Bluesong

Danior is the only son ever born to a Barohna, one of the extraordinary women whose powers sustain life in the mountain valleys of Brakrath. This makes him unique, important and almost entirely without an established career path. Tradition has detailed instructions for Barohnas and their daughters; for Danior, it has approximately the embarrassed expression of an official confronted with a form for which no suitable box exists.

Keva is also the child of a Barohna, but she has been raised far from the mountains and kept ignorant of her true inheritance. Both young people are therefore outsiders in a world where identity, family and social purpose are ordinarily determined well in advance. Their separate journeys lead them into the desert, a harsh region occupied by small tribes whose independence is threatened by a leader determined to impose peace and civilisation—even if he must destroy nearly everybody to achieve an acceptably peaceful result.

At the centre of the story is the mysterious bluesong, one of several pieces of silk-like fabric whose origins have been forgotten. When exposed to the wind, these strange cloths produce haunting music. One, however, does not sing at all but carries a cry for help in the voice of the Darkchild, connecting Danior and Keva’s story with the larger mysteries surrounding their world. It is interstellar communications technology disguised as decorative fabric, which at least eliminates the usual problems with charging cables.

Bluesong returns to the world introduced in Darkchild, where forgotten science has become custom, myth and inherited power. The people of Brakrath understand the sunstones that warm their valleys through tradition rather than technology, while evidence of a much wider universe survives in forms they cannot entirely explain. Humanity has travelled between stars and engineered remarkable abilities, only for subsequent generations to treat the equipment as sacred heirlooms and hope nobody has misplaced the instructions.

Sydney J. Van Scyoc combines science fiction with the atmosphere of fantasy, creating a coming-of-age story shaped by biological inheritance, cultural expectations and the discovery that the world is considerably larger than one’s upbringing suggested. Danior and Keva must decide who they are while other people remain eager to make the decision for them, generally in ways that are politically useful and personally disastrous.

This is the second novel in the Daughters of the Sunstone trilogy, following Darkchild and preceding Starsilk. Although it belongs to a larger sequence, it has its own central characters and conflict, expanding the landscape beyond the mountain valleys into the deserts and tribal societies of Brakrath. Readers beginning here may occasionally sense that the mysterious singing cloth knows more than they do, but that is true of most of the characters as well.

Published in this Penguin Books edition in 1984, Bluesong will appeal to readers who enjoy thoughtful planetary fiction, strange inherited technologies and societies poised between myth and science. It offers adventure without surrendering its interest in belonging, difference and the dangerous enthusiasm of people who intend to improve everybody else.

This copy is in Very Good condition, with little evidence of its four decades of terrestrial existence. The pages remain firmly attached, the book does not sing when held in a breeze, and no interstellar distress message has yet emerged from the cover.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where every customer is free to discover a mysterious inheritance, although responsibility for maintaining the valley’s sunstone remains strictly with the purchaser.

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