Reading: McKillip, Van Scyoc, William Morris

McKillip's Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy: finished; 4?/5 overall, perhaps?

This was good as an overall experience, but the last book wasn't as fun as the second one. The first book was engaging enough, but as I mentioned before, the start was a little slow, there weren't any significant female characters, and the main character's primary struggles got a little exasperating. The second book was narrated by his betrothed instead, and it was much more fun for me - her internal journey was more sympathetic, but also the whole quest was a little less psychological, in the sense that there was an ensemble of other significant characters instead of just a series of challenges and wise teachers as in the first. The two protagonists are reunited and the third book has them traveling together, with more action and magic, even though the guy has the narration back, and it became more dramatic as the plot threads started drawing to a close... even though the ultimate solution to everything was a bit... wasn't. I suppose this is a normal problem for a story where there's an external adventure but the real spine of it is the protagonist's mental and emotional quest. I'll try more of her stuff, anyway.

Van Scyoc's Starmother: 4/5

I haven't read any Sydney J. Van Scyoc since I was a teenager, when I really liked the vintage 70s books I found in my mom's library. She wasn't as prolific, and was weirder, than my favorites, but the individual books often felt more cool, impressive, or brilliant than my favorite books. This is the first one I picked when I decided to reread her books, but I don't think I've read it before, actually. There are some truly hilarious cultural remnants of the 1970s in its style of future (definitely hard sf), but overall it was a really absorbing story. So when it ended, I was almost as surprised as at the end of the previously reviewed Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb, which felt like just about exactly one half of a novel and took me completely by surprise, ending with all the major plot threads somewhere around 50% and not even at a stopping place. In contrast, Starmother definitely did end at a kind of stopping place; it's just that the place it ended felt like the conclusion of act one of either three or five acts, so I was still extremely jostled in the event. It will be interesting to see if the rest of her ouvre diminishes in the same way in comparison to the halo of my memories.

The story itself has an interesting premise - a colonized planet with a strong ability to mutate anything on it, including people, produces a strain of humans who pass on traits and even memories through imprinting and are able to partially take on the form of the dominant native predator. The POV character is a very young cadet in an interplanetary Peace Corps assigned solo to this bog-and-jungle planet, which is divided between an insane anti-mutation religious cult that's sort of Puritan and a jungle-dwelling population with bizarre and sinister cultural practices who mostly don't even build shelters to live in (I didn't say it all seemed plausible). Although the premise is very different, in some ways the story and planet reminded me of John Varley's Titan/Wizard/Demon trilogy, which I liked a lot ~10 years ago.

William Morris's The Story of the Glittering Plain: Which Has Also Been Called the Land of Living Men or the Acre of the Undying 4.5/5

I read most of Morris's mediæval romance/fantasies a few years ago, but I had a few leftover, for one reason or another. This one has a very mediæval romance adventure sort of story, but with a pretty high fantasy premise. The protagonist is a young man named Hallblithe, a warrior of the House of the Raven, who lives in a semi-idyllic, pre-Christian Scandinavian-inspired society that is comparatively egalitarian and agrarian, until some mysterious sea-raiders pull up to the beach and kidnap his betrothed shortly before their scheduled wedding and leave a bunch of witnesses to tell him about it. One thing that's rather extra memorable about this one is that his betrothed is literally called "the Hostage" through the whole novel as if that's her name, although it need hardly be said that that is also her role in the story. Interesting choice there, but okay.

Hallblithe then meets a man in a sailboat who says essentially 'come with me if you ever want to see your betrothed again', so he does. There follows an interesting journey where he receives a message in a dream from his betrothed entreating him to come meet her at the Glittering Plain, and is then smuggled through a well-hidden secret sea route into an island that appears uninhabited, but conceals in a hidden valley a whole society that looks normal, but is made up of people who refuse to speak to him, except for one little old man lying in a cabinet bed in the empty house he eventually walks into, and the little old man tells him he was about to go to the Glittering Plain anyway and will take Hallblithe with him. They are sailed there in a longship and dropped off on the beach, where the old man almost immediately regenerates into his young self at the peak of health.

So this island is literally undying, and people just live there in this magic eternally unchanging, under a weird psychological effect that makes them tend to forget both their past lives and anything unpleasant that comes to their notice afterwards. Hallblithe turns out to have been tricked into the Glittering Plain, and most of the story thereafter is his unceasing efforts to escape from it. He eventually manages to sail back to the other island, which is only possible because he wasn't old and/or dead (the people who arrived in the Glittering Plain old just die if they leave, but people who arrive of free will can leave again - shades of all that scholarship/literature on Faery=Death, and also the debates about Valinor and Frodo and Gimli).

The secret-entrance island's reapperance provides an opportunity to explain (somewhat) what was going on before, and the man who kidnapped Hallblithe in the first place - who is actually called the Puny Fox because he's a sneaky giant - reappears as well to make amends, so that the only character who opposes Hallblithe and never becomes his ally afterward is the king of the Glittering Plain. The quest structure and the magical mystery make it fun reading, although it wasn't as enjoyable for me as some of Morris's other works with more significant female roles. The Hostage might as well be called The Fridge, but he was writing ca. 1900 and frequently did much better with female characters than Tolkien did half a century later, so I won't belabor the point. (Except I should note it's more like The Icebox because refrigeration hadn't been invented yet.)

Morris's The House of the Wolfings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (20%)

I've started this one, but two things have given me pause: 1. the amount of it that's in verse instead of prose is really pretty high, and it takes some effort to pay attention to the content instead of trying to sing it in my head; and 2. Apparently it's about some fictional germanic tribes' first encounter with the Romans, which seems a little ominous.