Barbara Hambly, The Darwath Trilogy (Del Rey, 1997)
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
That, of course, is Clarke’s Law. It is one of the precepts of science fiction (and fact: consider the Cargo Cults of the New Guinea). One of the most original ideas in Barbara Hambly’s Darwath Trilogy is that this can be seen to hold true even for the users of that technology – or for their heirs, desperately trying to back-engineer their ancestors’ arts.
Hambly is well known these days for her marvelous takes on both fantasy and historical fiction; in fact, her most recent novel is centered on Mary Todd Lincoln. Way back in the mists of time, though, she started her storytelling career with tales of the realm of Darwath and its hopeless fight against horrific, inhuman enemies. This is a splendid and completely realized tale, that deserves a second look after all this time. It’s not your average fantasy, and in fact, dances beguilingly along the edge between fantasy and science fiction. Because magic in Darwath, which once wrought vast fortresses and machines out of thin air, has largely been forgotten. And now the world is in peril and almost no one can tell how the magic or the machines worked, or is even certain of the difference between them.
The plot is deceptively simple: the Realm of the West of the World is under attack. Mythical monsters have risen from the depths of the earth, and in a month of haunted nights have destroyed an entire civilization. Now the few survivors are trying to find shelter, hunted through the emptied countryside by creatures like flying nocturnal squids armed with malign magic and the intelligence of men. The Darwath Trilogy is based firmly on classical fantasy tropes: enemies in the dark, enemies who are The Dark --intent on literally consuming humankind, ancient magic, unexpected love, unlikely heroes, desperate causes and a pair of 20th century adventurers tossed into an alternate universe to be the audience’s focus.
What makes this story so vastly enjoyable and different is that, having established this classical background in the first 60 pages of the tale, Hambly then strikes out firmly into Terra Incognita. The reader is dropped off an old, familiar path into a truly unique world, imagined in every detail and presented with a loving hard-focus that surrounds like a well-cast spell.
Darwath is no faux-medieval world of verbose armored knights. Its society, crumbling under the assault of The Dark, is presented realistically, in every detail and at every level. There is a bureaucracy selfishly trying to defend its power base after the King’s death. There is a powerful and entrenched Church, which doesn’t mind the world ending as long everyone is properly shriven. There is an undermanned and underfunded military, trying to chivvy the remnants of humanity -- quarrelsome, frightened, greedy, and terrified --into some kind of shelter before war breaks out between the surviving factions. Another of Hambly’s glorious departures from tradition is that these people are real. They swear, fight, joke, lose their shoes as well as their families and worry about sanitation in a refugee camp crowded with 8,000 distracted survivors. Some people have to shoulder ghastly burdens. Some fall in love with the wrong people -- two of these are Gillian and Rudy, the misplaced Californians dropped into the middle of the war, and their subsequent growth and travails are one of the themes of the tale.
And nicely done it is, as they sidestep the stereotypes of fantasy in their adventures. Gil, a historian, becomes a warrior. Between episodes of fending off The Dark or black marketeers or bandits, she applies her scholarly training to deciphering the lost history of Darwath, trying to find a way to defeat The Dark. Rudy -- who painted motorcycles in the wilds of San Bernardino -- most unexpectedly finds he might become a mage. That is if he can find the inner discipline he has always lacked, if he can keep his quixotic master Ingold alive, and if he can dodge the fanatic Bishop who would like to stake out any magic user for The Dark to devour.
The Darwath Trilogy has a solid, matter-of-fact approach that is a wonderful antidote to the legions of derivative elves that now populate the fantasy field. At the same time, with its core struggle to decipher and wield a lost magical technology, it is a charmingly eccentric bit of science fiction. Most of all, it is a solid, entrancing, captivating story that every lover of well-realized worlds should explore.
