Jo Clayton (1939–1998)

After writing the very belated 2010 reviews for Jo Clayton's Drinker of Souls trilogy, I was inspired to revisit her Duel of Sorcery trilogy. This is one of my childhood favorites. Moongather was published in 1982, followed quickly by Moonscatter in 1983 and three years later closed with Changer's Moon. The Dancer trilogy revisits the central protagonist and this phenomenal world a couple centuries later.

I consider this to be a seminal work of feminist fantasy, though I was not conscious of show more this as a child. It is very much an exploration of gender roles, how girls and women survive patriarchal societies, and to a lesser degree love and sexuality. It is the first instance I can recall reading of a lesbian (or at least bisexual) relationship, though as I indicated, sex is a relatively minor part of the story. And the bisexual characters aren't bad guys, unlike in the romance genre--sexual perversity clearly indicating their villainous nature.

The premise is an archetypical struggle between the (masculine) impulse to command and control and concomitant desire for efficiency and order, represented by Ser Noris, who has near-immortality and mastery of elemental powers that allow him to control anything inanimate yet is emotionally stunted, and the wasteful, extravagant, endlessly creative diversity of life, embodied in the goddess representing the feminine mysteries, fertility, love, and nature.

On a clifftop overlooking the valley that is the heart of her power, in the prelude of Moongather, Ser Noris challenges the goddess (embodied in her avatar Reiki Janja, a shamaness of a nomadic desert tribe) to a game for mastery of the world, or maybe just this continent. They draw cards to determine their "pieces," which is to say, the key characters and plot elements. In Moonscatter the face-off between Ser Noris and Reiki Janja on the cliff looks more like an abstract strategy game(say, for example, go): a gridlike game surface with stone playing pieces; in Changer's Moon it's more like a role-playing game, with dice and miniatures.

And so opens the wild adventure, following the epic quest format of most fantasy books. Our band of heroes emerges over the course of three books to resist the political and religious coup and subsequent oppression arising from the duel of sorcery as Ser Noris attempts to dominate the world through his pawns: a fundamentalist patriarchal sect (Sons of the Flame) seeking to overthrow worship of the Maiden aspect of the triple goddess (Maiden, Matron, and Crone--it's a common enough trope), the lesser sorcerors (as a whole, known as the Nearga Nor) and all of the magics at their fingertips, and the power-hungry members of court plotting against the hereditary ruler (Domnor) Heslin Hern--wives and military leaders.

Moongather concentrates almost entirely on Serroi, the main protagonist and pivot point for events in the ongoing duel. She's small, she's green, and she has some special abilities in addition to being a kick-ass fighter. Like many Jo Clayton novels, Moongather follows a nonlinear format--jumping back and forth between Serroi's childhood training with Ser Noris ("The Child" chapters) and the present as Serroi flees for her life in the first chapter and then desperately tries to get out word of the plot against the Domnor ("The Woman" chapters). She's the solitary star of the first book.

Along the way, we meet minor characters, many of whom appear in the later books, either as key players or in brief cameos. These include Domnor Hern himself; Dinafar, the unwanted legacy of a fisherwoman's rape by a hill raider who is approaching puberty and desperate to escape the hatred and destitution of her life in the fishing village; Tarom Tesc Gradin and his family, particularly the twins Tuli and Teras, a wealthy plantation family on pilgrimage; Coperic, the shifty barkeep and spy in the capitol city of Oras. I won't bother listing the bad guys, since they have a tendency to not survive their encounters with Serroi.

The precipitating crisis is only hinted at in the beginning of Moongather. As the story progresses, Serroi keeps revisiting it in flashbacks and nightmares and dialogue with other characters, all of which slowly fleshes out the sequence of events that led to her mental breakdown in the midst of a thunderstorm. The concomitant backstory developed in parallel help us understand her actions and motivations in the opening chapter.

Both Ser Noris and Reiki Janja are important characters in the childhood half of the plot. In the later two books, they play only peripheral roles confined to the metastory interludes and the final climactic confrontations in Moonscatter and Changer's Moon. These subsequent books are far more linear in narrative, simply jumping around POVs as more characters become central to the increasingly interwoven and complicated plot.

Moonscatter takes place about a year after Moongather. Serroi and Hern trek to another continent, seeking a mysterious figure named Coyote who may be able to assist the beleaguered forces of the goddess by giving Hern a go at his (magical) Mirror ("The Quest" chapters). Meanwhile, Tuli's POV (one of the twins introduced in Moongather) gives us perspective on how the new regime is affecting people on the ground, in addition to being something of a coming-of-age tale ("The Mijloc" chapters). Once again, minor characters introduced in this book have more central roles in the third installment. The star has become a constellation of points that build the outlines of a larger pattern.

As I mentioned in my review of the Drinker of Souls trilogy, I love Jo Clayton's originality, inclusiveness, world-building, gritty realism, strong characters, plots, and dialogue, and alternative writing styles in at least some sequences (much like Stand on Zanzibar in some respects). The Duel of Sorcery epitomizes these strengths. Serroi also resonated a great deal with me.

Serroi describes herself as a tribe of one, since she's a misborn of the windrunners, destined to be burned but for the intervention of Ser Noris, which means that there is no one else like her in the world: green and with her magical connection to animals, which the master sorceror uses to create animal-like demons. As a child, I felt more connections to animals than to people who were too often inexplicably cruel or simply incomprehensible, and I also felt alone, since no one in my family resembles me. She's small and female, so constantly underestimated and not taken seriously as a warrior. I get that too, though I grew up to be slightly above average in height. And as a child I desperately longed for the skills that Serroi displayed as an adult: master archer, competent fighter, self-sufficient, able to survive in the wild. So I strongly identified with this protagonist, which wasn't surprising given a genre overwhelmingly dominated by male protagonists.

Plus I was fascinated with the description of the Biserica. This is the valley that Ser Noris covets--the center of the goddess faith and symbol of the limitations of his power. It is a refuge for women escaping the traditional gender roles of their societies. The Biserica trains the priestesses who staff the temples around the country, the healerwomen who provide the medical care, and the meien, the warrior women pairs who serve as guards for women-run caravans, royal women's quarters, ruling queens, etc. (anyplace where male fighters might prove problematic). The meien provide essential cash income to the Biserica, along with the female artisans in the valley who specialize in such esoteric arts as glass-blowing. The entire community consists of women who provide all of the skills and labor needed to maintain an independent enclave.

Marian Zimmer Bradley suggests something similar in Thendara House, published the same time as Moonscatter: a community of women warriors that provide shelter and training to women fleeing abusive relationships or simply the confines of traditional gender roles. Jane Yolen explored similar female-only communities with warrior women in her books Sister Light, Sister Dark (published in 1989) and White Jenna. I can't think of any other books off-hand that develop this idea.

All in all, a great read that has stood the test of time and many rereadings. show less

This 4th entry in the Diadem series has some encouraging signs. Some of the annoyances from the previous books remain. As before, when a male appears, whether human stock or not, Aleytys sleeps with him. Here, she doesn't sleep with a four-foot fur-covered local boy until halfway, but by then they are both pretty desperate at having held out. Later on, she's back to her normal sex at first sight with someone else. She also continues to accumulate powers, becoming even more like a comic book show more superhero. Now she can use telekinetics to affect machinery no matter how complex or hidden. As a result, the tension level is much lower than in previous books.

On the other hand, Aleytys is no longer mostly nude throughout the novel. This aligns with the cover, which uses the same pose as the previous books, but has Aleytys dressed for a change. I don't know whether that was intentional on the part of the publisher or author, or simply a choice of the new cover artist. Second, those paragraphs full of ellipses that would appear every few chapters are gone. There are a few elliptical moments, but they are held in check.

As someone who prefer science fiction to fantasy, I welcome the shift from a pure fantasy story to one slightly more SFnal. It's an aliens vs natives plot, initially environmental destruction, later a bit more. Nothing deep or innovative, but serviceable as a driver for an adventure series. The spider-like Rmoahl return after being absent in the previous book, though here they are less threatening and more comic relief. There's an epilogue where Aleytys returns to where it all began, that appears to wrap up a plot line that was never going to go anywhere.

This may disappoint, if you really loved the previous books. It may be an improvement, if the previous books were a very mixed bag for you. Being more in the latter camp, I'll give the series another shot. show less

I picked up the first seven books of this nine-book series at a Swecon because Clayton was not a name known to me at the time and I thought they’d make suitable review material for SF Mistressworks. This series was apparently very popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s but has since been forgotten, and having now read them I’m mostly happy with that state of affairs. When you read forgotten or obscure sf, there’s always the hope you’ll stumble across a lost masterpiece; and it’s show more certainly true I’ve found some forgotten female writers of sf, or books by female sf writers, from past decades who deserve far more of a reputation than they currently have – anything by Marta Randall, for example, and Judgement Night by CL Moore should rightly be considered one of the classic space operas. But a lot of books vanish into obscurity for very good reason. The Diadem series has its high points and its low points, but its lows are pretty damn low, and even when it manages to be inventive progressive space opera it only just clears the bar. The series improved as it progressed, but not by a great deal. Still, there are the last two books to go – copies of which I will have to track down. show less

If Lamarchos, the second in the Diadem series, was a step up from the first novel, Irsud suggests this rise was a trip up the ramp to jumping the shark. What a mess. The annoying bits of the first two book are repeated in even more silly ways. Our heroine being nude most of the time. Yes, now on a cold metal table. Sex with the first male she meets? Yes, now with an insectoid, who becomes her lover for the rest of the story. Paragraphs that are nothing but random phrases strung together with show more ellipses? Repeatedly, and now not just when the diadem's powers come into play. Adding the mix, no longer is there the voiceless presence in her mind that she negotiated with in Lamarchos. Now we have three chattering voices -- prior wearers of the Diadem -- with their own special skills, described and presented like cards from a role-playing game. Despite being 100s or 1000s of years old, at least one appears to know how to pilot Ffynch brand skimmers and spacecraft. Technology apparently stopped evolving.

All this bodes ill for the next book, but even worse is the plot structure of this novel. The premise is simple:Aleytys has been impregnated with the seed of the dying insectoid queen, has one year of watchful tending, to end with death when the new queen is born. The next 3/4s of the story is slow but readable, as she gradually builds alliances with a race enslaved by the insectoids while playing cat and mouse with the old queen's regent. Then it all falls apart in a rush to wrap things up so that she can move on to the next planet and lover. In the end, Irsud is the same plot as Lamarchos: Aleytys ends the lifecycle of the evil being with much violence and death. But this time the killing is mechanical and bother her little. In a different author's hands, e.g., John Christopher, this might be story of the growth of a new evil. I will be very surprised to see that here. show less