I’m a big fan of Mary Gentle’s fiction and I dearly wish she were more prolific. I remember reading and enjoying Golden Witchbreed (1983, UK), and its sequel Ancient Light (1987, UK), in the mid- to late 1980s, but it wasn’t until her hermetic fantasy Rats & Gargoyles (1990, UK) that I began following her career in earnest. I still remember the buzz when Rats & Gargoyles appeared. It’s one of the few books from that time I recall people talking about excitedly, a genre novel that seemed something genuinely different. (Another was Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty (1990, UK), another book I still rate very highly.)
Golden Witchbreed, however, I remembered only as an accomplished first contact novel in the style of Ursula K Le Guin, and I never bothered revisiting it.
Until now.
I had not, I soon learnt, misremembered the novel. But I had forgotten how much it was a novel by Mary Gentle. True, it wasn’t until last year I finally read Gentle’s debut novel, A Hawk in Silver (1977, UK), and even that displayed much of the prose style Gentle continues to use today — the drops into present tense for descriptive passages, the sheer physicality of the prose, the focus on smell and discomfort… A Hawk in Silver may have been fairly typical, plot-wise, of 1970s English portal fantasies, although it’s an example that deserves to be much wider known. Something similar might be said of Golden Witchbreed: that it is fairly typical, plot-wise, of late 1970s / 1980s first contact science fiction, particularly those focusing on the society and history of the alien race being contacted. As in many stories and novels by Le Guin.
Lynne de Lisle Christie, a mild empath in her late twenties, is sent to Orthe, Carrick V, by Great Britain, of the Dominion of Earth, as envoy to the low-tech inhabitants of the world. (The privileging of the UK on the galactic stage is common in 1970s English science fiction.) Christie is given permission by the Orthean ruler to travel about the continent, although the “xeno-team” already in place on Orthe remain restricted to the capital city.
Christie travels north to a provincial settlement, whose leader is opposed to contact with other worlds. In fact, there are many on Orthe who think Christie is not from another planet but an agent of the Witchbreed, a high tech race who ruled Orthe, and enslaved the Ortheans, thousands of years previously. The Golden, as they’re also called, were killed off by an engineered virus, but there’s a city on the southern continent, whose inhabitants are distantly descended from them, and which is waging a cold, and occasionally hot, war against the other Ortheans.
There’s a murder, Christie is accused, but manages to escape. She flees north, with the help of her apprentice, a teenage Orthean, and an Orthean mercenary (who had earlier tried to kill her). They’re captured by the fenfolk, aboriginal inhabitants of the planet, but released, and travel to the frozen northern wastes, where Christie encounters the “barbarians”, Ortheans who live in the ruined northern cities of the Golden.
This is where the callbacks to Le Guin are strongest, not just the trek across the frozen waste, which echoes that of Genly Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, USA), but also the fact Orthean children have no gender, and it’s only on attaining adulthood that their bodies change to be male or female. Some never change.
Christie eventually makes it back to civilisation — to the continent’s winter capital — only to be framed for the murder of its ruler. She flees yet again, this time making her way south across the Inner Sea to an independent city where some Golden technology is still in operation. From there, she manages to convince the Ortheans of her innocence, but the mystery of who has been trying to kill or discredit her remains. It all comes to a head back in the capital city, shortly after the Orthean ruler is selected to rule for another ten years.
I remembered Golden Witchbreed as a good novel, but suspected my memories had been coloured by Gentle’s later works and my admiration of them. It was nominated for the BSFA Award in 1984, but lost to John Sladek, but that was four or five years before I joined the BSFA or started attending sf conventions. On this reread, I discovered just how bloody good Golden Witchbreed is. Its plot is hardly original — cf The Left Hand of Darkness — and its worldbuilding is interesting, but there are lots of books with interesting building in early 1980s science fiction. But Gentle’s prose is definitely better than average, the narrative pace is relentless — this book is a fast read — and everything that happens arises out of the psychology of the Ortheans — which is defiantly not human — or the character of Christie. It is extremely well done.
This is a novel which reads just as well today in 2024 as it did in 1983. In fact, it might read better. It puts many current sf novels to shame. It deserves to be better known.
There’s not many forty-year-old science fiction novels that holds true for.
