But the politics of her world never let her forget that flying is not all. These are the moments she lives, and sacrifices much, for.

Their creators made sure the monopoly of ownership over such precious artifacts will be forever restricted to their descendants, and flyers of Windhaven became a caste, privileged few, above law of mortals, but regulated by their own very strict traditions.ĭescriptions of flight, over the sea and around rocky islands are great and really make you wanna take up hang-gliding 😉 Our protagonist, Maris of Amberly, loves nothing more than the moments when she can forget herself in the flight. From the ultra light and very resilient alloys of the crashed ship wings were crafted ages ago, wings that make it possible to fly in the light gravity and windy climate of the planet. The surest way of communication is… flight. The isles are largely isolated, because sea monsters happily attack ships. Windhaven is a world of water and many small islands, reminiscent of Le Guin’s archipelago. Myths without magic, this is strictly post-sf world, without supernormal stuff. Or rather, as was often the case before written history (and sometimes even after that), distorting half-remembered facts into myths. Or maybe reading fantasy in my mother tongue no longer feels natural to me 😉Īction takes place on Windhaven, a planet where, centuries earlier, large human spaceship crashed giving birth to a new civilization of people deprived of any connection to outside world, slowly forgetting their past and its technology. It was an early work for both Martin and Tuttle, so it may not be translator’s fault. That’s how 2013 Polish edition looks, I share one Polish reviewer’s complaints about sometimes clumsy language plagued by too many repetitions, but I was not dissatisfied enough to get English version to compare. But it’s no Game of Thrones, in small scale political conflicts we encounter here hardly anybody dies and the reader is left feeling nostalgic, but optimistic about human nature. I don’t want to imply it’s not a good book, I love Le Guin and feminist is not an insult in my vocabulary.

I constantly re-checked the front cover to make sure it’s Martin on it and not Ursula Le Guin 😉 After that I’ve read that Tuttle wrote a book with straightforward title Encyclopedia of Feminism and the world made sense again. I’ve never read anything by his co-author here, Lisa Tuttle, and maybe that’s why I was very surprised by the book. A collection of three novellas that are not what you’d expect from Martin.

Windhaven by george rr martin