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language: English
country: USA
year: 1987
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Darksword, #1
dates read: 29.12.12, 20.3.25-24.3.25
I first read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Forging the Darksword when I was like 11 and for better or for worse I really imprinted on it. I’ve been thinking about rereading the whole series — which I haven’t done since about 2004, though I did reread just Forging the Darksword in 2012 — for a while, and I picked it up on a whim a few days ago.
there’s a lot going on here and it’s a bit difficult to summarize concisely. more than a thousand years ago either a group of or possibly all magic users fled Earth, led by “Merilon”, for a distant world, which they sealed off from the outside, in order to escape persecution. the society they developed is built on magic: people fly or float rather than walking (provided they have the energy); houses, furniture, clothes I guess, etc. are magically shaped out of living (or naturally dead) material; etc. to give “Life” to something that is dead — for example, by using simple machines like levers — is considered to be horrific, evil perversion of their god’s gift to them.
our protagonists are Saryon, a mathematical prodigy “catalyst” — a priest with very little inherent magic who transfers magic between the world around him and other magic-users who can actually use it — and Joram, a young man who is Dead, which is to say that he does not possess even the tiniest spark of magical Life, though he is biologically alive. their lives become bound up when Saryon is sent to retrieve Joram from a coven of “Sorcerers”, those who have devoted themselves to the Mystery of Death, also known as Technology, and bring him to justice for murdering the field overseer who killed his mother. they find themselves facing a renegade magic cop who has coopted the Sorcerers for complicated political purposes that become more important in the second book, and they create the titular Darksword in order to defeat him.
the writing is fine. comma splices, serviceable but not especially inspiring imagery and descriptions. it is prone to infodumping, in a way that’s sometimes clunky, but also in a way that I think is aesthetically interesting — it lapses into present tense when providing world-building information, in a way that implies a present of narration and an individual rather than omnisicient narrator, and I have a vague memory that this is expanded on in later books. (we’ll see if this is borne out or not.)
why was I so taken with this book as a child?
the answer is twofold. first, the world-building is absolutely unhinged. we’re going to ignore some of the contradictions (the existence of books and fabric vs. joining objects together is Death), because in spite of these I do think Weis and Hickman do a good job conveying the phenomenology of the world through Saryon’s perspective, though as an adult rereading it it’s a little bit undercut by Joram’s cynicism.
I also think they do a surprisingly decent job thinking about class and power and the economics of magic: this is a story about a feudal society that understands that peasant revolts on various scales were actually quite common in medieval Europe. even in the farming community Joram grows up in, which has historically had a relatively benign “overseer”, there is a clear sense of class solidarity, and we’re aware that peasant revolts are actually a major driver of contemporary politics, because the aristocracy keep having Dead children and they’re terrified that the (robustly Living) peasantry will rebel en masse and overwhelm them. the Church is, of course, also here as a corrupt force manipulating world politics.
and when I say “the economics of magic” I mean that Life is quantifiable and Catalysts’ work relies on mathematics. the work of a Field Catalyst on an agricultural plantation is to give the fieldworkers precisely as much Life as they need to do their labor — and no more than that, lest they become restive and rebel against their lords.
meanwhile, the Sorcerers add an interesting twist to the book’s fantasy world-building: centuries ago the Mystery of Death was outlawed, following the “Iron Wars”, which were blamed on technology — though this is heavily implied to be historical revisionism on the part of the Church, presumably because technology that requires little or no input of Life is much more difficult for the Catalysts, who functionally control the entire magical economy, to control. the surviving, exiled Sorcerers are a shadow of what they once were, having lost the ability to read their ancestors’ books. Andon, the Sorcerers’ leader, is particularly compelling as someone who understands that so much knowledge has been lost but, because he’s illiterate, can’t do anything about it except wait for the right, hopefully literate person to come along.
also. how to put this. sex is illegal. all marriages are arranged (based on a prediction of whether they will produce magical children), and reproduction is conducted by the “druids” of the Mystery of Water, under the management of the Church, who magically transfer a man’s “seed” to a woman’s womb. the man and the woman aren’t even in the same room. actual sexual intercourse is punishable by exile or by turning to stone, and it seems like to some extent people have literally forgotten that sex exists: the one character in the novel who we know has had sex had to have it explained to her by her lover.
the theological reasoning for this is that reproduction in this way differentiates humans from animals. the obvious political reason for it is that it strengthens the Church, which has the sole legal ability to sanction familial and sexual relationships (and to divine whether or not children will result). this is also explicitly a eugenic project: reproduction is managed by the Church both as a form of large-scale population control to avoid (it was the ’80s) overpopulation and as a form of population management to ensure that marriages produce children with desirable magical abilities (especially more catalysts).
narratively, it’s clear that these policies are meant to be seen as bad. ironically, to me they feel positioned as a marker of the general “decadence” of mainstream society in this world: even without the prophecy that begins the book, it would be clear that Thimhallan is on the verge of a rapid social and political transformation and that the current social order is not sustainable as it stands. that sexlessness is part of this is a striking contrast to ~fall of Rome~ narratives where Civilization is destroyed by Perverted Lusts.
(it’s unclear whether the Sorcerers have sex or not. they do have one of the reproduction-management “druids”, but they don’t, until Saryon arrives, have any catalysts, so in any case they can’t be doing the kind of population management that the Church is overseeing.)
on one level, being Weird About Sex is perhaps to be expected given that Hickman — but not Weis — is Mormon. on another level, this is truly next level Weird About Sex and I am, regrettably, fascinated.
the second thing that I think explains my response to this book is: good god it’s gay. it’s not clear to me that this is intentional, with the exception, of course, of the Gay Mage, Simkin, who wears flamboyant clothes and is regularly described as “mincing” (though I should note that Simkin is an ally of the protagonists and Joram quite likes him). but from the moment Saryon first looks at Joram he’s captivate, and the result of their relationship is this unhinged passage:
“No, I won’t destroy it.” [Joram] paused. “And neither will you.”
“Why not?” asked Saryon.
“Because you helped create it,” Joram said, the forge fire lighting his face. “Because you helped bring it into this world. Because you gave it Life.”
“I—” Saryon began, but he could not finish. He was too scared to search inside himself for the truth.
Joram nodded, satisfied. Turning, he walked over to the body, issuing instructions as he went. “Wrap the sword in those rags. If anyone stops you, tell them you are carrying a child. A dead child.” Glancing over at the pale, shaken catalyst, he smiled. “Your child, Saryon,” he said. “Yours and mine.”
hello?????? what????????? this also casts the mostly passing references to Saryon’s embarrassing youthful fantasies in A Light.
beyond this, Joram has a best friend named Mosiah, who abandons his life and home and follows Joram to the Sorcerers’ village. Mosiah is the only person who’s able to — occasionally — break through Joram’s thorny exterior and one of the only people Joram trusts, and it very much reads as a kind of — perhaps one-sided, unrequited — love. I don’t know that I would have identified this as a causal factor at the time, but I think it was definitely part of what drew me to this, and also perhaps why the later books — where Joram gets involved with a woman — didn’t grip me the way the first one did.
relatedly, while events do happen in the book, this is very much a character-driven book, which I think is probably for the best. there might be a prophecy, but it’s not About The Prophecy (though it is to some extent about the ways people respond to the prophecy). this also puts it in an interesting partial contrast with its literary-historical moment. the Darksword trilogy is the product of two closely related developments in the English-language publishing industry: the epic fantasy boom of the ’70s and ’80s, as publishers discovered that Tolkien-inspired Big fantasy series (Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, etc.) could be extremely profitable, and the emergence of Dungeons & Dragons and its growing influence on the fantasy genre. Weis and Hickman are of course best known as the creators of Dragonlance, which debuted not as a book but as a Dungeons & Dragons adventure (released seven months before the first novel). Dungeons & Dragons is, of course, an action-adventure game, originally first and foremost about dungeons: the point is the situations in which characters kill monsters and do cool magic.
Forging the Darksword in some ways diverges from these models, even as it is clearly the product of them. it is neither particularly Tolkienian — except in its world’s, but not necessarily it’s narrator’s or writers’, attitude towards technology — nor is it action-driven. its infodumps do have a certain rpg sourcebook vibe, and not coincidentally Weis and Hickman published a ttrpg based on the setting, Darksword Adventures, in 1988. set against the broader cultural landscape of the ’80s, I think it’s interesting to see the ways anxieties about sex, technoscience, class, and — indirectly — race (since the Sorcerers are differentiated and excluded from mainstream society on the basis of their magical phenotype) are intertwined here, and that — contra other major ’80s fantasy, like (say) the Conan the Barbarian film — the takeaway here, at least so far, is a deep ambivalence about racialization and state and religious-institutional management of sexuality, a gesture towards armed resistence to these and towards the possibility and maybe even desirability of a revolution, and a sense of the contingency of the relationship between technoscience and war and the ways state power shapes both (though this is somewhat muddled by the marginalization of the Sorcerers).
is it a great book? no. but the world-building is genuinely unhinged, and, as a result, I have enjoyed (re)reading it.
moods: dark, grimy, horny, tense