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

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Schmitz, James H. - The Witches of Karres

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!

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That earlier Psion cover seems to have disappeared entirely - I get a whole 'nother page at that URL.

I will say that the classical English language term "dark" - as in describing a person who isn't "fair" - usually just meant "dark-haired, and of darker-than-milky-white complexion." Petrova, one of the three heroines of the children's classic Ballet Shoes, was described as dark - she was of Russian descent, had sallow skin, and "hair the color of a jay's wing." And again, in classic English usage, a Caucasian person who goes out into the sun for a while can get "brown." So the illustrators may have just received the wrong idea, especially if they were given nothing but what the publishers thought were suitable extracts from which to work. I wish they'd have authors work more closely with the cover artists.

Personally, if I say someone is brown-skinned, it's brown. What happens to my pale peachy skin when I get some sun is "tanned" (or to get squishy, "sun-kissed"). (Kougaiji is brown, but Gojyo isn't, for example.)

Well, phooey on vanishing pages. But I've done some scans for a future writeup - here's the 1982 paperback cover -- and here's a new one I just found, a 1996 omnibus of the first two books where the cover model looks more like the Vampire Lestat than Cat!

And yes, I'm well aware of the relativism of dark/brown in classic English texts -- I'd interpret those descriptions differently if they were in something like T.H. White or Enid Blyton. But the society in the Cat books is very clearly multiracial -- the only character whose ethnicity is clearly stated is a slightly anvilly North American Indian in the third book, but there are enough descriptions of skintone, hair, eyes, surnames with recognizable ethnic/national associations, to make it clear that this isn't an all-white future.

I haven't combed through the books yet to get all of the physical descriptions, but if my memory serves correctly "brown" is the word that's used most for Cat, "dark" only shows once or twice. Hydrans skin tones are compared to "nutmeg", "golden", "burnished brass", or "spice", and Cat looks Hydran so it seems a safe bet that his skin's a similar medium warm brown with golden or reddish undertones.

I did already go through just to see how early on in the text you get a physical description, and in the first book in particular it's not a case where it sneaks up on you -- it's on the first page! The prologue of Psion, which is the only bit where we ever see him in a third-person POV, has this bit when Contract Labor are looking for fresh meat in the slums and homing in on Cat trying to sleep in an alley:

_{Dirt grayed his worn clothes, the pale curls of his hair, the warm brown of his skin.}

That's the fourth paragraph of the book. Two paragraphs later we get the first mention of his eyes, the one feature the artists all seem to latch on to:

_{His eyes came open slowly, intensely green eyes with long slitted pupils like a cat's.}

In the second book, his appearance is described only a short ways in to the first chapter -- page 17, after a few earlier passing mentions of his slit-pupilled eyes and "halfbreed's face" that "wasn't put together right by human standards", we get a closer look when he's being grilled by some Corporate Security types:

_{My own face appeared suddenly in the air behind him: a little younger, a lot thinner, hair curly and white-blond, skin brown, eyes green and slit-pupilled.}

It takes a little longer to get that level of detail in the third book; you don't get that full of a look until partway through chapter two. Once again, though, in the pages leading up to this there are passing mentions of his slit-pupilled green eyes and Hydran appearance, coming along with our first good look at some of the unmixed Hydrans that he so closely resembles. And surprise surprise, the hair length thing that was also off on the cover of Dreamfall is mentioned here, long before the other passage I'd remembered where the length was implied in how his hair was getting restyled:

_{I stared at the double image of my face, the file-match side by side with the realtime image, looking at them the way I knew the guards would look at them. Seeing my hair, so pale in the artificial light that it was almost blue. I'd let it grow until it reached my shoulders, pinned it back with a clip at the base of my neck, the way most students of the Floating University had worn theirs. The gold stud through the hole in my ear tonight was about as conservative as I could make it, like my clothes. The light turned my skin an odd shadow-color, but it was no odder than the colors the guards' skins had turned in the light.}

But then again, Dreamfall's cover is one of the few that gets the hair color right -- it's repeatedly described as pale, white-blond, lighter than even the very light blonde of some pale human characters -- but most of the covers show deeper golden blonde shades instead of a true whitish platinum. But the shorter spiky style here is one he only wears during Catspaw...

Hey, I'm as puzzled as you are. I found the one where he's being grilled on Amazon, and I'd've at a minimum drawn his skin tones like the very most toasted blond-haired surfer boy, but more likely he'd have ended up with coloring similar to one of our mid-toned African-American staffers with a blond dye job (not as fashionable as it was a couple of years ago, but I still see it sometimes). I'm just trying to be the shrink for the artists, here, and figure out where their heads were at ... .

*nods* Having grown up around surfers from all ethnic backgrounds -- family friends and kids I went to school with were in the back of my mind when I gave Rosa brown skin and light blonde hair. Some of my Asian/Pacific Islander classmates were out at the beach so often that their dark hair was bleached lighter than mine from the sun, and one of my older calabash cousins was sort of your archetypal California-style surfer boy -- blue-eyed blond, pretty much pure Irish-American stock, with his hair dramatically lightenened and his skin a deep golden tan from spending pretty much every weekend out on the water. (He also spoke fluent Japanese -- his family were military, stationed overseas during the post-WWII occupation; he was their youngest child, born in Japan, so he grew up bilingual, and kept it up in school when they moved to Hawai'i. This led to many amusing scenes around tourists who never expected a gaijin who looked like he'd stepped out of a Beach Boys song to understand what they were saying about him...there'd be much blushing and giggling when he thanked them for the compliments about his appearance in flawless Japanese.)

About the covers: Huh. That first one looks like a Leo and Diane Dillon cover! And in that case, they probably were pleased to have a character that could plausibly be African-looking.

Other Dillon covers:

Abhorsen by Garth Nix
World's End by Joan Vinge (and that lends even more weight to the idea that your example is by the Dillons ... they also did a famous cover for The Snow Queen, which I have as a poster over my computer - maybe you recall it ... )
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

Just checked my copy...unfortunately there's no art credits anywhere to be found, and I can't spot any hint of a signature or initials anywhwere on the cover itself. It's a 1982 printing under the "Laurel-Leaf" imprint of Dell, if they did a lot of work for particular publishers...

I need to reread the first one now that I have the anniversary reprint; it seems that the earlier printings were rather heavily bowdlerized to make it more YA-friendly, which might explain part of why Psion seemed a lot more disjointed and shallow than the other two books.

Lord, I hate it when they do that to books. Some years ago, a dear friend who knew me well got me a fancy new edition of National Velvet to replace my rapidly disintegrating Scholastic paperback. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Velvet and her sisters (especially the eldest and most beautiful, Edwina) cussed. I mean, Velvet calls 'Dwina a bitch at one point (it was richly deserved, too). And in the context of how Velvet pulled off her masquerade as a male jockey, they omitted the following line, which I found really odd: "'A boy and a girl, they're that much alike that you've gotter have the pants off them to see ...'"

need to reread the first one now that I have the anniversary reprint; it seems that the earlier printings were rather heavily bowdlerized to make it more YA-friendly, which might explain part of why Psion seemed a lot more disjointed and shallow than the other two books.

There are noticeable differences not only in language, but in plot-content. It's bizarre. I originally discovered Psion when I was in middle school, at which point it read fine as a YA, but I much prefer the original (reprinted) version, even with the cover issues.

*nods* I've only just started in on the uncensored reprint, so I haven't hit any major discrepancies yet -- but judging from the introduction, I'm guessing they cut out a lot of the sexual references? (Oh, how the YA market has changed in the last twenty years...) That was one of the huge shifts I noticed between the first and second books -- in Catspaw it's shown openly that Mikah is gay, Cat's had experiences with both men and women and at times turned tricks to survive back in Oldcity, and so forth, but in Psion there are only the most discreetly indirect hints of any of this, and his yearning for Jule is strangely chaste for a red-blooded and utterly non-sheltered teenage boy...

(Metropolis icon love, btw!)

but judging from the introduction, I'm guessing they cut out a lot of the sexual references?

Yeah. I would have to re-read the YA version to make sure, but I remember reading the original text for the first time and thinking, "So this is where the characters' sex lives went . . ."

(Metropolis icon love, btw!)

Thank you!

matociquala made it for me.

And now Lord Peter! *swoons happily* Another series I've been pimping very hard to Cho and others recently...ah, synchronicity.

Speaking of Metropolis, have you seen the music video for Ari Gold's Where The Music Takes You? It's Fritz Lang imagery turned into a cartoon gay disco anthem, complete with dancing twink robots...utterly charming.

*swoons happily*

Hey, you just combined Saiyuki and Tom Lehrer. You win points for that.

It's Fritz Lang imagery turned into a cartoon gay disco anthem, complete with dancing twink robots...utterly charming.

. . . I think I have to see that.

smilla needs to win some kind of award for that icon ... I first bonded with her over that!

I'm endlessly amused at how much attention that one gets -- it wasn't even a deliberate case of spot-the-reference trolling, it just seemed a rather apt quote for a little truth-in-advertising icon! What can I say, my inner child is a cheerfully perverse ero-kappa. XD

Did you see Neil Gaiman's movie MirrorMask? It had a scene rather like that ... I'll never be able to feel the same way about the old Carpenters chestnut "Close to You" again. (Looks like you should able to find it on YouTube if you haven't seen the movie - unsurprisingly, YouTube is blocked here, so I can't recommend a specific clip.)

Nope, missed that when it was in the theaters and I'm very very slow about bothering to rent things. This sequence? How very Dave McKean...

Well, McKean was the co-creator! The official site is very cool.

And funny you should mention the Gojyo/Kougaiji comparison -- in Minekura's own color art she usually draws Gojyo with the same general complexion as the rest of the ikkou while Kou and Lirin are distinctly more tan...but I've seen artbook pieces where for whatever reason of artistic license, Kou and Lirin are lighter than usual. Meanwhile in the anime, for some reason they gave Gojyo (and Kenren, in the Gaiden flashback episodes) the same sort of tan complexion...perhaps to play up the Gojyo/Kou/Doku connection, and then by extension to make the Gojyo/Kenren parallel clearer? (The anime also redid Kenren's hair from black to red...and just to add to the confusion, Minekura has since done the occasional redheaded Kenren artbook pics.)

So even though the covers and artbooks really don't support it, the earlier immersion in the anime means that in my head, Gojyo tends to be a little more tanned than the rest of the guys. I mostly handwave it away by telling myself that he's far more likely to strip down and wander about scantily-clad or shirtless than the rest, so of course he's gotten a bit more sun and it should show...never mind that they're all spending hours in an open jeep every day so you'd think everybody would be at least tanned on their faces and hands, if not chronically sunburnt...I'm sure it's just that mother-hen Hakkai nags everybody not to forget the sunblock in the morning. *chuckle*

(And at least you're able to tan! I'm one of those folks who pretty much burns under a strong light bulb, which seems a particularly cruel genetic joke. I've tried, believe me, it just doesn't happen; my skin has only three states, the baseline pale, the slightly sallower pale that comes with small amounts of sun, and cooked lobster.)

Yeah, but I've never seen Doku drawn as anything but whiter than white ... I figured that was the purebred Kappa in him (fresh-watery, and all that - like frog and fish bellies), and anything darker in Gojyo's skin came from an Asiatic human mother.

Well, that explains all those fics that are talking about his tanned hands and golden skin ... I wondered, because in most of the color art I've seen, he didn't look anymore tanned or golden than anyone else!

(It's like in SDK - Yukimura's eyes always look hazel-ish in the early manga color art, and later on, someone makes a very big deal about his eyes being "golden" and "sparkling like gold." But in the anime, they ended up ... blue. WTF??? Which ticked me off, because otherwise, Yukimura is an Asian near-twin to my long-running RP character Keldarek, who was also 5 ft 6", black-haired to just past the shoulders, with unusual hazel eyes (Kelo's were slightly ringed), gorgeous, and smart-mouthed. No way he could have blue eyes!)

Oh, I can burn as well, if I don't take it very easy at first. And since I'm not spending hours at the pool in the summer anymore, it's always "at first." But as a child, with gradual sun exposure, I turned medium-toast brown and got blond-tawny streaks in my hair.

Yep, in the anime Gojyo has a very distinct golden tan, while Hakkai and Sanzo are comparatively pale. (When the colorists are being particularly attentive, you can even see that while they try to show both Sanzo and Hakkai having very fair complexions, Sanzo's skin is rather paler and more pink-tinged.) Goku also has a slightly deeper complexion than the other two, if a shade lighter than Gojyo, which again sort of makes sense to me as he's a more active outdoorsy sort, and like Gojyo seems like he'd generally be more relaxed about running about shirtless.

Anime-Kenren has pretty much the same complexion as Gojyo (and along with the recolored hair, the anime versions of Kenren and Tenpou also have the same red/green eyes as their later reincarnations, instead of the violet shades used on the most recent Gaiden covers.) And carrying on with the parallels, in the Homura-tachi Zenon also is more tan than the other kami.

For the Kou-tachi, the anime has Kou and Lirin with fairly deep tan complexions, but they also give Doku a bit of a tan to match Gojyo's; the Sha boys are maybe just a shade lighter than Kou. I can't quickly find a good screencap showing all of them on screen at the same time, but this AMV shows how the animators are giving Gojyo and Jien/Doku the same tone; their mom's shown as very pale.

It's kind of interesting to see all this divergence between the anime/manga skintones -- usually it's hair and eyes that get tweaked wildly in animated adaptations. But here other than the little detail of the Ten/Ken Gaiden eyecolors and the unfortunate fuchsia-for-red swap in the first season of the anime, they've stayed relatively faithful to the character designs...

And I'm grinning at your SDK/RPG overlap, as part of why I'm so ticked at seeing Cat done so far off from the description is that he really could be my Nobilis girl's big brother, a very close cousin at the least -- she was also a bit shorter than average and slightly built and a bit underfed-looking, with a warm caramel complexion and shoulder-length pale blonde curls. Other than the lack of feline pupils, the biggest difference in appearance would be her hair was more of a pale yellow instead of platinum, and her eyes were a lighter gold-green shade rather than Cat's deep grass-green.

Taking it very easy doesn't work for me -- I used to pretty much live at the beach on weekends, and did actually make a serious attempt to tan when I was in my teens and fed up with being so pasty...it just doesn't work. The "darkest" I can manage is just a slightly warmer, slightly deeper ivory, it's just one foundation shade darker than my usual makeup; past that point I stop "tanning" and burn. It always seemed so unfair, when folks like my mom could just spend one good afternoon in the garden and her already deep complexion would darken by several shades to a glowing warm brown, and she almost never burned... *pouts*

My brother-in-law tans very, very deeply. In high school (yes, we've known him that long), he used to work summers as a groundsman at one of the country clubs in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area, and he got well into the Indian subcontinent range of complexions.

The Young Lady also tans fairly well, which is odd, given her seeming English Rose complexion. I have no idea how the Mr. tans - he hates being out in the sun and avoids it at all costs. When we persuade him to go to the beach with us at Cape Cod in the summer, he hides in the sunbuster the whole time!

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Schmitz, James H. - The Witches of Karres

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