By Liz Williams
Winterstrike is a novel about the four Harn sisters. The eldest, Hestia, the adventurer, plucked from childhood to serve as a Winterstrike spy, Leretui, the rebel, confined to a locked room as punishment for the disgrace of being caught with a man-remnant, Essegui, the sensible one, works in the Temple and the youngest, Canteley, the baby, still too young to fully comprehend the enormity of what’s going on around her and, in this book at least, a bit-part player.
We open as the three younger girls and their parents are preparing for the festival of Ombre. Both mothers have, against their better judgement, agreed to allow Leretui out of her bedroom prison to attend the celebrations and she will eventually use this opportunity to escape the matriarchy and flee to the hills away from Winterstrike. Hestia meanwhile is spying on rival city Caud. In an old abandoned library she stumbles across plans for strange and very powerful weapon which she sends to her Winterstrike contacts. Unfortunately she is caught by the Caudi but, while imprisoned, a strange and very powerful weapon launches an attack on Caud and in the aftermath of the destruction she escapes.
Hestia hitches a ride up river and heads back to Winterstrike to find out what happened, while Essegui is coerced by her less-than-caring parents into leaving the city, tracking down Leretui and returning her to the family home. Meanwhile, in the mountains they are both headed for, the Noumenon are gathering in ever larger numbers in a bid to attack Winterstrike and regain power from the current rulers while a Centipede Queen, who has made the long journey from Earth to Mars, readies herself to join this revolution.
So, confused much? I know I was.
So lets the good stuff out of the way first. Despite being set on both Mars and Earth in the far-off future, Winterstrike reads a lot like a fantasy novel. A really good fantasy novel. The world is rich, vibrant and beautifully brought to life with touches of real brilliance within prose that feeds the reader with enough detail to satisfy that hunger to be absorbed in the story, but not so much as to overdo it and spoil the feast. Mars itself, depicted as an icy waste, cold and desolate, bears ancient battle scars and the city of Winterstrike with it’s broken fortress, survivor of a long-forgotten war, has a lovely Gothic feel to it underlined by the crumbling technology, ‘haunt-tech’, which somehow draws on the spirits of Mars’ dead and has a kin with any well-derived magic you’ll find elsewhere.
As you might expect of a world dominated by women with only ‘men-remnants’, products of genetic experimentation, left to skulk in the shadows, the politics is complex and power bitterly fought for, while religion is all encompassing, with variety and depth, and even an inquisition of sorts in the shape of the Excisseres or ‘Scissor Women’, unnaturally fast and strong law-keepers who communicate silently using only holographic wound patterns that play over their armour, all of which makes for a book filled with interesting ideas that will stay with you long after you put it down.
The characters too are well drawn and three-dimensional, each with a distinct voice and sense of purpose but, as good as they are, they are the weak link in the chain for me. The novel mostly alternates between Hestia and Essegui, one as she tries to make her way from Caud to Winterstrike via Noumenon and the other as she makes her way from Winterstrike to Noumenon in search of her sister. Both of them are strong, dependable and capable young women, intelligent, quick-witted and pretty-much in control of things. All well and good but along the way, as each of them sneaks about, gets captured, fights, escapes, bumps into the other and is involved in numerous scrapes, they never really seem to be in any imminent danger, and the complete indifference each of them seems to exhibit in any given situation means it’s really difficult to care about them, because you know they’re going to survive without suffering any physical or emotional trauma, to the extent where they begin to blur into one after a bit and you begin to wonder why there had to be two paths for this story to go down at all.
There is also, at times, a little deus ex-machina. A nice touch is that while in the library at Caud, Hestia picks up an egg-like object as a souvenir which turns out to be the ‘library’ itself, a kind of Jiminy Cricket in hard-drive form, font of all wisdom and able to help Hestia along the way. However, despite a non-corporeal form, she seems to be able to turn up whenever needed and shield hestia from pretty much any ill, early escape from the Excissers being a premium example.
But don’t let this put you off. This is after-all, the first book in a new series by one of the most inventive and imaginative writers working in the SF genre and there is clearly a lot more story to come. We barely scratched the surface of the genetically altered Vulpen – an interesting conceit and one that needs exploring – and there is a lot more to come from the Centipede Queen I’m sure.
Liz Williams gets better and better with each outing and despite being both brilliant and flawed in almost equal measure, Winterstrike ultimately gives a lot more than it takes away. It succeeds in drawing the reader into its mysteries, painting vivid pictures along the way, and leaving enough issues unresolved that you will absolutely want to read the next in the series. I know I do.
Winterstrike is published by Tor through Pan Macmillan and is available from Play.Com, Blackwell and all good book stores.