I am only now ... beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care. [p. 148]
Lynesse Fourth Daughter, accompanied by her laconic companion Esha Free Mark, is on a quest: a demon is threatening the land, and she seeks the help of the fabled sorcerer, Nyrgoth Elder, who aided her family centuries ago against the evil Ulmoth. The sorcerer, when they find him in his forbidding tower, is seven feet tall, horned, and wears 'slate robes that glittered with golden sigils'.
Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps, is woken from his long, artificial sleep by the outpost's caretaker routines. At first he thinks this might mean the return of the Explorer Corps, but there's been no communication from offworld in nearly three centuries. He's been abandoned, and the locals -- whose culture, and language, has evolved in leaps and bounds since he last mingled with them -- want his help. Lyn speaks of magic and demons, but Nyr is a scientist and a scholar, as he tries to explain.
Unfortunately both those words translate as something like 'wizard'.
On one level this is a straightforward, and very entertaining, exploration of the old axiom that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. (There's a bravura chapter where Nyr's explanation of colonisation is shown next to what Lyn hears. A great deal is lost in translation, as it were, though Nyr is speaking the local language as best he can: he doesn't understand the nuances or allusions in what he's saying.) On another level, it's a story about different ways of looking at the world; and on yet another, it's about Nyr's appalling loneliness and depression, and how he decides to deal with it. He has an enviable device, a Dissociative Cognitive System, which is supposed to cut him off from his feelings so he can make rational decisions: he is, perhaps, overreliant on it. (He tries to explain depression to Lyn, but what she hears is a tale about a beast that ceaselessly pursues and torments him.) The DCS can't be used constantly, though, and sometimes it is better -- healthier and more useful -- to experience the emotion than to block it out. (I say this as someone who has experienced mental health issues for much of my life.)
There are two narrative voices: Lynesse in third-person past tense, and Nyr in first-person present. I wonder how differently the story would read if these were switched: if we had Lyn's stream-of-consciousness rather than her framing of the story, and Nyr's mostly-dispassionate reflections on his actions.
This is a short novel, barely more than a novella, and it could easily have been a long one: I'd have loved to read more about Sophos 4, with its vestiges of high technology and its complex matriarchal society, the echoes of Earth culture (what is the red face that now appears on funerary urns?) and the various genetic modifications that have been made to the planet's inhabitants. But the story of Nyr and Lyn is contained and complete, and though it doesn't wrap everything up it does resolve in a very satisfactory way.
No comments:
Post a Comment