The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie

Cover art for The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie, 2019

I've had The Raven Tower on my TBR shelf for a long time, putting it off for ages due to work and other things that needed to be read. Since I also have Ann Leckie's 4th and 5th novels set in the Imperial Radch universe to read, I turned to this, her first fantasy novel, before those. (I read this in print.)

This is one of those fantasy novels that feels like a science-fiction novel--that is, the magic is as quantifiable as science, in many ways, as if the fantasy universe is just a normal, material universe with slightly different rules. In this world (which could be Earth), there are gods, which seem to come to being in various ways as part of the natural order. Some are much older than humans; some apparently even come from outer space. Humans have learned how to make contact with gods, how to teach them to communicate, and how to get them to help.

There are two point-of-view characters: The Strength and Patience of the Hill--a god older than life on land--and Eolo, a transgender man who is retainer to Mawat, a man of heroic stature and temperament, who is the son and heir of the leader of a nation, the Lease of the Raven--the Raven being another god. Mawat, a character much like Hamlet, returns home to find his father missing and the throne usurped by his uncle. Indeed, there are many Hamlet elements in the story, including an Ophelia parallel and a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern parallel. Also, the transgender nature of Eolo harks back to the male-only rules of the acting profession in Shakespeare's time, so that all female roles were played by men or (more often) boys.

Eolo's story is the investigation of what is going on, to set things right. Strength's story, on the other hand, covers vast stretches of deep time, much like some of Lovecraft's works, and yet it leads inexorably toward a collision with Eolo. Strength is a god who cares little for individual humans--until other gods treat them callously. Its story is one of learning to care for those humans who count on it, and then--returning to Hamlet--revenge.

A beautifully written book, unlikely to become a series, but I can imagine further stories set in the same world. Indeed, this would make a very interesting TTRPG campaign setting, in the vein of Runequest.

As with her Imperial Radch novels, this book examines how other forms of life might think, and also addresses other possible human cultures, and the effects of those human and nonhuman cultures encountering each other. Gender, too, is a theme--gender and the effects of culture on it.

I had the pleasure of meeting the author when she won the 2016 Seiun Award for Best Translated Novel (given for speculative fiction works translated into Japanese, presented every year at WorldCon by literature and culture scholar Dr. Tatsumi Takayuki).

Things I still need to blog: Witch King (in print); Rivers of London Master and Commander and Post Captain, the first few stories of The Unreal and the Real, the first stories of The Complete Stories of HP Lovecraft (all audio)