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A Marvelous Light by Freya Marske
I feel like I've read a lot of these recent Edwardian/Pseudo-Edwardian/Late Victorian fantasies lately. C.L. Polk's Witchmark, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, Victoria Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic, a couple others whose names escape me. Maybe it's not really that many, but the setting kind of feels significant to me. They all remind me in some sense of Forster's Howard's End, in existing in the precarity of a social order that is about to be destroyed by an unthinkable cataclysm- Polk's book in fact ends with the cataclysm.
These books are a lot queerer than typical Edwardian romances, they're a lot more ethnically diverse, driven by a much more modern sense of the consequences of empire and colonialism. They seem to be written with the idea that maybe if you do fixit before things fall apart, things will fall apart in a less catastrophic way. If only some English lord were AWARE that colonialism was hurting people! If only some Scotland Yard bigshot were TOLD that gay people are people too! But these books are also very much preoccupied with the costume drama of it all, the romance of idle upper crust pre-War English society. Marske spends a lot of time detailing the putting on and taking off of waistcoats. Servants are largely figures for the background. [I would love to see the China Mieville version of this kind of story.]
If I am being slightly less sarcastic, a significant objective of these kinds of stories is to say that people were poorly treated in the past for absurd reasons of identity, but those people still had lives and feelings and strategies for survival, and it is possible and therefore valuable to tell stories involving minorities that have happy endings, because it helps us imagine what happy endings can look like. It reminds us that the dominant trope of a historical moment is not all there is to history, and settling for the dominant trope to the exclusion of alternatives is intellectually and emotionally impoverishing. I don't want to discount the significance of that reality.
This is nonetheless not my favorite type of story, largely because I tend not to find this sort of nostalgia for British Empire charming. I should maybe stop trying to read them, but lots of authors I admire keep writing them! Beyond telling a happy queer love story of pining and then consummation in fantasy Edwardian England, Marske's primary mechanism of plot motion is the novel's magic system, which is deeply fascinating although perhaps slightly underdeveloped (because the book is due sequels and learning how magic works is the engine that must drive them too).
It's a magic system that is substantially about contracts and formalisms, but not in a mechanistic way. It's also about the way magic fits into nature and grows and evolves after a spell has been cast, and if those things sound at odds with each other, that's the point! Magic is a thing that escapes rules the way life escapes laws. And magic is a subject of active and dangerous research, a thing that is powerful but only partially understood. (Here there is a strong analogy being constructed to the Early 20th Century researches into the atom, researches that were (publicly at least) until the 1920s largely the affair of amateur gentleman scientists- yet another arguably lamentable casualty of the cataclysm.) If I ever go back to running my D&D campaign, with all its fey contracts, I think I would like to take some ideas from Marske's worldbuilding. I like the way she uses magic that connects people to the building they construct and the land it sits on, in particular. I'm especially interested in how that would work in other land ownership models besides the post-feudal landed gentry we see in A Marvelous Light. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/385814.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
I feel like I've read a lot of these recent Edwardian/Pseudo-Edwardian/Late Victorian fantasies lately. C.L. Polk's Witchmark, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown, Victoria Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic, a couple others whose names escape me. Maybe it's not really that many, but the setting kind of feels significant to me. They all remind me in some sense of Forster's Howard's End, in existing in the precarity of a social order that is about to be destroyed by an unthinkable cataclysm- Polk's book in fact ends with the cataclysm.
These books are a lot queerer than typical Edwardian romances, they're a lot more ethnically diverse, driven by a much more modern sense of the consequences of empire and colonialism. They seem to be written with the idea that maybe if you do fixit before things fall apart, things will fall apart in a less catastrophic way. If only some English lord were AWARE that colonialism was hurting people! If only some Scotland Yard bigshot were TOLD that gay people are people too! But these books are also very much preoccupied with the costume drama of it all, the romance of idle upper crust pre-War English society. Marske spends a lot of time detailing the putting on and taking off of waistcoats. Servants are largely figures for the background. [I would love to see the China Mieville version of this kind of story.]
If I am being slightly less sarcastic, a significant objective of these kinds of stories is to say that people were poorly treated in the past for absurd reasons of identity, but those people still had lives and feelings and strategies for survival, and it is possible and therefore valuable to tell stories involving minorities that have happy endings, because it helps us imagine what happy endings can look like. It reminds us that the dominant trope of a historical moment is not all there is to history, and settling for the dominant trope to the exclusion of alternatives is intellectually and emotionally impoverishing. I don't want to discount the significance of that reality.
This is nonetheless not my favorite type of story, largely because I tend not to find this sort of nostalgia for British Empire charming. I should maybe stop trying to read them, but lots of authors I admire keep writing them! Beyond telling a happy queer love story of pining and then consummation in fantasy Edwardian England, Marske's primary mechanism of plot motion is the novel's magic system, which is deeply fascinating although perhaps slightly underdeveloped (because the book is due sequels and learning how magic works is the engine that must drive them too).
It's a magic system that is substantially about contracts and formalisms, but not in a mechanistic way. It's also about the way magic fits into nature and grows and evolves after a spell has been cast, and if those things sound at odds with each other, that's the point! Magic is a thing that escapes rules the way life escapes laws. And magic is a subject of active and dangerous research, a thing that is powerful but only partially understood. (Here there is a strong analogy being constructed to the Early 20th Century researches into the atom, researches that were (publicly at least) until the 1920s largely the affair of amateur gentleman scientists- yet another arguably lamentable casualty of the cataclysm.) If I ever go back to running my D&D campaign, with all its fey contracts, I think I would like to take some ideas from Marske's worldbuilding. I like the way she uses magic that connects people to the building they construct and the land it sits on, in particular. I'm especially interested in how that would work in other land ownership models besides the post-feudal landed gentry we see in A Marvelous Light. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/385814.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.