Schmitz, James H. - The Witches of Karres

[chomiji]

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!

Comments

[chomiji]

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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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*

[chomiji]

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!