John Campbell Would Like It, I Suspect

[billroper]

Ok, so I've just finished reading all four books of Lois Bujold's The Sharing Knife series. And having done so, I've concluded that I wasn't actually reading a fantasy series. I was reading an SF series with fantasy trappings.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

You see, what this looks like to me is a post-apocalyptic tale following a great war where psionics were used. That's the source of the malices. And the blighted areas. And the Dead Lake, which looks to me like a slightly expanded version of the Great Lakes. Heck, you can still see the tip of Lake Michigan in the map. And the Great North Road looks an awful lot like I-80, while the Grace River sure looks like the Ohio, etc.

All of the magic that we see in the story is pretty much garden variety psionics. Some of it isn't too different from Gil the ARM.

Seriously, they're fine books and I greatly enjoyed them.

But John Campbell could have printed them in Analog (modulo some of the not-very-explicit sex which might have been a problem for him).

It's probably easier to sell a fantasy series than it is to sell SF though.

*sigh*

Anyway, I suspect that these thoughts aren't new with me. Anybody else either trip on this themselves or see someone who did?

Comments

SF/F

[hazelchaz]

I've read all four as well. I was hoping that somewhere along the line we'd get the origin story.

I mean, how does a society come up with an oath like "Absent gods!" without there being an implied past where they believed in gods?

[demoneyes.livejournal.com]

I've only read the first two, but they struck me more as a romance series with fantasy trappings. And reviews I've seen of the third suggest that it continues there.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I came to the same geographical conclusions as Roper. There's been some icecap melting also: Greymouth is NOT New Orleans; it is Natchez.

There was mention a time or two of the gods having deserted humankind when we seriously tried to kill ourselves off in the Big Brouhaha.

And Bujold herself comments in the SFBC booklet (whence I ordered MY set) that she was deliberately making the romance more central to the plot than in past books, just for the exercise.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I hadn't considered that the magic was a lot like psionics (and frankly I don't consider magic and psionics very different anyway; psionics is mostly the version of magic that is allowed in science fiction stories :-). Actually, come to think of it, there are stories that treat magic like technology (Lord Darcy, Rick Cook's Wizard series), so I think the whole line between fantasy (which I tend to define as the presence of working magic) and science fiction (which I tend to define as stories in which the plot is strongly affected by science or technology) is blurred.

I had noticed the strong resemblance to USA 1800s plus magic minus slavery, though. I kind of enjoyed it; I don't see a lot of fantasy books with that setting (Alvin Maker, but not a lot else).

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

That it was a post-apocalyptic alternate North America seemed pretty clear. But I didn't think the actual nature of the apocalypse mattered so much to whether it should be considered fantasy or s.f.. It seemed to me that what made it fantasy was that the characters believed that it was magic, in some form. The Lakewalkers dismissed their perceptions and ability to manipulate them - psionics - as perfectly natural, (if uniquely Lakewalker), but only to a point. At a certain rather cloudy "we can't explain it either" point, it became "magery" - magic. Either way, it was an excellently well-told story.

I'd love to see the backstory someday, though.

[sraun]

According to Lois, she definitely modeled the (piece of the) world (we see) on the upper Midwest. It's the area she grew up in, she didn't have to do any research to speak of on the plant and animal life. I didn't know it at the time, but channel catfish really can get that big!