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language: English
country: USA
year: 1978
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 13.5.23-15.5.23
Andre Norton’s Yurth Burden is a conceptually promising planetary romance that feels like a kind of composite of Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exil. the planet Zacar is inhabited by two peoples/species, both humanoid: the Raski, the original inhabitants of the world, and the Yurth (a painfully obvious descendant of “Earth”), who arrived at some point in the past. the novel’s protagonists are, of course, one Yurth — Elossa, a girl who’s undergoing a rite of passage to adulthood — and one Raski — Stans, a descendant of kings sworn to follow and, if possible, stop any Yurth attempting to make the journey Elossa is undertaking.
we’re introduced to the sci-fi aspect of the novel pretty early, when Elossa and Stans arrive at the site of a Raski city, Kal-Hath-Tan that was destroyed when the Yurth’s ancestors’ ship crashed into it hundreds of years ago. Raski civilization was destroyed, and the scattered remains of it reformed into an absolutist and xenophobic feudal monarchy; the Yurth, meanwhile, used technology to make themselves telepathic for some reason and then withdrew from the world as fully as they could, taking the “Burden” of guilt or “sin” (the novel’s word) on themselves as penance for their destruction of the Raski’s world. Elossa and Stans come to the conclusion that their respective peoples are trapped by history: the Yurth in useless self-flagellation, the Raski in the reenaction of the violence of their destruction. they decide they can’t return home — yet, anyway — and set out together to try to find a new way.
so far, this is an interesting, if clunky and flawed, meditation on historical wrongs. it is easy to read the Yurth as a kind of allegory for imperialists, for settlers-conquistadors, or for white people grappling with the legacy of slavery — a reading encouraged by the novel’s characterization of the Yurth as light-skinned and the Raski as darker-skinned. the conclusion Elossa reaches — that wallowing in guilt or shame accomplishes nothing — is, fundamentally, the right one: the Yurth can’t simply hide themselves away in the mountains forever. (you could read this alongside Ahmed’s discussion of shame in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.) this aspect of the allegory is undermined, though, by the fact that in the case of the Yurth the violence they caused was literally entirely accidental and, in fact, individual: their ship had been damaged and human error caused their navigator to miscalculate their landing process and, ultimately, crash. they chose to take the guilt on collectively, but there’s clearly a disconnect here between Yurth and conquistador that makes the novel’s argument about guilt…dubious.
on the Raski side, meanwhile, it’s simply victim-blaming. should the Raski have started hunting down surviving Yurth without giving them a chance to explain themselves? maybe not. are the Raski “equally” at fault because they’ve “chosen” to “wallow” in their victimhood instead of finding ways to rebuild and rise above it? the implications of this are transparently racist — it’s the same argument that’s leveraged against Indigenous people, among so many others, while ignoring the material power dynamics at play in settler colonialism. the Raski’s situation is somewhat different, in that the Yurth are not materially or institutionally privileged over them but rather live on the margins of Raski society, but even then it becomes something like blaming medieval peasants for not overthrowing the feudal system in 1100. (in b4: I know peasants did in fact resist feudalism, but you see what I mean.)
the writing is a bit messy, though it’s better (and better-edited) than some recent specfic I’ve read from big 5 publishers. the prose tends towards purple, although I also find that aspect of it endearing, even if sometimes I think it would benefit from a sparer style. there are some continuity errors — a reference to “high tides” at Telgar, an inland Hold, e.g. but these are relatively minor — it’s the gender politics that are the biggest issue here.
(also forgot to note that the references to the “Yurth Burden” are too close for comfort to the “white man’s burden,” although the substance of the burden is (somewhat) different.)
despite its flaws, though, I appreciated — for the first half or so of the book — that it was at least trying to do something conceptually interesting, particularly in terms of thinking through white guilt. the writing is, for the most part, engaging and even stylistically appealing, although there are some places where the syntax falters. the telepathic stuff was a fun compromise between sci-fi and fantasy, featuring the telepathic sensory-impression ghost of a Raski guard trying to kill Elossa.
the problem is that once Elossa and Stans make up their minds to do this, the second half of the novel completely changes direction and doesn’t follow through with its central conceptual problem (spoilers follow).
instead of trying to find a third way (as it were), we spend most of it simply getting out of the mountain-enclosed plateau where the ruins of Kal-Hath-Tan are located. this process is made more complex by their encounters with “Atturn,” a threatening Raski entity that alternately draws Stans forward, forcing Elossa to follow, and attacks both of them. they’re ultimately captured by the radiation-mutated descendants of the inhabitants of Kal-Hath-Tan and find themselves shipped off (literally by riverboat) to Karn, the now-immortal king who, with the help of the evil otherworldly being/god Atturn, survived the Yurth ship’s crash and has been enslaving Yurth for centuries, preparing to (re)conquer the Raski lands he once ruled. they spend two chapters defeating him, and then the book just…ends. Stans affirms that the Raski were bad, too, and that’s it.
the first half promised an interesting but very flawed look at how we redress injustice; the second half…simply did not do that.
moods: adventurous, mysterious