The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

I hope this gets classified as a novella for the Hugos so it doesn't get crushed by The Fifth Season. The mixture of idioms and imagery and cultures and peoples is unlike anything else I've read, if not ever than for longer than I can remember. It works to immediately break and reset your expectations. I don't want to say much about the details, because I found I enjoyed knowing nothing about it when I began. I will say, I am in willful denial about the ending. Except I'm not, of course, because what *seems* to have happened of course did not happen at all. Of course not. Nope.

Beautiful style, including a wonderful use of real-world languages to give the sense of fantasy cultures interacting, not always successfully. The main character—the titular sorceror—is well-educated and well-traveled, but considered a barbarian by many of the people he’s traveling with because he can’t communicate well in the merchants’ tongue. Also, the mercenaries in his company seem to frown on homosexuality, but he’s lovers with the captain of their company, a godling of some sort. (Magic here may be extremely advanced technology, left over from when the most advanced people left their bodies for the stars.) As his traveling company gets closer to the dangerous Wildeeps, fissures internal and external threaten the show more group, and in particular Demane and his Captain. The narrative jogs back and forth in time, and some of the phrases are quite striking; recommended for those who enjoy beautiful writing and not completely resolved mysteries. show less

Tight, gorgeous, and brutal. Homoerotic, humane, crushingly moving but utterly unsentimental. The premise as pure a sword-and-sorcery trope as you can get (superstitious and provincial bash-and-slash mercenary company traveling with erudite and sensitive mage-ish outsider far from his homeland), only minus the typical tired faux-Celtic trappings - this world is explicitly African in inspiration and Kai's chorus of pitch-perfect voices are all un-apologetically Black American. And the love story (because it is a love story...just one that contains more skull-smashing and battlefield gangrene than most) is so, so real. Not that any words are wasted on describing the state of being in love; it is just shown, beautifully, in tiny sharp show more shards of interactions - soul-deep love on the DL between two warriors in an intolerant world. This love story is tender in the way that a rare steak is tender - all bloody muscle and seared outsides, primal, sensual, and raw at the core. This little book is like the Sorcerer Demane's magic bag - physically slender but capable of holding unbelievably vast quantities of content. I can't wait for someone I know to read it so the full unpacking can begin. show less

*WAVES ARMS* Read this! And if it's anything to go by, go ahead and pre-order all the other Tor.com novellas as well. BUT THIS REVIEW IS ABOUT THIS GLORIOUS BOOK.

"Sumptuous" doesn't really do the language here justice. I read a ton of short fiction with language that I truly enjoy, but nothing novella or novel-length in quite some time. This ended that drought. And the plotting sure isn't bad either (IT'S GODDAMN GREAT). The dialogue is fantastic, the world-building is amazing, and the action is visceral as hell. THE MAGIC IS SCIENCE-Y AND EARTHY. AND THE CHARACTERS! DEMANE. THE CAPTAIN. CUMALO. ALL THE CARAVAN GUARDS. Even the *vague eyebrow waggling* creature, in the same way the shark was a looming background character in Jaws.

"The show more Devil in America", and Wilson's other short fiction, has been on my list for a while, and I'm about to go on a spree, for sure. show less

I will freely admit that the primary motive for my reading is entertainment. And whatever sort of literary merit The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps has, I don’t think it works on an entertainment level, or at least for me anyway.

Demane’s demigod, descended from the people who came down from the stars. But now he’s traveling with a merchant caravan as a guard and in love with the Captain, another man with divine ancestry. Yet, the caravan must pass through the wilderness of the Wildeeps, where a terrifying evil lurks.

Something you should know going in - this is a tragic queer story. Our bisexual protagonist is basically the only queer character to make it out alive. Seriously, even the background gay couple dies! The 75% death rate going show more on here is definitely a factor in why The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps doesn’t work for me.

Another thing – there are practically no women in the book. The only named female character with dialog is Auntie, and she only appears during flashback scenes where she’s training Demane. I get that this book was exploring masculinity (I think specifically in African American culture?), but masculinity doesn’t exist in isolation.

However my main problem with the book is the writing style. It’s non-linear and all the scenes seem to float together. It felt a bit like reading a really weird dream. And it also felt like nothing happened until they got to the Wildeeps – which they take over half the novel to reach.

The only reason this book manages to get three stars from me is that there were some interesting things going on with the world. For one, I think it was a fantasy equivalent of ancient Africa. For another, it had all these enticing bleed overs with science fiction. A lot of the “magic” of the book is presented as highly advanced science, and I got the impression that the protagonist is descended from genetically engineered people. And are the gods really gods? Or are they some far more advanced civilization from elsewhere that decided to walk among humans for a time?

I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something about this novella given all the rave reviews it has elsewhere. Still, I wouldn’t really recommend it based on my own reading.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page. show less

You have to pick it up, rub it into your face, smell it, breath it, mold it into different shapes in your head. Maybe bake those shapes into some kind of ocarina. Then you can understand it, and follow it as the prose skitters around like an unknown, three-footer mammal settling into the marsh. I am so glad books like this exist. Recommended. Poetic gore warning.

Hells bells, what a book; so much crammed into 200 pages, short but dense, lush, layered. A little the world-travelling and intricacies of sci-fi, a little the broad sweeping action and world-building of fantasy, a little the side-by-side differents of urban fantasy, and a lot the challenging, brilliant, playful language skills of deep literature. It juggles so many balls - issues of masculinity, of acceptance and brotherhood and the difference, of difference and self; but also big damn action, myriad developing relationships, and a huge emotional suckerpunch.

Does it do all that perfectly? No. But it's amazing to watch it happen.