Strange Horizons, April 30, 2012
“The Gods of Reorth” By Elizabeth A. Lynn
Reviewed by Aaron Bradford Starr
It’s one of speculative fiction’s challenges that, as time passes, what was once speculative comes to pass, or becomes passé. Usually, this is most notable in the realm of technology, as Clarke, Verne, and Wells would be happy to tell you. But there is another part of even the most speculative story that also follows this trajectory, and that is the social constructs of the imagined societies. It is this aspect of “The Gods of Reorth,” by Elizabeth Lynn, that bears the greatest weight, and it is clearly the aspect that will stand the test of time, or not.
The story of “The Gods of Reorth” concerns Jael, a goddess of life. But her godhood is part of a job, a position of power to ensure the plans of the galaxy-spanning society of Reorth. Her powers are derived from super-technology sequestered in the cave she dwells in, high in a sacred mountain. The history and culture of her homeworld of Reorth is not elaborated upon, and Jael has infrequent communications with them, and less with her contemporaries, each acting as other gods in the larger society, composed of multiple island nations. Little is known of the cultures of the nations themselves, appearing, as they do, as nothing more than names. Jael is almost entirely removed from the day-to-day life of even her home island’s population.
That changes one day when she meets a local herbal healing woman, Akys. Living as a celibate loner on the mountainside consecrated to The Lady, Jael’s divine persona, Akys is still more deeply knitted into her community than Jael ever was to Reorth. Perhaps it is loneliness, after her centuries as a goddess, but Jael is drawn to Akys, who knows nothing of Jael’s true position, nor her distant home.
Their relationship is clearly sexual, though not explicitly so, and this aspect of the story feels oddly strained. This is, at least in part, a product of the time during which the story was written. First seeing print in 1980, “The Gods of Reorth” is awash in the gender wars of the late 1970s, and perhaps foresees the growing conservative movement of the 1980s. In any case, the idea of presenting a lesbian relationship in such a matter-of-fact way must have felt very powerful when it was first published, and it was certainly a brave literary stance. Strangely, with the rise of the modern gay rights and equality movements “The Gods of Reorth” feels both relevant and irrelevant, all at once.
On one hand, it addresses an emotional outlook that is still seen as challenging to some, and attempts to put a human face on the relationship between Jael and Akys. The impact of this, however, is bound to be dampened by Ms. Lynn’s cool, remote writing, which rarely evokes emotional warmth. The subject’s feelings are held too far at bay, even in the most extreme moments of the story’s resolution. Love, no matter the object, should feel sharper, more definite than it does here. And, strangely, “The Gods of Reorth” has lost some of its power in the thirty-two years since first being published due to the greater acceptance of gay lifestyles in modern society.
There is more to the tale than the women’s relationship, however, as the powers-that-be on Reorth have foreseen a monumental conflict on Jael’s world, and have ordered her not to stop it. It seems that Jael has, in the past, hindered war, since she’s been on the job for three local centuries, and has never seen one. But when a gathering war is ordered to take its course, Jael, strangely, attributes the approaching horrors almost entirely to men. This is a jarring mindset, affixing “The Gods of Reorth” firmly into the gender-based politics of a specific time in America.
For a sophisticated future macro-meddler like Jael to grant women no part in starting or continuing wars is a touch of unexpected naiveté. When Akys asks why men would want “…wealth, or power, or lands,” it is as if she cannot conceive of a woman wanting those things, too. The rulers of many warlike cultures were definitely influenced by their powerful wives, often to the path of war. The gender stereotyping in these passages and others makes the tale seem old-fashioned, reflecting modern society’s popularly proclaimed dislike for war.
“The Gods of Reorth” has settled awkwardly into the present. The inner and outer conflicts that drive the story no longer synch with modern sensibilities, and the one that should remain unchanged – the feeling of caring for someone else — is too much of a sketch to give it the human foundation it needs, and lacks.
[Editor’s note: Tangent does not review reprint stories other than those included in single author or Best of the Year collections. I failed to notice Ms. Lynn’s story was a reprint, but as the reviewer had already written and submitted his review, I chose to run his review anyway. This is a one-time exception only.]