chomiji | Schmitz, James H. - The Witches of Karres (Reply)

I recently talked smillaraaq into reading this old favorite of mine, so it seemed like a good time to re-read it myself. This cheerful, comic space opera from the 1960s has no ax to grind and no pretenses of presenting anything but a cracking good time. However, it's strangely modern in its near-disregard of the sex-role stereotyping of its era. Most notably, our square-chinned young male protagonist spends most of the story depending on the skills, common sense, and knowledge of an 11-year-old girl - whose mother is also presented as a force to be respected.

Gallant but impecunious young Captain Pausert of the planetary Republic of Nikkeldepain (a place that sounds as though it's run by the descendants of Michael Bloomberg's arm of the GOP) has been given one last chance to redeem himself financially in the eyes of both his government and his secret fiancee's father. He's been given an aged starship and a cargo of leftover bits and pieces to sell, and turned loose on a trading mission. Things are going splendidly when he hits the planet of Porlumma, part of a classic space opera Empire where slavery is is legal, and encounters three enslaved young sisters - Maleen, Goth, and the Leewit (yes, the Leewit), ages 14, 11, and 6 - in need of rescuing. Good-hearted Pausert does so, at considerable cost and personal risk (slavery is illegal on Nikkeldepain), and even volunteers to take the girls back to their mysterious home planet, Karres.

He probably should have thought harder about the fact that the owners of the girls are only too happy to sell them off.

Soon Pausert is on the lam, wanted on his home planet and in the Empire, traveling to the far side of the galaxy with Goth as his advisor and becoming involved in interstellar politics on a grand scale. He learns (and we do too) about the ill-omened Chaladoor, a huge, forbidding section of space traversed only by the bold and the foolhardy; Uldune, an entire planet of successful interstellar crooks; Worm World, a noxious place inhabited by the Nuri Worms, whose activities turn the skies of planets yellow and cause their inhabitants to run screaming mad; the dread Agandar, a pirate lord of all-too-serious competence; psychic entities called vatches, which think that they are dreaming the lives of more corporeal beings; Sheem robots; Moander who Speaks with a Thousand Voices; the Megair Cannibals; grik-dogs; and much much more. It's a heady, frothy concoction that still manages to build to a genuinely scary climax that leaves the reader glad for the eventual happy ending.

It's the perfect companion to a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies on a cold winter day. Read it. It will make you smile, as it has for me on every re-read since I was Goth's age.

The Witches of Karres (review)

I tried to pay particular attention to the whole sex role thing this time, and I'm still convinced that Schmitz was amazingly, modernly liberal about this. It's not that his female characters never use stereotypical female behavior - notably, both the wicked ship outfitter Sunnat and the Imperial double agent Hulik do Eldel certainly do so - but that's the point: these women are using their feminine wiles, deliberately. Schmitz never presents this as the default, unavoidable mode of female behavior. Goth is never less than a full partner, and when Pausert and crew are fleeing across the planet of the red sun, it's Hulik who manages to be useful and resourceful, and the experienced male spacedog Vezzarn who chickens out and betrays the party. And although Pausert is the one who figures out how to exploit the energies of the giant vatch, the strange creature has already been traumatized by Toll, the mother of the three juvenile witches.

This is not lofty, skillful worldbuilding. Schmitz clearly never worries about how exactly the normal interstellar drives of this universe function, what's the basis for the ecology for any of the various planets, why the sky looks yellow whenever the Nuris show up, or anything like that. People still drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, and when Hulik needs an analogy for the size of the Sheem robot, she references a horse. Some of the technology described has gone the way of all things already: star charts are in some form that supports scribbling in the margins, vault doors are still opened with keys, and computers don't seem to exist. None of it really matters much: the plot rollicks along in a way that makes worrying about these details feel like mere ass-hattery, and the writing is snappy and sparkles with deadpan humor. Here, for example, Pausert seeks some reassurance that their new business contacts won't rip them off:

"[W]hat makes you think we won't get robbed blind there?"

"They're not crooks that way - at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning-alive thing," Goth explained. "You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It's pretty safe!"

It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals.

I suppose I should be worrying about how many innocent people are inadvertently skinned alive by the Daal's government each year, not to mention whether anyone plans to do anything about the Empire's deplorable practice of slavery. But the Witches have moved their planet again - using the Sheewash Drive: "The one you have to do it with yourself," to quote the irrespressible Leewit. They're fighting the Nuris amidst the dead suns of the Tark Nembi Cluster, and I've got to get back in time to see the Venture arrive with the Synergizer.

To quite Dave Langford's review in Ansible: "Abandon moral uplift, all ye who enter here."

Enjoy!