Emma Bull, War for the Oaks

[oyceter]

I haven't read this in years. My very first thought was something like, wow she spends a lot of time describing everyone's clothes! And: Wow, this was written in the eighties, wasn't it?

I still absolutely adore the phouka. I think he fits in with the Fool/Trickster type character that I like so much.

That said, a lot of it read like a first novel -- the sort of Mary-Sue-ish specialness about Eddi, her amazing skill with music and her ability to change the minds of the Seelie Court and the Lady while gaining magical powers of her own (sort of) remind me a great deal of the discussion in oracne's LJ a while back about the visitor to foreign culture gaining some sort of nifty martial art prowess.

I wonder if I would have noticed this if I had reread more frequently? Hrm.

Comments

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

Steven Brust, China Mieville, George R. R. Martin, Iain Banks, Charles de Lint, Lois McMaster Bujold, and everyone else I see when I glance at my shelves tends to feature protagonists who are special in some way, acquire special skills during the book, and/or save the day.

The only sf writer I can think of offhand whose characters do not possess extraordinary skills, do not acquire prowess in anything during the course of the book, and do not save the day is Maureen McHugh. And possibly Richard in Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE.

I wonder how much of this is a generational thing -- I don't think I've read a novel by anyone on the list above -- but I can think of a host of science fiction authors whose characters neither possess exceptional skills nor save the day. The protagonists of Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley tend to be average Joes caught up in circumstances they can't take control of. John Sladek's characters are pretty much normal, everday people, except that they're robots. Even Heinlein's characters (other than Valentine Michael Smith, of course) aren't so much possessed of extraordinary skills as they are more willing or better prepared to express their normal capabilities to the fullest. Even Alfred Bester's psychics and Dick's precognitives are normalized in futures where their special powers have become not-so-special in societies that have adapted to them.

The fantasy novels from the seventies and the eighties I've read, on the other hand, were all about the child who possessed secret powers and was marked out for great things. This is ironic, as those Del Rey paperbacks were uniformly derivative of Tolkien, who instead extols the potential contained within the ordinary.

This is not to say that science fiction ever did not contain exceptionally powerful characters -- there's a straight line running from A. E. Van Vogt's Slan through Dune to Ender's Game and beyond -- but I wouldn't call their presentation the dominant mode of the sf I used to read. I wonder what underlying shift occurred to change this.