From rec.arts.sf.written Mon Nov 30 10:32:34 1992 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: lysator.liu.se!fizban.solace.hsh.se!kitten.umdc.umu.se!sunic!mcsun!uunet!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!dani From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: The Outskirter's Secret Message-ID: <1992Nov28.054313.15380@netcom.com> Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1992 05:43:13 GMT Lines: 47 "The Outskirter's Secret" is the sequel to Rosemary Kirstein's excellent first novel, "The Steerswoman". It takes place on a world which might be a post-ecological-disaster Earth and might be another world settled from Earth -- The evidence to this point is ambiguous. It's a world of swords and sorcery -- sort of. The reader recognizes fairly quickly that what the wizards call 'magic' is what we would call high tech. "The Steerswoman" sets up the mystery: Rowan is a Steerswoman (a member of an order of pathfinders and knowledge seekers) whose innocent inquiries about some anomalous gems results in a series of attempts to murder her. A hitherto-unknown chief wizard appears to be responsible. By the end of that book she is able to reason out that the gems are artificial, and that they come from a downed satellite. (Kirstein's implicit view is that a technological society can lose much of the technology without losing the all the modes of thought it engendered.) Which still leaves the questions of how and why unanswered, not to mention the question of why someone thought it worth killing her for asking these questions. "The Outskirter's Secret" picks up shortly after. I think the book would stand up on its own, but the reader would be missing a good deal of the background and motivation. Rowan and Bel -- her chance-met companion from "Steerswoman" -- journey into the Outskirts -- the wasteland surrounding Rowan's civilization -- in search of the downed satellite. (Rowan knows approximately where it would have gone down; the problem is getting there.) The Outskirts turn out to be part of the same puzzle: They're an ecological mystery. A large population of Outskirters lives in a land which is completely inimical to what we think of as normal life forms. (Again, the reader may have the background to see part of the answer that the protagonists cannot.) By the end of this book we learn how the two mysteries are connected. It'll take a third book before we learn how they are resolved. I don't care to start trilogies in the middle, myself. My advice would be to give "The Steerswoman" a try, if you can find it. (It appeared a couple of years ago, and I don't know whether it's been reprinted.) It's an enjoyable read. Once you've read it, you'll know whether you want to read the sequel. I'd say there's a good chance that you will. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope From /tmp/sf.15692 Tue Mar 30 18:23:40 1993 Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!noc.near.net!hri.com!enterpoop.mit.edu!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!nobody From: sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: The Outskirter's Secret by Rosemary Kirstein Message-ID: <732758819@sheol.UUCP> Date: 22 Mar 93 15:52:31 GMT Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Organization: Lines: 101 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) 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 throopw%sheol@concert.net