The Lost Steersman [Paperback]

At the risk of spoilers, imagine a world that's nearly uninhabitable by man, filled with plants and animals inimical to earthkind. Now imagine a program for the terraforming of that world, a program that will take centuries if not millennia, involving first infrared bombardment by satellite and the burning of the borderlands, then sowing a genetically engineered plant that serves as a transition to earth life, and then a succession of increasingly earth-like plants.

After hundreds or thousands of years, in the areas treated first, the land is pretty much indistinguishable from earth; at the borders, life is strange and harsh. Most of the planet is apparently unchanged. Different peoples and cultures inhabit the various zones as the millennia-long terraforming proceeds.

To make things stranger still, those with knowledge have made themselves sorcerers and wizards, wielding technology when and how it suits them, quarreling among themselves and extirpating ordinary people who try to recover science and technology. As a result, most residents in this world are technologically ignorant, unknowingly held in that state by the technocractic wizards. Most humans think technology is magic, in a neat reversal of Clark's Law. Everyone but the wizards is completely unaware this is an alien world.

The sorcerers tolerate a band of Socratean scholars, the Steerswomen, who have re-developed principles of logic and serve as explorers, historians and cartographers. They mingle with the people of this world, operating by two rules: they will answer any question you ask, provided that you answer the questions they ask you. If you refuse to answer a Steerswoman's question, they shun you. It works pretty well... Sometimes a steerswoman - and some steerswomen are men - quits the order. They are said to be "lost."

But the wizards have their schemes, and as Rowan the Steerswoman struggles to understand them with the help of Bel, an outskirter, a member of one of the tribes on the fringe of the terraforming, the importance of understanding those schemes is increasingly urgent. Because one of the wizards is willing to use one of the terraforming tools in the satellite system to burn terraformed lands, and it is a terrifying weapon. The same wizard has caused one of the satellites to crash, at what jeopardy to the terraforming product we don't yet know.

It is fascinating to watch Rowan struggle to understand the issues and her situation, to see her begin to grasp that the world she knows is not the world on which earthkind evolved. With her, we are ignorant as to the wizards' motives, but we can understand better than her the risks their actions are creating.

The first two novels led to the conclusion that one of the wizards had set out to sabotage the terraforming process and, incidentally, to kill Rowan and Bel. This new novel tells of Rowan's efforts to find that mysterious wizard, and centers on the life that is native to this world. What if there is an intelligent alien species inhabiting this world? What if the terraforming process is destroying that alien intelligence? And Kirstein's aliens are truly alien; you will not mistake them, in the words of Alex Panshin, for someone from New Jersey. And all the while, there is the lost steersman of the title, who may be lost in more ways than one.

This is an excellent story. Wonderful, vivid characters are set in a plausible, complex world, with characters who struggle to understand the things that they encounter. Complex, unpredictable plots. Some reviewers have described these stories as fantasy; they are not. They are science fiction, and exceptionally well-conceived science fiction. These novels are genuinely new approaches to ideas. Highly recommended.

But please, Ms. Kirstein, can we have the next story a little sooner?