Subject: The Outskirter's Secret by Rosemary Kirstein

From: [email-masked] (Wayne Throop)
Date: 22 Mar 93 15:52:31 GMT

This is a sequel to _The_Steerswoman_, and continues following the career of
the steerswoman Rowan.  I think the author has improved, and the first one
was already worth while.

The setting involved is a fairly primitive society, but we pretty quickly
see that it is a colony world that has lost much of its history, and is
re-inventing technology.  The Steerswoman's guild plays significant roles in
this process.  The members of the guild are essentially academics, who go
through a literal "journeyman's" phase, where they go out into the world,
make maps of new territories or update maps of old, and try to gather raw
data.  When they get too old to travel, or for whatever reason, they retire
and continue to pursue the intellectual interests that their travels have
engaged them in, elaborating the framework of facts into coherent theories.
Before the journeying phase, they study the 3Rs intensively, and also
"divers mental asceticisms".  They are mostly women, by long tradition and
temperment, but there are a few male members.

The most interesting thing about the guild is their method of promoting
academic freedom.  They adopt a harsh and absolute tit-for-tat policy on
information transfer.  If anyone lies to a steerswoman, or even refuses to
answer a direct question, that person (and potentially any co-conspirators)
is put under ban, and no steerswoman may answer any question of theirs, no
matter how trivial.  For example, if a person under ban asked "is the sky
blue", a steerswoman would be prohibited from answering at all, neither yes
nor no.  This is significant, since the steerswomen can answer questions of
geography, weather, history, and so on that are crucial at times.  In the
other direction, a steerswoman is prohibited from lying, or even failing to
answer, in response to any question put to them by someone NOT under ban.

I have my doubts about such a harsh system working in practice, for reasons
ranging from Axelrod's work on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (in his
terminology, this is too "unforgiving" a strategy of tit-for-tat to be
optimal), to the practical difficulties on remembering just who is and is
not under ban.  But despite the jarring insertion of this guild rule into
the plot, Kirstein ends up exploiting it fairly well, both in discussing
it's impact on the protagonist's life, but in integrating it naturally into
the rest of the plot elements.

But speaking of who is and is not under ban: one group of people who have
been under ban since records have been kept are the "wizards".  From our
perspective, we can easily see that the feats attributed to the wizards are
actually technology.  They appear to be a group that preserved and hoarded
surviving technology when the colony as a whole lost it for whatever reason.

Hence the continuing plot for both books.  Rowan has made a discovery that
draws the attention of the wizards to her, and they consequently dispatch
assasins and take other rude and antisocial actions towards her.

In the first book, Rowan discovers a small bit about the wizards secret
organization, and deals them their first setback.  In this second book,
Rowan and her outskirter companion set out for the "outskirts", a region
farthest from the center of the reviving civilization.  They are trying to
find the location of a fallen satelite, the nature of which they hope to
give them clues to the plans of the wizards.

The book then is a travelogue, starting at the edge of the outskirts region
(with some minor flashbacks to give context from the earlier book), and
detailing their adventures as they first travel alone, then attempt to
travel with local tribes as the landscape becomes harsher and too dangerous
to proceed alone, their adoption into a tribe going in the right direction,
and their final investigation of the crash site.

Along the way, they pick up various clues, both relevant to and irrelevant
to their quest, and Rowan's method of thinking about things in her internal
dialogue as presented to the reader is one of the interesting things about
the book.  All too often, the internal dialogue of characters in many books,
SF books included, are not of interest, and (to me at least) are actively
annoying.  In this case, Rowan is an almost ideal candidate as a protagonist
to follow along, since she is moderately alien to the setting herself
(because her guild sets her off), and because her world-view is
modern-western-academic (again because of her guild).

And it's a good thing that Rowan could be out of Agatha Christie or PD
James, because there are plenty of secrets that could be the title secret.
And starting in, we don't even know which outskirter has the principle
secret (and they all seem to have one or more).

In some ways, these books remind me of the McAvoy "Lens of the Word" series,
with the focus adjusted to the tactics of western thought where McAvoy (to
my mind) is concerned with the strategy.  In a vague sort of way; Nahazuret,
like Rowan focuses attention on the object, to contemplate it as distinct
from the world, while the mystic might use the object to contemplate he
unity of the world with the object.  In any event, each series reminds me
somewhat of the other.  Kirstein could benefit from a more polished
technique, but that seems to be the trend from the first book.

The steerswoman books seem well worth reading to me.

( But how did Lord of Light creep in here twice? ... well, the book
  was like that for me, raising quite rich associations with many
  other things, both in SF and elsewhere. )

%A   Rosemary Kirstein
%C   New York
%D   December 1992
%G   ISBN 0-345-36885-1
%I   Ballantine (Del Rey Discovery)
%P   333 pages
%T   The Outskirter's Secret
--
Wayne Throop  [email-masked]