expeditions to other strange worlds

Whoozat? Purrcy and I were resting together, until all of a sudden he wondered what the human was doing in his bed. Besides being warm, of course.

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The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott is the second part of a duology with The Witch Roads, about Elen, a Deputy Courier in the Imperial-China-esque Tranquil Empire who gets caught up in the machinations of princes and demons, when all she wants to do is keep her head down, walk her circuit carrying mail, talking to people, keeping an eye out for deadly Spore infestations and stopping them before they spread, and seeing her beloved nephew Kem on his way in life.

Sidebar: Elen is 34, and we had a to-me hilarious convo on Bluesky when Elliott (who is 2 years younger than I am) said she was taken aback by how many readers describe Elen as "middle-aged", because *she* doesn't think of 34 as middle-aged, "middle-aged" is just a euphemism for "old"!

I think this is hilarious because from my youth I figured 0-29 was young, 30-59=middle-aged, 60+=old, that's just MATH, people, stop kidding yourselves! But then we talked about it at dinner and it turns out Beth & Dirk have very vibes-based definitions of "middle-aged" as well. Frankly I'm disappointed.



Back to the duology! One reason I love Elliott is that she often writes from the POV of non-elites who don't think elites (princes, emperors, billionaires, etc.) are that great, and she maintains it, she doesn't fall into the "except for this one" trap. This is *so* rare, even writers who are making a determined, conscious effort to avoid what Pratchett described as our "major design flaw, [the] tendency to bend at the knees" will still fall into it -- e.g. by having crucial non-elite characters we've identified with turn out to be close family members of the leading elite (royalty, rich people, etc.). Which the writers do to add family drama to the mix, but which also falls back into the old, OLD trap of "only the families of the elites count as Real People".

Because Elliott really cares about the little people, even when they're spending time with the high & mighty, her plots have less narrativium than usual & more "buffeted by the winds of fate" or "let's roll the dice, WHOOPS lost that saving throw" quality. The Witch Roads story isn't "how Elen saves the world/changes her society", it's "how Elen protects her child, comes to understand herself better, and gets to a [a better place in life, spoilers]."

But that also means that on some level it's disappointing, because I've been so conditioned to expect SFF to be about how someone at least *helps* to change the world. But in Elliott's little-people fantasy, the protags don't really do that, because they're in such hierarchical societies that a change at the top really boils down to "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

The only thing that really bugs me is a me-thing. As in Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, we have a fantasy society where people have some ability to choose their occupations--which completely overlooks the fact that in a premodern society almost everybody has to be a peasant farmer. (I'm now going down a research spiral; stay tuned.)