One of the many things I learned at Wiscon was that Laurie Marks‘s Water Logic (the third in the Elemental Logic trilogy that began with Fire Logic and was followed by Earth Logic) is finally out! Better than that, it’s published by Small Beers which means that not only is it edited by Kelly Link, but it finally has a cover I’m not embarrassed to buy and carry around. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about check out Fire Logic and Earth Logic’s. I even thanked Gavin (Small Beers co-chief bigwig). It’s not just that I loathe the art, it’s that they’re so completely off target in the same way that the old whitewashed Wizard of Earthsea covers were/are. Somehow Zanja went through a Michael Jackson transformation by the time she hit the cover. But enough about that thing we’re not supposed to judge a book by. I should confess that I own them anyway. That’s how good they are. Actually I’ve owned them several times because I keep loaning them out and having to replace them when they don’t come back to me.

So, I’ve been trying to find a way to talk about these books and have been struggling because, really, the main thing I come up with is that I’m always shocked when people tell me they aren’t reading these books. They’re brilliant! They’re complex and layered and beautifully written. They have strong (female!!) principle characters who are brave and brilliant and also selfish and stupid. They’re big, sweeping, epic fantasy… that are somehow more real than most literary fiction. They have magic, but it isn’t the flashy magic that has no source and no limits. It’s magic that works.

I stopped reading ‘fantasy’ (whatever the hell that means!) when I went off to college. Partly because I was too good for that genre stuff anymore (I had to grow up to refind it) but mostly because I was sick to death of books about a guy or group of guys acquiring and/or searching for the magic thingie in a land that looked a lot like medieval Europe with or without monsters. Also, I should mention that the difference between magic guy and the ‘bad guy’ was always very, very clear. Magic guy was good and bad guy was bad and any idiot could see that. And the girl? Well, she was mainly ornamental and/or evil. Even LeGuin fell into this trap and broke my heart.

The brilliance of Laurie Marks lies (mainly) in the deconstruction of that good guy/bad guy binary. It has all the hallmarks of classic fantasy (magic, an invading army, a band of dogged resistance fighters), but that breaks down by the end of the book and reforms into something completely new, to me at least. To be brief: Shaftal has been invaded by the Sainnites who burn down libraries and cities, commit genocide, torture and oppress the indigenous Shaftalese. Looks simple, right? And it seems to begin that way. The brave Shaftalese fight their oppressors and sometimes even win, but the Shaftalese have no Earth Witch (G’deon who ‘rules’ Shaftal) to replace the recently deceased G’deon….and there’s your quest — to find the next G’deon who can lead them to victory. Of course Laurie Marks takes these tropes and deftly subverts them. This isn’t your grandaddy’s fantasy novel. The ‘Chosen One’ looks nothing at all like the thing/person even the complex Shaftalese had in mind. And nothing at all like any Chosen One I’ve ever seen.

[more spoilers for Fire Logic and Air Logic ahoy!]
Since this review is really of Water Logic, I’ll stop with the summaries of the first two books. I will say that I wasn’t sure what to expect of Water Logic, but it felt exactly right and flowed effortlessly from the first two books. Water Logic begins with Karis G’deon and her family trying to put Shaftal back together without everything falling apart and/or allowing the Shaftalese to resort to violence/righteous vengeance against the Sainnites. I was immediately back in Shaftal and despite the long time lag between the last book and this one, I remembered a lot of the intricacies of the last book without a lot of cumbersome prompting.

I could not put this book down and had to invent distractions in order to make it last longer. If I have any complaint about these books it is that I want more. As the series continues, the number of important and incredibly compelling characters rises — which fits a series that is above all about groups/families of ‘everyday’ people working together to do great things– and that inevitably leaves some characters to a few supporting scenes. Although Clement played a much larger and key role in this book, I wanted more of her. Some of her scenes felt rushed to me…or maybe I just wanted more, more, more. Probably. I could imagine fifteen books in this world.

The writing is yet another thing that separates this series from most of the high fantasy books I read long ago. Marks’ prose is spare and efficient — just the way I like it. She gives us just enough description to put us in place and lets us fill in the rest — again, just the way I like it. If you’re looking for the paragraph-long descriptive sentences of Tolkien, the thirty pages of detailed description of the slog through the forest, Marks may drive you nuts. Her prose, like the people of Shaftal, works hard without waste, without extraneous ornamentation. But with elemental magic. The last line of the book, as Kelly Link pointed out at Wiscon, is absolutely beautiful and indicative of the rest of the writing: “The world is full of ravens, she thought.”

Then, of course, there’s the queer thing…or more importantly, the lack of a queer thing. There simply is no word for ‘gay’ in this world because there is no difference between love for someone of the same sex or different. People marry other people because they love them. Period. Families are more than a mother and a father, they are groups of people who come together and support each other and sometimes raise children together. So Marks’ has managed to shatter another binary, the gay/straight polarity that has such a stranglehold on our culture. A part of me feels that I shouldn’t make as big a deal of this as I am — the Shaftalese wouldn’t– but it seems as essential a piece of this world-building as every other carefully crafted component. And more importantly, this is what I feel that ‘high fantasy’ should be, what I was waiting for it to be. Alternate realities, potential worlds of difference. I mean, what’s so fantastic about a Judeo-Christian-looking world with ‘nuclear families’ and a patriarchal hierarchy that looks exactly like what we have today — except for the swords and horses and castles, etc.? I want my fantasy to be fantastic. And maybe fabulous. Is that too much to ask?

So, basically that was a whole lot of me simply saying more. More. More. Please.

There are other people talking about Water Logic here (actually, it’s a recap of a Wiscon panel discussion of all of Laurie Marks’ works, but there’s a lot of discussion of the Logic books).