Troubles in SF Poetry—Part III

[Last week in Part II of “Troubles in SF Poetry,” I discussed poems by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and Math Jones. Here in Part III, we now discuss Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series for how it incorporates alliterative poetry into a science-fictional setting.]

Click here to see Part I or Part II of "Troubles in SF Poetry."

Kirstein is one of those hidden gems of a writer who has flown, as sometimes happens, unfortunately, under the radar. For myself, I discovered her thanks to Paul Deane, but in addition to the alliterative verse in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series (1989-2004), she also published with Del Rey Books … a major second research interest of mine.

What to say about Del Rey? Well, if you – like me – grew up reading fantasy in the 1980s or 1990s, chances are that more than a few Del Rey titles lined your home bookshelves. These books were everywhere. Del Rey published big-name SF authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov, not to mention Alan Dean Foster’s ghostwritten novelization for Star Wars. And it was Del Rey who basically turned fantasy into a mass-market category of fiction. Through authors like Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and Stephen R. Donaldson (my own personal favorite,), they launched an entire generation of new fantasy readers.

That’s why, when some critics sneer about “commercial fantasy” or “Tolkien clones” between 1977 and 1990, I prefer to invoke, more simply, the “Del Rey Era” – although “Del Rey Hegemony” has a nice ring about it, too. During those fourteen years, Del Rey had more titles reach a Publisher’s Weekly or New York Times bestseller list than every other SFF publisher …. combined.

The architects of this little empire were Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey. The former ran the SF line (and seemingly inspired awe from every author with whom she worked), and the latter, Lester, did the fantasy side of things.

That’s important, cuz Kirstein’s first novel arrived at the tail end of Del Rey’s hegemony. Judy-Lynn had died a few years earlier, leaving Del Rey’s SF line to Owen Lock, and Lester himself had slowed down considerably. His bosses eventually tried to force him into retirement in 1991, although Lester being Lester, he choose to quit instead. So the waning of Del Rey’s glory days perhaps explains why The Steerswoman never quite found its audience, but even so, I can detect Lester’s impact in at least one tangible way.

Before I explain, though, take a gander at this cover for the British edition of Kirstein’s first novel. Tell me, what genre do you think this is?

Gotta be fantasy, right?

And that makes total sense. The plot is all about evil wizards trying to murder Rowan, the steerswoman, and her only ally is a sword-wielding lady barbarian named Bel … a female Conan, basically, except she’s a sidekick and smells nicer (presumably).

Fantasy, then, all the way. Although this cover doesn’t depict Bel herself, the steerswoman Rowan is a smart, stylishly becloaked young woman standing in a shadow-filled woods laced with cobwebs. Quite mystical, quite intriguing. So if the Big Bad Wolf were suddenly to appear in this story, well, he’d better watch out, is all I’m saying.

Now check the American cover by Del Rey. Tell me if you can spot a difference. Careful, though – it’s subtle.

Yep. Since Pan Books believed that fantasy was read mostly by women, their cover plays up Kirstein’s female protagonist, but Del Rey Books tended to gender its audience as male … heavily. Moreover, Lester himself strongly believed that fantasy readers abhorred anything that smacked of SF, whereas most SF readers didn’t mind the occasional fantasy element. Therefore every time Del Rey published a book that crossed traditional genre boundaries, they marketed it as straight SF.

That’s clearly what happened with this American edition;  Del Rey even adds their special “vortex” colophon for SF titles. For all that Rowan is being chased by evil wizards in a pre-industrial society, Kirstein plants several clues that The Steerswoman is actually SF. All units of measurement are in miles or kilometers, for instance. Likewise, the Guidestars – a major plot point – are clearly just orbiting satellites. Finally, the wizards aren’t mystical magic-users. They just have access to advanced technologies unknown to the rest of Rowan’s society.

In fact, it slowly becomes apparent that Rowan’s world is an alien planet being terraformed by colonists who’ve long forgotten their origins. In that sense, Kirstein’s Steerswoman series reminds of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), which tackles terraforming more from a hard SF perspective. Another comparable series is N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo-Award winning Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), which, despite explicit references to magic in the text, I persist in thinking of as SF-coded. A major plot point for Jemisin, however, is the idea of a “missing moon,” and Rowan mentions that her world no longer has a moon, either.

So – science fiction to its bones. And readers with the Gift of Prophecy surely know where I’m going with all this.

Alliterative poetry.

Here’s an example from the second book, The Outskirter’s Secret (1992). The lady barbarian Bel is attempting to build support among her fellow Outskirters against the wizards, and uses their dominant metrical form:

Who will hear, or have the heart

To stand beside me, to stay, and strike?

Outskirters all now understand:

War will come. With weapons wielded

All as one must answer evil.

The call will come, and I shall call it.

The need will be known, by these three names—

            I am Bel, Margasdotter, Chanly.

Like Anderson in “The Scothan Queen,” Kirstein foregoes any explicit mention of SF tropes, and her metrics are highly impressionistic. Yet there’s clear alliterative patterning here, plus a caesura via mid-line punctuation in almost every line. Although this brief verse doesn’t work well as a standalone text, as prosimetrum, it adds several wonderful resonances to Kirstein’s novel’s SF themes.

For instance, whereas Marcie Lynn Tentchoff chooses to adopt – or more likely reinvent – Anderson’s device of a poetical barbarian people stealing interstellar technology, Kirstein goes in the opposite direction. Instead of an ancient medieval people catapulted into the Space Age, Kirstein has her galaxy-spanning colonists regress backwards. Steerswomen themselves retain a high degree of scientific rationalism, but Kirstein’s alien society otherwise reverts back to a level of social and technological organization more commonly associated with … alliterative poetry.

Again, Kirstein plants several clues about this reversal. Bel’s alliterative poetry is obviously a big “Germanic” hint. In the Inner Lands, moreover, their major city is Wulfshaven. This name builds upon two Germanic root words, the Old English wulf (ON úlfr) and the Old English hæfen (ON hǫfn).

Coincidence? Then consider this. When the Outskirters present their lineage, as Bel does in her poem, she does so in a specifically Norse style: i.e., “Bel Margasdotter.” The menfolk do likewise. Their various patronymics include Karinson, Linson, and Kresson.

In fact, Kirstein’s Outskirters are a particularly fascinating people. In terms of terraforming, they’re something like advance scouts, destroying the alien landscape so that it might better support more Earth-friendly lifeforms in due time. They’re also heavily Germanic in the sense of being “barbarians” who are also, significantly, non-literate.

The old Norse peoples did not, during pagan times, practice literacy—that came later, much later, after being Christianized. And in Kirstein’s SF novels, it makes no sense for a nomadic people without access to forests to develop a book culture. Hence they need oral poetry. As one of their seyohs or leaders observes, this “true poetry” must be unrhymed, alliterative, and with a caesura in the middle.

Beyond this, though, the folk knowledge of the Outskirters contains vestiges of a once literate society. The most fascinating instance happens when Rowan is questioning a Face Person (a type of extreme Outskirter) about his people’s ancestors. He recites their names as a list, and Rowan realizes this list is in nearly perfect alphabetical order. Only one name, “Lessa,” is an exception. It appears in the m-group … but Rowan, with an intuitive leap to make any medievalist proud, quickly realizes that “Lessa” must be a shorted form of the name Melissa.

So there you have it. An excellent SF series which finds a novel, thematically appropriate way of introducing an archaic medieval meter into its far-future setting. It’s a deft variation on what Anderson and Tentchoff manage in their respective stories, but this is exactly the kind of creativity SF poets need for the Modern Revival.