time, and I’d love to see some of that aspect being covered. And, of course, the concern that other Lakewalker-Farmer marriages might happen with binding strings becomes not just a possibility but a certainty — Lakewalker society overall is going to have to deal much more intelligently with the issue than the Hickory Lake people did.
LOTR shows us Samwise settling down and marrying, but it does not show us Arwen nursing a child while Aragorn washes diapers. In general, we see gardeners and farmers in the Shire, and no warriors until Merry and Pippin return; while in Rohan and Gondor, we only see the warrior class and no farmers. Mordor, too: if soldier orcs eat, who grows that food and where are the farms? Soldier orcs wear clothes; do Shagrat and Gorbag spin and weave?
Any story which includes farmers *in relationship* with a horse-riding, weapon-trained warrior class is a significant difference from LOTR.
Sharing Knife’s setting is somewhat like the Missisippi of Mark Twain. It has the discontinuity of not being on the frontier of a more “established” culture – one with cities and armies. It also lacks gunpowder, which significantly changes human’s relationship with bears, wolves and each other, and might affect the power balance between Lakewalkers and “farmers” (mundanes). We see clerks, but we don’t see a ruler or “county” government which appoints those clerks, and the tax collectors and police (or Watch) which goes with them… and with which the Lakewalker leaders could negotiate.
Well, any novel and any series can only raise X questions and deliver Y answers, and I’m happy with the questions and answers of Sharing Knife.
The farming lands that support Mordor are on the extreme right edge of the map, around Lake Nurnen. We’re told, I think in Appendix A5 but maybe in the main text, that Aragorn sets the slaves free and gives them those lands for their own (i.e. not part of Gondor/Arnor).