Given that I routinely read books from thousands of years ago, it sometimes strikes me as strange that I can still pick up a book like The Steerswoman and feel its age. Sure, it’s only a couple decades old, but it has that feeling of belonging to a different period of fantasy. Just like modern fantasy tends to have echoes of Sanderson, fantasy from a generation ago has its own flavor. Like Hambly’s unique offering to draconic literature, Kirstein’s novel is a flavor I enjoy, though rough publication timeframe is about where the similarities between those two end.
Where part of Hambly’s appeal is her writing itself, Kirstein’s prose is spare and direct, sometimes more so than I would like – there were several instances where I wished for a little more extraneous detail, a little more exploration, than the story permitted itself. That is not to say that it lacks for details, and every detail Kirstein includes is relevant. That style plays perfectly to the story’s protagonist, one of the titular steerswomen, a group of navigators-turned-…scientists? Scientist is not quite the right term, for their methods are not yet so refined and rigid, nor their aspirations as lofty, but the bones are there. Perhaps they could be called protoscientists, and that concept powered my enjoyment of the story.
A scene early on, when Rowan attempts to explain how objects fall, and accidentally constructs the Newton’s Canon thought experiment (a famous, real-world thought experiment that establishes the basic principle of orbital flight) captures the mood of the story, the temperament of the protagonist, and, when I read it, captured my attention for the remainder of the book. It is emblematic of the steerswoman concept, which I found compelling on both its intellectual and cultural levels. How the organization arose, its role in the civilization, the way that people treat steerswomen, and the principles which steerswomen follow, are all fascinating, and contribute dimension to a story that is otherwise somewhat sparse.
Not that I think there isn’t more to the world, but the plot and the writing are both presented in such a brief, tight fashion that there is little opportunity to explore the various elements. The plot is solid, but it would not have kept my interest without the steerswoman concept and Rowan’s unique approach to problems and the world; the overall idea of magic is science is science is magic is otherwise too often explored, and I too quickly got ahead of Rowan and the plot, making its twists, turns, and execution more interesting on the small scale than the large scale.
This is book one of a series, which necessarily prompts the question of whether or not I will be picking up the next book. I would consider it, but it won’t be right away; the book did not conclude on such a compelling note that I need to know what happens in the sequel, and it overall was not quite substantial enough to really capture my imagination. It is a calm, collected, concise piece based around an intriguing concept, neat and well-executed. As a quick, interesting read, I recommend it.
IGC Publishing 