9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More Than One Way to Be Lost, September 19, 2003
This review is from: The Lost Steersman (Paperback)
Finally, the third book in the Steerswomen series! It has been almost 11 years since "The Outskirters Secret," the last book in this remarkable series. It was probably worth the wait, at least if we don't have to wait ten years for the next volume.
At the risk of spoilers, imagine a world that's nearly uninhabitable by man, filled with plants and animals inimical to earthkind. Now imagine a program for the terraforming of that world, a program that will take centuries if not millennia, involving first infrared bombardment by satellite and the burning of the borderlands, then sowing a genetically engineered plant that serves as a transition to earth life, and then a succession of increasingly earth-like plants.
After hundreds or thousands of years, in the areas treated first, the land is pretty much indistinguishable from earth; at the borders, life is strange and harsh. Most of the planet is apparently unchanged. Different peoples and cultures inhabit the various zones as the millennia-long terraforming proceeds.
To make things stranger still, those with knowledge have made themselves sorcerers and wizards, wielding technology when and how it suits them, quarreling among themselves and extirpating ordinary people who try to recover science and technology. As a result, most residents in this world are technologically ignorant, unknowingly held in that state by the technocractic wizards. Most humans think technology is magic, in a neat reversal of Clark's Law. Everyone but the wizards is completely unaware this is an alien world.
The sorcerers tolerate a band of Socratean scholars, the Steerswomen, who have re-developed principles of logic and serve as explorers, historians and cartographers. They mingle with the people of this world, operating by two rules: they will answer any question you ask, provided that you answer the questions they ask you. If you refuse to answer a Steerswoman's question, they shun you. It works pretty well... Sometimes a steerswoman - and some steerswomen are men - quits the order. They are said to be "lost."
But the wizards have their schemes, and as Rowan the Steerswoman struggles to understand them with the help of Bel, an outskirter, a member of one of the tribes on the fringe of the terraforming, the importance of understanding those schemes is increasingly urgent. Because one of the wizards is willing to use one of the terraforming tools in the satellite system to burn terraformed lands, and it is a terrifying weapon. The same wizard has caused one of the satellites to crash, at what jeopardy to the terraforming product we don't yet know.
It is fascinating to watch Rowan struggle to understand the issues and her situation, to see her begin to grasp that the world she knows is not the world on which earthkind evolved. With her, we are ignorant as to the wizards' motives, but we can understand better than her the risks their actions are creating.
The first two novels led to the conclusion that one of the wizards had set out to sabotage the terraforming process and, incidentally, to kill Rowan and Bel. This new novel tells of Rowan's efforts to find that mysterious wizard, and centers on the life that is native to this world. What if there is an intelligent alien species inhabiting this world? What if the terraforming process is destroying that alien intelligence? And Kirstein's aliens are truly alien; you will not mistake them, in the words of Alex Panshin, for someone from New Jersey. And all the while, there is the lost steersman of the title, who may be lost in more ways than one.
This is an excellent story. Wonderful, vivid characters are set in a plausible, complex world, with characters who struggle to understand the things that they encounter. Complex, unpredictable plots. Some reviewers have described these stories as fantasy; they are not. They are science fiction, and exceptionally well-conceived science fiction. These novels are genuinely new approaches to ideas. Highly recommended.
But please, Ms. Kirstein, can we have the next story a little sooner?
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Demons in the Inner Lands, August 29, 2003
This review is from: The Lost Steersman (Paperback)
The Lost Steersman (2003) is the third novel in the Steerswoman series, following The Outskirter's Secret. In the preceding volume, Rowan and Bel discover that the wizards are keeping the Outskirts under surveillance. One of the wizard's agents tells them everything he knows, including information on the upcoming Routine Bioform Clearance. Rowan and Bel lead the Outskirter tribes in a wild flight to safety.
In this volume, Rowan has returned to the Inner Lands, staying at the Annex in Alemeth in hopes of discovering more information about Slado. She finds the resident Steerswoman, Mira, to be recently deceased and the Annex left in a confused mess. While Rowan starts organizing the books into some semblance of order and searching for magic events that are not connected to known wizards, she finds herself being unfavorably compared to Mira.
To her surprise, Rowan also finds Janus, the lost Steersman, residing in Alemath. He stills insists that he has resigned and that he can't -- or won't -- talk about his experiences. Janus has been put under the Steerswomen's Ban by Ingrud, a former friend, because of his refusal to answer her questions about what happened to him, but Rowan thinks that she may be able to get him reinstated. Then the demons show up in Alemeth.
This novel is a worthy successor to the first two tales. Rowan has to deal with an almost overwhelming string of new experiences that run counter to her own beliefs. We are kept in suspense to the end of the tale (which had better have a sequel) and are shown first hand why Rowan is a good Steerswoman.
I have only one peeve about this story: the lack of romantic interest. Will Rowan ever find, and keep, a man or woman to become her partner? She finds plenty of people who could be close friends, but always falls for the wrong man, and she keeps being separated from Bel, who has rapidly become her closest friend.
Recommended for Kirstein fans -- who have long awaited it -- and for anyone else who enjoys tales of exotic societies, alien plants and animals, and a restless urge to see the other side of the hill.
-Arthur W. Jordin
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lyrical series, September 25, 2004
This review is from: The Lost Steersman (Paperback)
This is the third in the Steerswoman series. As with the first two, the writing is beautiful and the story is both thoughtful and interesting. These are intelligent books, easy to read; the characters are funny, smart, and tough in their own ways.
Usually I have trouble with books based in the future that depict people's return to magical ways of thinking. This one, however, makes sense. Everything happens for a reason; there is a structure that functions very well. There is nothing gratuitous about the story, or the society; everything has it's reason. The conflict set up for the next book isn't a physical war, although that might happen as well; it's a conflict of morals and behavior.
Rowan the Steerswoman is come to the Archives, looking for a man whom she has never seen. She has only his name and ocupation: he is the head wizard, the commander of the magic that shapes their world. The Archives are a secondary repository for copies of all the collected knowledge of the Steerswomen and men. The old keeper has died. The archives are a complete mess. Rowan has spent too long on strange roads in strange places, and no longer understands how to deal well with the normal people of her world. And the lost Steersman, the lost friend, is found again; but he is already under ban for not answering a Steerswoman. His answers are strange and raise as many questions as they put to rest... Then things from the outer lands are seen in the inner lands.
Anything else I say will be a spoiler, and you don't want this lovely book spoiled.
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