iz Williams's fifth novel revolves around three strong women, each astonishingly different from the other. But it's no chance plot twist or authorial whim that places three females at the center of the action in this book, instead of three men or some mix of genders. Thanks to millennia of weird and dramatic developments, Williams' far-off future features no males at all, except for a few barbaric mutants and castoffs living hard lives in the wilderness. One last exception to this X-chromosome dominance: the strange and deadly male creature known as the Animus.
Our first meeting is with Dreams-of-War, a member of the Martian Matriarchy that also rules a subjugated and backward Earth. Dreams-of-War is a soldier clad in sentient armor, trained from youth to be an efficient killer. But now her latest assignment requires her to develop an uncomfortable maternal side as well. She is being sent to Earth as the bodyguard of a young child named Lunae. Lunae is the result of a long-term breeding project to create a being with the paranormal powers needed to stave off an anticipated crisis. The third player in the Machiavellian intrigues of this era is Yskatarina Iye. Like Dreams-of-War, the cyborg Yskatarina is a deadly killer, especially when paired with Animus, her artificial familiar, who resembles a human-sized scorpion. Yskatarina is a product of Nightshade, the human colony at the edge of the solar system. Thanks to the arrival in the recent past of aliens known as the Kami, Nightshade now supplies the dominant technology of the Matriarchy: haunt-tech. Involving literal disembodied souls and the afterlife, haunt-tech keeps the solar system functioning, making the whims of the Nightshaders potent. And one of their whims is that Lunae should die under Yskatarina's hands.
Dreams-of-War journeys to Earth, where she meets her young charge. But Lunae, having been decanted rather than born the old-fashioned way, is maturing at a prodgious rate. In a few months she is a teenager who begins to chafe at her seclusion at Cloud Terrace in a transformed Hong Kong. Escaping the manorhouse one day, she is detected by a Kami, and all her safe childhood is over. Fleeing Cloud Terrace with Dreams-of-War and her froglike kappa nurse, Lunae will experience wild adventures under sea, on land and eventually on Mars, where a final showdown between Dreams-of-War and Yskatarina and all the forces behind each woman will determine whether the Kami turn humanity into their cattle.
A powerful child adrift in time
Liz Williams published her first novel, The Ghost Sister, in 2001, and has turned out four more in quick succession. Amazingly, they've all been splendid: unique and innovative and dissimilar, no signs of repetitiveness or flagging energies among them. And we learn from a sample chapter in Banner that she's already hard at work on Darkland, her sixth. This is the kind of driven, dedicated writer whom our genre depends on for its sustained health.
In her current book, Williams has brought off an impressive science-fantasy hybrid adventure. Creating a scenario that would fit equally well in Weird Tales or in Asimov's SF, Williams gracefully joins a small but impressive tradition that includes such writers as Jack Vance, Elizabeth Hand, Leigh Brackett, Gene Wolfe, Clark Ashton Smith, Paul McAuley and Richard Calder.
Williams' expert prose, while not as baroque as Calder's or Wolfe's, succeeds eminently in creating the desired cognitive estrangement. Neologisms and archaisms abound. Yet Williams knows when to rely on such classic and archetypical place names as "the Fire Islands" and "Mount Haut." Moreover, the characters speak differently, think differently, from us, their distant, legendary ancestors. Yet the reader is never at sea in all of this strangeness, as Williams conveys the backstory cleverly and in snippets, without resorting to dull infodumps. Moreover, the action is unrelenting, keeping this tale moving ahead at breakneck speed.
Perhaps what this book resembles more than any other book is a movie or two. Hayao Miyazaki's great Spirited Away (2001) will immediately come to mind, as will certain of Tim Burton's fantasies. (Are the deadly assassins known as "excissieres" a tribute to Edward Scissorhands [1990]?) But whether judged on cinematic or literary terms, Banner of Souls takes the Palme d'Or.
