chasing_silver

McIntyre finished Curve of the World just before she died in 2019. After a long delay, it was published this year by Aqueduct Press.

Short version: It's good. Most highly recommended.

Curve of the World is an alternative history of sorts. What if the Late Bronze Age collapse of the 12th century BCE never happened? What would the Eastern Mediterranean world look like if the bull dancing, Labrys using Cretian civilization that preceded the Greeks was still around in the 6th century BCE? (we're told of a volcanic eruption a thousand years earlier, which I think refers to the famous Minoan eruption of Thera circa 1550 BCE, placing the story around 550).

I've read just enough ancient history to be able to recognize and appreciate the research McIntyre did and the work she put into fleshing out the bare archaeology of the Minoans into a living, breathing culture (which she names Idaean) that doesn't contradict the little we know about that time and place. But she also felt free to steer her extrapolations into the kind of society she wanted to write about - a peaceful matriarchy that hasn't been at war in living memory, set amongst other matriarchies (the Pharaoh is a woman, the People are basically Amazonian horse nomads). We do meet two warlike societies, and the Idaeans are skilled at defending themselves from pirate attacks just as the People are skilled at fighting off pillaging raiders from the north. But overall, she wanted to write a story about traders who make friends, not bullies who take.

Iakinthu is an Idaean trader and professional diplomat. She sails the seas, meeting new peoples, trading with them, and ensuring ongoing peaceful relations by a system of exchanging foster children. With their consent, tween-ish Idaean children go off to be raised by people she meets, and vice-versa. The fosters return home once they reach adulthood, and only then, after reuniting with their birth family, do they make a choice of which culture they will stay with.

Iakinthu has traded with Egypt, with the horseback riding nomadic People (Amazons, basically), and, taking advantage of the ancient Canal of the Pharaohs linking the Nile to the Red Sea (this existed, look it up), she has visited Hind (India) and Sheng (China). Going the other direction, she has been to the eastern coast of North America and traded with the maize growing Maisusutha. Her ship, the Flying Fish, has an advantage on these extremely long voyagers - Aranthau, its captain and her lover, is part human, part Sea People (aquatic humans, a recurring trope in McIntyre's fiction), which makes him very good at talking to whales, navigating, and avoiding dangerous weather.

At the start of the novel, Iakinthu is middle aged and considering retirement, but her adopted son Rhenthizu has reached adulthood and it is time to reunite him with his birth family. The problem is that Rhenthizu was enslaved at a very young age, then traded from one master to another over a vast distance before Iakinthu freed and adopted him. He remembers very little of his birth family, but he knows it lies on the coast where the sun rises above the Salish sea (America's Northwest Coast). For her last voyage, Iakinthu sets out to return him to his homeland, seemingly impossibly far from the east side of the continent where she has been before.

Structurally speaking, the book is more a travelogue than a novel. There's very little conflict and no real antagonist. Instead, McIntyre takes us on a delightful tour through a might have been world.

Don't expect this to be a rigorously historical book. Idaeans enjoy silk and paper imported from the Sheng over the Silk Road, but both paper and the trading route were not things until centuries later than my best guess at the time of the novel. McIntyre does not hesitate to have appearances by species that became extinct thousands of years before the story takes place (a huge ground sloth), or that might not ever have existed (a giant squid larger than the Flying Fish). And she arranged for the Bronze age to still be going on in the places we see, with "sky iron" and "earth iron" being exotic trading items rather than things the Idaeans make themselves.

One place where I think McIntyre made the wrong choice: after visiting the Maisusutha, and with the guidance of their former foster child Uinthi, who has explored very far in search of someone who speaks Rhenthizu's language, the Idaeans head south. Eventually they come to the waters off central America and meet Lady Jaguar, a Mayan-like ruler. McIntyre wanted Jaguar's empire to be expansionist, so she gives them the Incan system of inheritance - dead rulers continue to own their lands, forcing their children to conquer if they want to have an estate of their own. And that mixing felt uncomfortably close to the Western movie tradition of treating Indian peoples as all the same, mixing up wildly different cultures into a single imaginary blenderized "Indian". Especially when there were real central American conquest based empires she could have drawn on, like the Aztecs. Someone who knows a lot more about the First Nations that McIntyre drew on for her Maisusutha and for the Northwest Coast people she depicts might be able to point out other points where she mixed different things together.

On the other hand, given the way the book rearranges other timelines, perhaps McIntyre meant for Lady Jaguar's empire to be an Andes-mesoamerican mix that stretches from Peru to the Yucatan.

I enjoyed this book very much and could burble on much longer. It's good. It's beautifully written. And given the way things are going in the real world, it was a much needed balm to read about a leader and a people who aren't bullies and aren't out to pillage for their own enrichment.