Who Goes There?

Joan D. Vinge was one of the more acclaimed SF writers in the latter half of the ’70s through the ’80s, which makes her retreat from public notice all the more conspicuous. She debuted in 1974 and was one of the post-New Wave crowd, alongside the likes of George R. R. Martin and John Varley. As you can guess, she was also married to Vernor Vinge for much of the ’70s, although they split in 1979, which didn’t stop Joan from ditching Vinge’s last name for her byline going forward. She won a Hugo for the borderline metafictional story “Eyes of Amber,” and she won another Hugo for her second novel, The Snow Queen. After the ’80s her output went down massively, to the point where she disappeared for nearly all of the 2000s. One reason for this is that she suffered a car accident in 2002 that left her unable to write for some years, although that doesn’t explain her relative inactivity in the ’90s as well. She has also, weirdly enough, written about as many novelizations as original novels at this point, including novelizations of (I’m not kidding) Return of the Jedi, Willow, Return to Oz, Cowboys & Aliens, and the ’90s Lost in Space movie. She had written virtually no short fiction since 1990, which makes “The Storm King” one of her later stories, published the same year as The Snow Queen. Unlike most of Vinge’s work, “The Storm King” is fantasy, although it retains Vinge’s propensity for incorporating fairy tale elements.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Wonders of the World (ed. Shawna McCarthy and Kathleen Moloney), A Dragon-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic (ed. Margaret Weis), and the Vinge collection Phoenix in the Ashes.

Enhancing Image

This will be a short and sweet review, because despite being nearly thirty magazine pages I don’t have much to say about “The Storm King.” I think it’s interesting to point out first that this really is a high fantasy story published in Asimov’s, early in the magazine’s history when such a thing was rare. Granted, Roger Zelazny’s “Unicorn Variation” was published there a year later and was just as much a fantasy story, and even won a Hugo for it. The market for short fantasy fiction, barring a brief period in the 1930s and more so the last decade or so, has never been that good. 1980 saw the death of Fantastic, so that F&SF was the only magazine in town that published a good deal of short fantasy. But Asimov’s, even in its first years, occasionally printed fantasy, and the results tended to be rewarding. I liked “The Storm King” enough, although I didn’t love it.

Lassan-din has a problem—actually he has two problems, but we’ll get to the second one in a minute. He is the heir apparent to the throne in Kwansai, but he’s a prince in exile and he’s willing to do anything to take back what is “rightfully” his, even to go against his homeland’s predominent religion by consulting an old witch. The witch in question and her servant girl, the latter calling herself Nothing, are pagans who work with the elements of Nature. There’s also a dragon who lords over this area called the Storm King, who like your typical Tolkien-esque dragon is an intelligent being who communicates with humans telepathically. Lassan-din wants to tame the Storm King and use its power to retake the throne, but as the witch says, “You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water.” The witch gives the prince a hint as to how to deal with the dragon and sends Nothing with him, but as she also says, as a kind of warning, “power always has a price.” Nothing will repeat this phrase verbatim much later, which of course means that we’re meant to take it as the story’s thesis. And indeed it is. It becomes clear quite early on that Vinge’s story is a fable about how power corrupts, to the point where it feels a little condescending and wearying; that the plot trajectory goes pretty much exactly the way I expected, going off of the thesis Vinge gives us, also means there’s not much surprising in store for us. Since “The Storm King” doesn’t have any real twists or turns, that forces us to turn to other things in looking for the story’s merits.

In all fairness. while this kind of high fantasy is commonplace now, such that I have precious little interest in modern fantasy writing, it would’ve been more novel in 1980, right after the sword-and-sorcery revival and right before we started getting the super-chunky multi-book sagas that have since dominated the genre. “The Storm King,” for better or worse, would’ve fit right in with short fantasy being published nowadays. There is, of course, also a sexual element, with Nothing being implied to be a prostitute as well as a witch’s apprentice; and while her relationship with Lassan-din never turns romantic exactly, it does get rather steamy. The problem on Lassan-din’s end is that he had suffered some unspecified abuse from his uncle, which has left him impotent, although Vinge is unclear as to what exactly is wrong with him. I thought at first that Lassan-din genitals must’ve gotten damaged, but this turns out not to be the case. There’s an obvious symbolic connection between Lassan-din’s impotence and his having fallen from the throne. Well, the damage can’t be that bad, for Lassan-din and Nothing have sex, and there’s a little something extra thrown into the deal that the former is not made aware of. (You can guess what it is.) The two proceed on their quest, which sees Our Anti-Hero™ finally meet the Storm King himself, and another deal is made. Lassan-din inherits the Storm King’s scales and his control of lightning, but obviously there wouldn’t be much of a story if things ended here.

There Be Spoilers Here

Lassan-din retakes the throne, but he doesn’t become respected so much as feared among his people, not to mention the dragon is still free to terrorize the populace. Lassan-din’s reign becomes so maligned that he too becomes known as the Storm King, by which point he realizes he might’ve made a mistake. He’s unable to reverse the deal he had made with the dragon, being unable to rid himself of those scales; even if the dragon wanted to, he could not undo what has been done. He comes to the conclusion that if he can’t save himself then he can at least save everybody else, so he decides to banish the Storm King from the land. We get what is more or less a happy ending. Hell, there’s even a baby in the mix, with Nothing (now named Fallatha) having a daughter by him. This all reeks a bit of wish fulfillment, at least from a modern perspective. This is a story about how power corrupts, and yet the one whose character is poisoned by power still has enough of a conscience to do the right thing at the end of the day, never mind retaining some of his humanity. Lassan-din is an anti-hero who would be a villain in some other stories, depending on the perspective one writes from, and while this is a nice arc for a character to have, it doesn’t feel real at all. Unfortunately, in real life, someone in Lassan-din’s position is unlikely to have any redeeming qualities of note, nor are they likely to suffer at all from the pain and oppression they bring on other people. “The Storm King” is fantasy due to its setting, but it’s also fantasy because it depicts someone with immense power actually facing consequences for their actions.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the delay. Depression and a bit of writer’s block. I was honestly stumped for a bit as to what my thoughts on this story even were, maybe because I tried thinking back on something I had perhaps missed, only to think I really had gotten everything on my initial reading and that I didn’t need to put much thought into it. Maybe not the first Joan D. Vinge story I should’ve written about her first, since in a way it’s an outlier among her short fiction, but it’s also one of her short stories that I’d not read yet that I really wanted to check out. I was mildly disappointed, if only because I expected there to be more to it, but Vinge is not a bad writer. Hell, at this point she was a better writer than her ex-husband. It’s just that “The Storm King” doesn’t show Vinge at her best.

See you next time.