Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  Central to the tale is a typical Tepper heroine: a young orphan called Dismé Latimer. She possesses a book that is seemingly incomprehensible but which she eventually deciphers as the diary of her ancestor Nell Latimer, one of the scientists who documented the course of the Visitor's unorthodox spacecraft as it sped towards the Earth. More, Nell and select bands of other scientists took the precaution, before the impact, of setting themselves into cryogenic sleep at various centres throughout the world, emerging from their slumbers in widely separated shifts to observe their descendants' rebuilding (or, more like it, building anew) of civilization.

  There are delicious baddies galore, both human and supernatural; and in due course there is what is in effect a Last Battle straight from more traditional high fantasy ... which, I would argue, is what The Visitor actually is. And this is what's so exciting about this book, I feel: where before Tepper has written fantasies that are finally rationalized to become science fiction, with The Visitor she at last takes the obvious next step. Yes, there are many of the trappings of sf here – aliens, a far future Earth, classy human technology, and so on – but at the end all is not rationalized: extraterrestrial in origin those monsters and indeed some of the goodies might be, but that doesn't affect in the slightest their status as beings of the supernatural, rather than of physical reality. What Tepper has done is to create a full-blooded fantasy – and a superbly realized, gorgeously readable one at that – which just happens to be set in a sciencefictional venue and draws upon some aspects of science and technology (and sf) as elements of that fantasy.

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  One might be tempted to come out with the old cliché that, if you're going to buy just one book this Spring, then The Visitor should be it, but actually there've been a lot of extremely good books in the field of fantastic fiction these past few months. A few that come randomly to mind are Harry Squires's What Rough Beast, George Foy's The Last Harbor, Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools, and of course Michael Moorcock's The Dreamthief's Daughter, while a couple of glorious revised reissues have been Nancy Collins's Tempter and especially Sylvia Louise Engdahl's long-neglected Enchantress from the Stars – one of the best sf novels ever published, but published into the YA ghetto. (The new YA imprint Firebird is shortly to release the paperback of the Enchantress reissue.) And also there's been Alice Borchardt's The Dragon Queen.

  Borchardt, you will recall, was the author much heralded a while back as doing for werewolves what Anne Rice had done for vampires; accordingly, and particularly because he'd read a couple of the early Borchardts, this reviewer opened The Dragon Queen with a certain deeply rooted feeling of malaise. What, he wondered, might Borchardt do with the tale of Guinevere, Arthur's queen, that hadn't been done very much better before? Little reassurance is to be gained from the fact that the very first character we're introduced to is ... a werewolf. (Well, OK, he's a shapeshifter who alternates between man and wolf, but that's splitting bristles.) The book almost went back on the shelf in the wake of that discovery, but – very, very fortunately – it didn't.

  Arthurian fantasies do tend to be much of a muchness: some are better than others, but almost all are written in similar style and have similar preoccupations – one that is outstandingly different in both style and mood is the Fay Sampson series Daughter of Tintagel, which is a sort of oral history of Morgan Le Fay, but it's well out on its own limb (and excitingly so). Guinevere is generally treated as the least interesting of the central Arthurian characters: a sort of bimbo for the Age of Chivalry.

  Not in Borchardt's book she ain't. The version of the Arthurian cycle rendered in The Dragon Queen is a completely revisionist one. The villain of the piece is Merlin, here rendered as a youthful necromancer with an almost insane lust for power and power-broking. He is ably assisted by his lover, Arthur's mother, Queen Igrane, her youthful beauty preserved by foul necromantic means. Guinevere, who tells much of the story herself, is orphaned in infancy and reared by a family of (were)wolves, headed by the wily Maeniel; the family is shortly joined by the fussy rebel druid Dugald and the freed slave Kyra (one of the best characters in the book). The girl-child has an affinity for dragons, which are an accepted if rare part of the ecosystem in Dark Age Britain; she also has a natural aptitude for magic and, most importantly, a spiritual identification with the Fertility Goddess, here rendered under various names, including Athena and the Flower Bride, but generally appearing simply as "She", no proper noun being required.

  From the description so far you might still be tempted to think that The Dragon Queen is going to be just yet another feminist-slanted rehash of the standard Arthurian fodder, with a few dragons chucked in to give the cover artist something evocative to work with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Borchardt uses her materials, some traditional but many of them original, to create a fully fledged work of the fantastic that is wildly imaginative and astonishingly exhilarating. One symptom of true fantasy (as opposed to generic pap) is that the reader hasn't a clue what to expect in the next chapter but that, when the chapter in question arrives, filled with fresh and unanticipated marvels, it seems to belong rationally to the whole, whatever the logical system upon which the novel is based. Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking-glass is a fine example of a fantasy based on a highly non-mundane logical system, yet it passes this test; and The Dragon Queen is another. For neither Guinevere nor Arthur, preordained to be a breeding pair yet beating the system by genuinely falling in love, spend all their time in this world, being cast often instead, by the magical machinations of their elders, into otherworlds of varying degrees of strangeness, from a truly bizarre Land of the Dead to unnamed lands where "alive" and "dead" are merely arbitrary terms.

  Looking along the dreary bookstore shelves filled with myriad interchangeable titles of the general form Quest of the Dragonspume Volume VI: The Realms of Kumquat, one often has the dispiriting sense that high fantasy, for misguided commercial reasons, has departed the realm of fantastic literature to become an adjunct of the bodice-busting romance; it is a dismal truth that this is more or less an accurate statement of the case. The Dragon Queen, which – joy! joy! – has no central quest, no kitchen-boy-who-will-come-to-the-throne, no wise old mage apt to produce Dale Carnegie-style pronouncements, and no twee elves, is, like Tepper's The Visitor, a timely and heartening reminder that the potential of the discipline is still as great as ever.

  —Interzone (Special Infinity Plus Issue)