This is the fourth book in the “Steerswoman” series from Rosemary Kirstein. I’ve not read the entire series so I can’t comment on it in detail as a whole. (I found “The Outskirter’s Secret” and read it a few years ago, but never found the first book in the sequence, and the third, “The Lost Steersman” somehow escaped my notice. Her first two have been re-released in omnibus form from DelRey, so all are currently in print, in trade paper size if your bookstore shelves by size as well as author and genre.)

The book stands on its own. Having knowledge of What Has Gone Before can lend a little more significance to some events but such knowledge isn’t necessary for the enjoyment of the story. However, I have to note that it is less independent than the earlier book I read. She may be in the process of moving towards episodic novels in a larger story, which is unfortunate. I stopped reading James P. Hogan for this reason, and have put George R. R. Martin in abeyance until he claims to have finished the Fire and Ice saga he embarked on since being so disappointed in the lack of significant movement in Episode 2. I understand the economic impulse behind it, though, so I don’t condemn the practice out of hand.

While the sequence isn’t a single tale broken up into book-sized chunks, a la Tolkien, it’s more than a collection of tales set in a common fantasy world. It has an overarching story arc that it follows. The Steerswoman (a Steerswoman, by the way, is an itinerant collector of knowledge; she is allowed to ask any question, and she will truthfully answer any question put to her) has discovered something momentous (a geosynchronous satellite, which the people call a Guidestar, has fallen) and there is A Plot Afoot by someone which is resulting in a lot of deaths among the frontier folk (called outskirters) and maybe the entire world.

One of the reasons I’ve looked for these books is that I served on a panel at PhilCon with the author, and found she possessed one of those minds that really enjoys turning things upside down to see what they look like from angles usually unseen. I don’t know, but I rather suspect, she would enjoy those puzzles Games magazine runs from time to time where you are asked to identify an object from a very close-up photograph of a small part of it. I’ve always found that sort of mind enjoyable, even fascinating, and I wanted to see what she did with her plots.

She didn’t disappoint. It’s not difficult to see the technology behind the “magic” or “charms,” but the terminology her unsophisticated folks use for the intrusions of hi-tech into their world is more reasonable than McCaffrey’s “agenothree” (from Pern; the etymology of this term never did satisfy me).

I found the concept of the Steerswoman office to be especially intriguing. In a nutshell, they collect and store knowledge for the world. They are entitled to pry into anything, and the price for not answering them (or worse, lying to them) is to be placed under ban, in which case no Steerswoman will ever tell you anything. It presupposes, of course, that you actually care whether you learn anything from a Steerswoman. Kirstein quite evidently considers this to be a horrible punishment; my experience with humanity leads me to believe that viewpoint is a minority one for the species, but it works well in the society she has created, so it’s hardly a serious complaint. In any case, it’s a creative way to solve the age-old problem of how to get strangers to talk meaningfully to your viewpoint character and, by extension, your readers.

To return to the book in hand, our heroine has been tracking the wizard, trying to find out what he is up to, and found the place where he served his apprenticeship. Wizards have a bad rep in this society, but here she finds the tale of one who suddenly changed to a Nice Guy. The larger arc is concerned with the why and when of the change; the immediate problem is how will the steerswoman survive being discovered there by the one she is investigating.

Kirstein paints well; my enjoyment of the characters and the society almost completely obscured how dependent the plot of the book was on What Has Gone Before (which is an achievement, considering I had missed 2/3rds of The Story Thus Far). The larger arch is definitely of the “puzzle” variety, but the individual stories themselves are character-driven. Recommended.