Barnes & Noble reviews PEGASUS
Diane in MN sent me this link (thank you!), which I hadn’t seen:
If you scroll down to the bottom you will find a good, interesting and thoughtful review of PEGASUS. But before we get there . . . okay, the web and the use of the web are still new and evolving, headlines aren’t what they used to be and Google is a thing that didn’t use to be at all. So maybe glancing over the pages for anything that catches your eye isn’t the way people read for web content—maybe most people just subscribe to bnreview.com, or to Paul Di Filippo, or search for ‘Robin McKinley’ or ‘PEGASUS reviews’ on Google, and this isn’t as confusing to most people as it is to me. But why doesn’t B&N, or Di Filippo himself, have a subheading to the piece that says ‘Galen Beckett, THE HOUSE ON DURROW STREET, Patricia McKillip, THE BARDS OF BONE PLAIN, Robin McKinley, PEGASUS’? Or am I hopelessly stuck in an ancient paper technology mindset?*
However. I’ve now given all of you the link, so please read it. And while Pat McKillip is a buy-on-sight with me and I’m delighted she’s got a new book, I don’t know Galen Beckett—but after reading about HOUSE and its predecessor I will certainly hunt them out.
And now to PEGASUS. In the first place it’s just such a pleasure to be reviewed thoughtfully. I acknowledge that taking time to muse over something is a colossal luxury which most reviewers don’t have—reviewing at best pays diddly, and most web reviewers do it for love of reading, and still have to fit that annoying day job in somehow. I’m grateful for every READ THIS BOOK tweet or one-paragraph shout for attention . . . but something like what Di Filippo has done here makes me very happy.
I’m also thrilled that he pretty well leads off with the paragraph in which I describe the pegasi in terms that make it very clear that they are not flying horses. In fact, I’m going to reprint it—yes, again—because this is another of those things that keeps coming up and coming up and coming up and while I’m doubtless preaching to the saved, still it makes me feel better:**
Pegasi looked almost like four-legged birds, standing next to horses. Their necks were longer and their bodies shorter in comparison, their ribs tremendously widesprung for lung space and their shoulders broad for wing muscles, but tapering away behind to almost nothing; their bellies tucked up like sighthounds’, although there were deep lines of muscles on their hindquarters. Their legs seemed as slender as grass stems, and the place where the head met the neck was so delicate a child’s hands could ring it…
Yep. Got that? Memorised it? Tattooed it on the back of your hand so you can refer to it at need? Great. Splendid. And then Di Filippo says: ‘Definitely alien, a bit creepy, and almost insectile. Not your off-the-shelf wish-fulfillment cousins to unicorns.’ Italics mine.
I’m drily amused that he can see my world-building as SF-y. I see exactly what he means, and I consider it a compliment; I’ve said many times that for me fantasy only works—as reader as well as writer—when it’s grounded in a world that feels solid, and SF is the nuts-and-bolts, how-and-what-then branch of the imaginary real.*** And I probably approach it in a somewhat SF-y way, which I’ve talked about in recent interviews: I look around the story-world I’m in and take notes–like a lab tech, if you will. And the stuff I can’t see or don’t hear the characters talk about, I’ll try to triangulate from things I do know. †
Di Filippo says: ‘One gets the sense almost that Sylvi is a mutant, the first of her kind in eight centuries, another SF riff.’ Huh. A perfectly valid observation, but mutant is such an SF word; as I write Sylvi’s story, I’m just thinking about the 800 years of the two species bumping into each other—it has to have an effect. Someone like Sylvi was going to have to happen some day, or the Alliance would eventually break down—although an 800-year treaty is pretty good going by human standards—I’d say it would have splintered at the point that either side stopped hoping for or believing in the moment or the person (human or pegasus) when they could talk to each other directly. But there’s always someone who’s found a way to take advantage of a situation, especially an unsatisfactory, unbalanced situation—and that would be Fthoom and his coterie in this instance. Which is why there’s a story.
Di Filippo says: ‘McKinley is explicit that her tale is a parable of race relations. (Did I mention that Ebon is a rare black pegasus?)’ Depends on what you mean by explicit: Ebon arrived very much a complete package, and black was part of the package. I didn’t mean to do this, and in fact worried about it, worried that Ebon’s blackness could be interpreted as a thumping great piece of moralising twaddle—but, those of you who have read PEGASUS, can you imagine trying to convince Ebon to disguise himself as brown or grey or flaxen? Not on. So black he remained. At the same time, De Filippo’s point is again valid and while as I keep saying the story is the story and I’m just†† writing it down, I’m aware of the parallels between one mixed lot of folks in Sylvi’s world having trouble communicating across a complicated barrier and another mixed lot of folks in our world having similar problems.
And finally he says: ‘Another subtext that is acknowledged glancingly, but is just as vital, is that of Sylvi’s adolescent sexual awakening—and interracial sexual awakening at that.’ Yes. Well. Ahem. Yes, I do think Sylvi and Ebon’s relationship is hellishly sexually charged . . . and a week or something ago THE FRELLING ENDING OF PEG II JUST BLEW UP IN MY FACE AGAIN so I am right back to not being sure what happens.††† Di Filippo is not the first person to comment on the romantic subtext, although he may be the first to do it without snickering and suggesting I’ve painted myself into a corner. I keep telling you it’s not up to me. The story’s not worried. So I’m not worried either. Much.
* * *
* And while I’m complaining, why is there only a single featured title from the essay in the right-hand column? Why aren’t BARDS and PEGASUS included?
** I was at least half-resigned to fighting the PEGASI ARE NOT FLYING HORSES battle, but I was—and am—not at all resigned to the continuing tide of will there be a PEG II queries. Every time I get another clutch of them I ask Blogmom, who is also my webperson, to hang yet another banner saying PEGASUS II COMING IN 2012 somewhere. Anywhere. Everywhere. The queries are still coming in. WTF? There’s now one of those banners immediately above the contact email button on the web site . . . but the emails are still coming. It would take less time to look around either the blog or the web site than it takes to write me the email. Arrgh. And I’m still amazed that so many people don’t recognise a broken-off story when they see one. Of course that’s not the end! Good grief. However, there will be a line or a paragraph in reprints of PEG I that PEG II is on its way which should finally stem that tide.
But for those of you who want to abuse and berate me for doing something so inexpressibly horrible as to write a cliffhanger and inflict it upon my audience . . . pffft. I’m not impressed. Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Stories are what happen when the writer loses control. You want safe and predictable, there are plenty of cereal-box backs out there.
*** When I was a mere slip of a young thing—and still went to SF&F cons regularly—there was often a fair amount of needle between the SF camp and the F: they thought we were fey and feckless, and we thought they were dour and dull. Perhaps this is inevitable, and rivalry is supposed to be healthy and inspirational and all, but I’d personally much rather it went away. There are better things to strive over—and certainly some of the old boundaries are blurring; there’s a lot of urban ‘fantasy’ that could just as well be urban SF, alternate history, eh, it’s often both, and the steampunk I like usually has some fantasy feel to it.
† Mind you I have a slight sense of ‘what other way is there?’ but I’m probably suffering tunnel vision.
†† ‘JUST.’ AAAAAAAAUGH.
††† You guys don’t really have to worry. This is not the first time this has happened to me. It won’t be the last. I may be dangling from the ceiling and throwing oatmeal at the walls by the time I turn PEG II in, but I will turn it in, and it will have the ending it’s supposed to have. Gah. Be glad for your nice job as a bricklayer or maths tutor or microbiologist. You don’t want to be a writer. There’s way too much screaming involved in being a writer.
Postscript: If, however, you’re hanging on for the graphic interspecies love scene, don’t bother. While the nearest I’ve got to graphic sex was some pretty kinky semi-trans-species^ stuff in SUNSHINE, thus clearly indicating that I’m a deviant, it’s not going to happen this time, okay? Please leave quietly.
^ Okay, what’s a vampire? Homo sanguinis potor?
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