Tuesday, January 26, 2021
reading: the steerswoman (series)
These are by Rosemary Kirstein, and available as e-books on Smashwords:
- The Steerswoman
- The Outskirter’s Secret
- The Lost Steersman
- The Language of Power
I came across these by way of a blog post by Sumana Harihareswara, I think with my ambient sense that I should read them enhanced by a review by Russ Allbery and a blurb from Jo Walton.
On first inspection, The Steerswoman is a particular and familiar sort of fantasy with one or two mildly interesting conceits. It quickly becomes something deeper than that, and after working through all four in the space of a couple of weeks, I’d rank them with the classics of their genre.
This is an unfinished series, the first of which was published in 1989, with a whole lot of unresolved questions. I normally try not to encourage people to take up this kind of thing; most readers of speculative fiction have been burned by some long-running series or another by now. I’ll make an exception for this one: I eagerly await the concluding volumes, but even if they’re never published, the first four are all worth the time.