My life has been fairly consumed lately with family-related travel - nothing bad, actually things are pretty good, it's just basic aging parent stuff, but I'm back home and looking forward to a couple of upcoming months of summer and quiet routine.
Anyway, I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to try to write about books I'd read earlier this year before I forget about them, and I decided to get started on that!
Earlier this spring I reread the Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman for the first time since I was a teenager. These are high fantasy books from the mid-80s, and I went in with rock bottom expectations, because it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that would have aged very, very badly. (Although I still do genuinely enjoy their Death Gate books, which hit my id square on.) These were actually the first books of theirs that I read. I read Dragonlance later - the thing they're best known for - because of a compulsive need after reading Darksword to find everything else they'd written, because I LOVED these books (though even as a not very critical teenage reader, I absolutely hated the fourth book and therefore I skipped it on the reread, because I suspect the intervening 35 years would not have improved it at all).
So my genuinely surprising discovery is: I do still really like these books! (Except most of the third book, which is a sudden genre shift that does not work for me at all, but I also reread these books often enough, back in the day, to remember exactly where the good parts are, and so I read the third book in about half an hour consisting mostly of skimming for the hurt/comfort.) The parts that nailed my teenage id squarely to the wall do in fact still hit my id hard, the worldbuilding is neat, and also, I think I can pinpoint the main reason why I fell so hard and fast for these books, and specifically for the first book, which is definitely the best of the three.
These characters have All Of The Feelings, All Of The Time, and you just didn't really get this kind of intense, high-key, very personal emotions in a lot of 70s/80s fantasy. That is, the characters are mostly focused on each other, not on the quest object; in fact, there isn't even really that much of a quest object in the first book - the Darksword of the title shows up around 90% of the way through the book. It's mostly just people living their lives and having relationships and experiencing Lots Of Emotions about it. I loved it then, and it turns out I still love it now. Well, I loved it with decreasing amounts of enjoyment as the series goes on; book 2 has way too much focus on a teenage romance with an unfortunately bland love interest (absolutely killer climax, though), and book 3 is ... everything that book 3 is.
But I went into the first book halfway expecting to be thoroughly disillusioned, and instead I really had a great time. I mean, there's stuff that didn't age well, and I didn't remember even slightly how overwhelming the pseudo-Christian religious focus of the books is. (Death Gate had more religion than I remembered, but at least it's fairly background; in these books it's front and center.) But on the whole, I still loved most of what I used to love. I'm not sorry I reread it.
The other thing I didn't remember was how intensely pro-revolution, pro-proletariat these books are, by the standards of fantasy at the time, or even now. It's explicitly focused on the peasants in the magic world being oppressed by the nobility, and their attempts to revolt are a running thread throughout the first 2 books. This never really comes together in the end because of the sudden sideways book 3 plot swerve into a completely different plot entirely, but it's definitely not even background, it's very much there.
And the worldbuilding in these books is really neat. That part I did remember; it was especially striking to me in the context of the kind of samey nature of 1980s epic fantasy, but it's still pretty unusual. Weis & Hickman do really love to construct their magic worlds.
In the Darksword world, literally everyone has magic. Magic is called Life, because they believe it is necessary to live, that it animates everything and everyone, and they use it for absolutely every task from cooking to making necessary objects and art. Tools are not only unnecessary but believed to be evil. People fly everywhere.
But there's a catch, which is that most people don't naturally have enough magic to do all of this. They're dependent on a religious caste called Catalysts, who have very little magic of their own and can't take in more, but can channel magic to other people who can then use it to fly and produce wonders and live lives of luxury. Catalysts, being essentially non-magical, are blessed with the Power of Suck and are simultaneously respected and necessary (since basically no one can do anything without them) while also being looked down upon somewhat because they can't actually do magic themselves and have to walk everywhere. The nobility may call freely on catalysts to give them magic for any purpose at all, while peasants are allowed only enough to do their work and sometimes deliberately starved of it to keep them humble. This, as you can imagine, is working out well.
Catalysts are born, not chosen. Everyone is born to one of nine magical specialties called Mysteries. Six of them are elemental, the seventh is no longer found in the world but still respected (necromancy/communing with the spirit world), the eighth is the catalysts (the Mystery of Life), and the ninth is the Mystery of Technology and is banned.
And then a child is born with absolutely no magic at all, and the plot starts.
Since magic is Life, children without magic are considered Dead, and are forbidden food or comfort until their bodies realize that they are already dead. (Read: they are exposed to die.) All babies are tested for the presence of Life. Nearly all of them pass. In this particular case, the baby is the prince of the realm, and the catalyst in charge of holding the baby while he goes through the tests is a young just-past-acolyte named Saryon. The baby fails the tests, and Saryon has a crisis of conscience over whether the child who is clearly very alive is truly Dead, but allows the baby to be taken away to die.
Not too long after this, a young woman shows up in one of the peripheral farming villages carrying a baby. She is clearly of noble origin, but wearing rags. She will not talk about the baby's father. She begs a job in the village and raises the child into a life of abuse, keeping him apart from the other children and teaching him sleight of hand as a supposed game. The child, Joram, slowly begins to realize he doesn't have the magic everyone else has, and the game becomes deadly real as he figures out that if he doesn't manage to convince everyone else he has magic, they're going to kill him. His mother feeds him a steady diet of physical and emotional abuse, combined with stories of how much better he is than anyone else in the village and how she and he were thrown out of their noble home and forced to labor in the fields, and someday they will go back to claim their birthright. Denied actual love or contact with anyone who isn't a narcissistic abuser, Joram grows up bitter, furious, and cold.
Meanwhile, Saryon's role in the baby prince's failure to pass the tests, however involuntary, has caused him to be kicked down to the bottom of the catalyst hierarchy and given the job of continuing to test babies for Life and consigning the failures to death, so his life is going really great.
(All of this takes place in the first few chapters.)
Spoilers go on from here!
( Extensive spoilers for all three books )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
