THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD: Fiction Review

Suzy McKee Charnas' Tiptree Award Winning Novel

By Denise Dumars     September 22, 2000

The James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award (named for the nom de plume of the late science fiction author Dr. Alice Sheldon) is given each year for an outstanding work of role-expanding speculative fiction. On the last weekend of July 2000, during the awards ceremony at Diversicon 8 in St. Paul, Minn., the award was given to THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD, the last chapter in the saga of the Holdfast Chronicles, a four-book series begun in the 1970s by Suzy McKee Charnas.

Spanning thirty years both in real time and in the lives of the fictional characters, THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD opens with a prologue by Sorrel, the now-grown daughter of Alldera, leader of the Riding Women and liberator of the enslaved 'fems' of WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD, the first book in the series. THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD is Sorrel's story, and it will also be the end for some of the continuing characters in the saga.

Sorrel has come of age in a world hardly recognizable as our own. Men and women live separately, and after generations of enslavement the women have broken free, led by the legendary Alldera the runner. The Riding Women, as Alldera's Amazonian compatriots are called, raise children communally and keep what men there are in their society as slaves. Still on the loose, however, is the murderous rapist Servan D Layo, the Dark Dreamer, who even in the collapse of men's sovereignty commands a small band who want to take power away from the free women.

Sorrel does not know who her father is. He could be the crippled Eykar, who lives in the library and is allowed to teach women to read, or he could possibly be D Layo: both had raped Alldera when she was a slave of men. When a woman stumbles into the Riding Women's camp and gives birth to another child of rape, this one a little boy, Sorrel feels for him. His mother dies, and he is tossed in with the other children, left to thrive or die, and Sorrel worries that the Riding Women will harm the innocent, dark-skinned child.

Neither racism nor sexism has vanished from this landscape, though civilization as we know it certainly has. Sorrel takes off with Veree, the boy, in hopes of passing him off as her own child and therefore keeping him from being castrated or killed. Along the way she'll run into some old friends and enemies, and the women's freedom is once again in jeopardy.

The society of the Holdfast Chronicles is fragmented in the extreme--a decimated landscape after the fall of civilization due to pollution and the dying off of virtually all food crops and domestic animals. The world men constructed after this collapse is for white males only. Seaweed is farmed as food, and the other agricultural crop is an hallucinogenic drug somewhat like a very strong form of marijuana. Men love men, but a few older men keep pet 'fems' (as women are called) and are considered aberrant in their preferences. Women are confined and enslaved, degraded to the point of cannibalism, and every child is a child of rape.

Alldera the runner breaks free of this enslavement and leads her Riding Women to a victory over the men, resulting in a world that is a bit better--albeit completely separatist--than it was before. Men in this world are not trusted at all, and the women enslave men because they are afraid of them and do not believe they can be trusted if set free.

The men rebel in their own way by becoming members of a bear cult that practices dark ecstatic rites culminating in male-on-male gang rape. They believe D Layo is their savior, who will come to liberate them. One of their strongest followers is Setteo, Eykar's lover. Eykar himself, as one of the last literate people, hates this nonsense and fears for Setteo and the cultists and tries his best to heal some of the rifts between men and women.

THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD is not escapist fiction; but neither is it a book with an overt 'message.' It's a challenging tale of a civilization in shambles where neither men nor women know how to set things right again. There is murder, rape and every sort of violence, and though the book can be read successfully as a stand-alone novel, readers as captivated by this strange and unsettling landscape as I was will want to go back and read the previous three volumes. All are fascinating.

THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD, by Suzy McKee Charnas, Tor: 1999. 428 p. $24.95. ISBN: 0-312-85719-5.

Also available from Tor: THE SLAVE AND THE FREE, containing books one and two of the Holdfast Chronicles, 436 p. $16.95. ISBN: 0-312-86912-6. THE FURIES, book three in the Holdfast Chronicles, 399 p. $6.99. ISBN: 0-812-54819-1.