o the natives, the Avtini, their world is called Niond. To the visiting humans, the world is Ormazd. But by either name, the planet hosts a bizarre society. The humanoid natives (mammalian but oviparous, like the Terran platypus) are organized much like any average colony of bees. One sexually functional female serves as queen, laying all the eggs needed to keep up the colony's numbers. The queen is serviced by a corps of sexually active male drones. The workers are neutered females. Old queens are replaced in combat with eager young princesses. Once upon a time, in the deep past of Ormazd, things were different, with sexually functional males and females cohabiting much like Terrans. But centuries ago, one ruler instituted the current system, which spread with variations over the whole planet.
Iroedh is a worker-soldier in the community of Elham. She has a peculiarly deep friendship with a drone named Antis. This relationship will eventually motivate Iroedh to overthrow all the deeply ingrained lessons she has been taught. But first Iroedh and Elham must deal with the arrival of strangers from the stars. The spaceship Paris, part of the Viagens Interplanetarias empire, has arrived, looking for any signs of a past VI mission and also intent on scientifically investigating Ormazd. Dr. Block and his fiancée, Barbe Dulac, are the members of the crew detailed to interact most closely with the natives. When Iroedh fortuitously gains some coercive power over the pair, Block is forced to help her rescue Antis from imminent culling as a drone supposedly too aged to perform.
But Iroedh's rescue of her male friend is eventually discovered and leads to her own exile from Elham. She and Antis are now rogues, without any community to call their own. After some hard time in the wilderness, they turn to their only hope: the Terrans. Block gratefully enlists the pair as escorts to the camp of the native power broker, known as the Oracle. But on the long ground journey to the Oracle, the party is bushwhacked by rogue drones under the leadership of one Wythias, who covets Terran weapons with which to establish his own empire. Lost in the wilderness, the humans and the Avtini will accidentally discover the secret of producing a functional queen, thus rendering Iroedh the rogue queen of the title. At last reaching the Oracle, they will encounter another surprise, meet Wythias in final battle and finally come full circle back to Elham, where a revolution awaits.
A cosmopolitan master of SF adventure
When the Golden Age of SF—the pioneering years under the editorship of John W. Campell—are discussed, names such as Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt and Sturgeon invariably pop up first. But L. Sprague de Camp was also an integral part of that revolution, as attested by his Grand Master Award in 1978. Unfortunately, de Camp has, since his death in 2000, not experienced the posthumous acclaim he deserves.
Knowledgeable in history (he penned many entertaining straight historical novels), a man of the world, de Camp produced fiction that was erudite, polished, action-filled (we should not forget that this is the man who was instrumental in turning Robert E. Howard's Conan into a major property through his new pastiches), humorous and yet barbed. Rogue Queen possesses all these properties and more.
As part of his Viagens Interplanetarias series, this book first of all exhibits a very postmodern multiculturalism. While his contemporaries were busy populating the spaceways with Aryan and Nordic types, de Camp predicted that Brazil would someday be the dominant power, and that the typical star explorer would be dark-skinned. It's a scenario that still has possibilities today. Another alluring aspect of this book is, of course, its satirical examination of sexual and gender roles. The matriarchal society of Ormazd of course stands in sharp contrast to the patriarchal societies of Earth, especially during the period when the book first appeared (in 1951). De Camp has great fun depicting the workings of this type of culture and how it would create its own, albeit different, injustices and inequalities.
And although once in a while the rough edges of cliched or stereotypical behavior intrude—there's one passage in Chapter IX when Iroedh and Antis banter like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or Cary Grant and Doris Day at their worst—for the most part de Camp shows a very broad liberal attitude toward gender roles and sexual dynamics. Iroedh's best female friend, Vardh, is almost explicitly lesbian in her love of Iroedh. "Submit to the horrid embraces of some drooling drone? No thank you!"
Not content with this allegory, de Camp also layers in a Cold War subtext, which is explicitly revealed in Chapter VII. The Communities of the Avtini are communist in nature, with their purges and repressions. But this is not belabored or strictly black and white. As for his planetary-romance leanings, de Camp constructs beautiful battle scenes and wilderness adventures, assembled like well-joined cabinetry. The very opening paragraph of the novel reads like the start of a sword-and-sorcery adventure—a frutiful blending of genres.
Rogue Queen influenced a generation—surely Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters (1963) owes a lot to de Camp—and deserves to see print once more.
