The Search of Mavin Manyshaped

It's been twenty years since Mavin Manyshaped has left Danderbat Keep, and it's now time for the long-planned reunion with the wizard Himaggery at the hotel Mudgery Mont. She arrives at the inn only to be greeted with brief messages from Windlow and from Himaggery, who wrote an emergency love letter in case he is unable to make their meeting. She heads to out of the city to meet Windlow's messenger, only to run into Throsset, a rebel woman shapeshifter who also hailed from Danderbat Keep. After discussion, she resolves to search for Himmaggery, and heads north, following his footsteps to his first stop at a wizard's demesne. On the way, she runs into an unusual lake known as the Lake of Faces, and is attacked by a harpy as she show more investigates. Though suspicious of the wizard Chamferton and his relationship with the harpy, she stays with him a day or two, learning what she can about Himaggery's search. From there she heads north following a mysterious group of runners, until she meets a Dervish. The Dervishe directs her to a tower of shadows, and helps her solve the mystery of Himaggery. Shadows follow her home as she leads a pair of transformed wizards to a "place where no shadows are," but luckily she will have help from her old friends, the Shadowpeople.

The weakest of the three Mavin-focused books, I still find Search worth the read. It's somewhat more somber, somewhat less whimsical, but Tepper's continually inventive, most notably in the lake of faces. More than anything, the three Mavin books remind me of a woman's evolution in sex consciousness: in the first book, she learns the constraints and unfair expectations of her family group; in the second, she indirectly struggles against a society's and religion's constraints; and in the last, Mavin struggles with how love can be similarly constraining. It's somewhat of a feminist diatribe at the end that I understand far better now than I had when reading at fifteen. While I wouldn't disagree with Mavin's choice, the whole pretense of meeting after twenty years seemed somewhat unrealistic from the start, a romantic idealization more suitable for a younger person. I would have rather had a Mavin adventure than the end arc of a romantic journey. show less

Sherri S. Tepper wrote three delightful little interconnected fantasy trilogies with a science fiction core back in the 1980s. These books are now rather obscure and quite difficult to find. The first trilogy features the eponymous Mavin Many-Shaped; the second, her son Peter; and the third, his sweetheart Jinian. I stumbled over the series bass-ackwards during my peripatetic youth. I spent a few years traveling between seasonal jobs and habitually browsed used bookstores to pick up cheap, interesting paperbacks, then discarded them at the next stop (I went through a lot of Dick Francis novels that way).

Thus I found Jinian Footseer. It was an imaginative fantasy novel featuring an intrepid young heroine confronting the challenges of show more adolescence as much as her magical quest, and very much a palate cleanser after the many derivative works I’d ingested by that point. About ten years ago, after I settled down, I visited a local bookstore and found The True Game omnibus edition of the Peter stories alongside The End of the Game omnibus of the Jinian stories. Although I typically do not purchase hardcover fiction, I did not hesitate to acquire these two volumes. I finally got to read Jinian’s entire story and the complementary Peter storyline. They were very much worth the wait.

I lacked only the Mavin books. Over the years, I patiently scoured used bookstores everywhere. I search online as well without success. But last year, finally, the local Half-Price Books had the entire trilogy in excellent condition—clearly someone had liquidated their inventory to my benefit. The broad parameters of the Mavin books were no surprise, given that I was already familiar with later events that built upon the earlier stories, but that did not hinder the joy of discovery. These books are all keepers, and I am glad that I can finally stop searching.

The series addresses fundamental social issues. The Mavin books feature strong feminist themes, while the Peter books (King's Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard's Eleven) concentrate on class differences and more general social justice. Finally, the Jinian books (Jinian Footseer, Dervish Daughter, and Jinian Star-eye) take all of these and combine them with spiritual and environmental concerns on par with Aldo Leopold’s land ethic in something of a science fiction context of first contact.

The stories take place primarily in the Land of the True Game, where Gamesmen have various magical talents, such as teleporting (Elators), mindreading (Demons), telekinesis (Tragamors), flying (Sentinels), beguiling (Kings, Queens, etc.), and changing shape (Shifters). Their frequently short, interesting lives generally consist of exercising their talents in various Games, which range from one-on-one duels to large-scale wars. Caught up in these Games as well are the untalented lower-class pawns who actually keep civilization going as farmers, merchants, servants, etc. And a third class of people are the Immutables who not only are immune to the talents of Gamesmen, but also effectively neutralize their talents, thus creating a safe zone bordering the Land of the True Game.

Being a biology geek, I love the mix of familiar and strange: horses and zellers, rabbits and bunwits. Tepper creates a delightful alien world with its own ecology and logic. From the arboreal towns that straddle giant tree limbs crossing the depths of an enormous chasm in The Flight of Mavin Many-Shaped to the self-aware Chimmerdong Forest in Jinian Footseer, Tepper explores how nature and culture might commingle in new and interesting ways. Also, I particularly enjoyed the scathing satire of academia reduced to absurdity in Necromancer Nine.

Twenty years after they parted ways, Himaggery misses their reunion at the beginning of The Search of Mavin Many-Shaped, and Mavin goes on a quest to find him, uncovering still more evil plots and fun times. These books chronologically precede the Peter and Jinian books, but were written after the two later trilogies.

The largest deficit in this series is the lack of diversity. In effect, we have an entire human colony filled with only white people as far as I can tell. And all of the characters are straight and able-bodied and so on. The characters are not particularly deep or complex, not surprising in plot-driven novels that average less than two hundred pages each. And they follow the standard fantasy formula of good triumphing over evil, with characters readily falling in one camp or the other. This is not to say that poignancy is lacking. Each trilogy has a bittersweet ending that encompasses profound loss as part of the cost of success, all part of the heroic formula, I suppose, along the lines of sacrifice for the greater good. And depending on your politics, you may object to the underlying political/ethical/moral messages in these stories. Personally, the Shadowpeople’s traditional greeting resonates: lolly duro balta lus lom (walk well upon the lovely land). show less

Read as the last book in the omnibus, "The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped".

See King's Blood Four.