Tag: joan d. vinge

Short Story Review: “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge

August 12th, 2025

(Cover by Alex Schomburg. Asimov’s, April 1980.)

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.
Things Beyond: August 2025

August 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, November 1955.)

So I had read Anne McCaffrey’s “The Weather on Welladays,” and I didn’t like it. I’ve read Dragonflight and The Ship Who Sang, plus one other novel and a few short stories now, and I’m still not really sure what McCaffrey’s appeal is (I say this as someone who jumps to defend A. E. van Vogt’s early work). “The Weather on Welladay” isn’t bad, but it’s seriously hampered by being a novelette where the perspective shifts several times so that we have a few protagonists, when ideally we should have only one. I also just don’t think McCaffrey is that good a writer when compared with some of her peers, who were (and still are) not as popular. It’s nice that McCaffrey was the first woman to win both a Hugo and Nebula for fiction, but I wish those honors had gone to better writers. That’s the gist of how I felt about it, in case you’re wondering where my review post for it is.

The funny thing is that I had too good a time during the couple of days I normally would’ve spent on reading and writing for this site, which is ironic. I struggle to write here either when my personal life is at a peak or when it’s deep in a valley. I have to admit to you, the five of you who actually read these posts, that I sometimes resent writing—well, really anything, but especially for SFF Remembrance. Sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything, but the problem is that if you stop writing then it can be a real challenge to start again. Writing (if you’re “a writer”) is like brushing your teeth, in that ideally it should be a daily activity. But I also don’t like writing that much; yet at the same time I can barely do anything else that would be considered “productive.” I work a service job. I pay my bills and my rent and my taxes like a “good American,” but I feel like I don’t create anything. I have this urge, or maybe this sense of obligation, to create something that is of any value, but I can’t do it. I hate myself and this country I am forced to live in. The environment is hostile, for creativity but also just for human decency. It’s like that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song: “We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” I hate being here, and yet I’m not sure where I could be that’s better. I hate that this is a culture that worships money and productivity. We must have infinite growth, even if the destination is oblivion.

Putting aside that I’m forced to live in this body, and in this third-rate backwater country called America, things are going well for me! Maybe that’s the problem: on a personal I’m doing well, for the most part, but I get the sense that this contentedness will not last, because the world around me is dying. My surroundings are transient. There will surely come a point where the workers of the world will have their revenge and the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last capitalist; but I’m convinced that I will not live to see any of this happen. Not even the beginning of it. I will have made my way for the exit before this play called The Downfall of Capitalism will have even gotten to its prelude. The curtains will not have risen and we will not see the stage, let alone the actors. There is a future on the way, but something tells me I won’t take part in it.

…

This is getting to be a bit much.

What’s the holdup? After all, it’s a packed month, as far as my review schedule goes, and I’ve really been meaning to get to some of these works for a hot minute. I’m also taking advantage of the loophole I had made for myself and so I have a serial from Galaxy, on top of a novella. We’ve got one story from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 2010s. This might be my most diverse roster yet, in terms of when the works were published. Well, let’s get to it.

For the serials:
1. A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. Nebula winner for Best Novel. When Galaxy changed editors in 1969, readers at the time as well as historians are prone to say the change was a downgrade. One major plus, however, of Ejler Jakobsson taking over was that we got several Silverberg novels in the magazine as serials in rather quick succession. Despite the acclaim he was earning, A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major award.
2. Under Pressure by Frank Herbert. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. Also titled The Dragon in the Sea, this was Herbert’s first novel, after he had been in the field for a few years already with now-forgotten short fiction. Herbert’s legacy pretty much solely rests on his Dune series, to the point where it might surprise the reader to find any Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. I’ve heard from a friend or two that this is actually supposed to be one of Herbert’s best, but we’ll see about that.
For the novellas:
1. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky. From the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. Nebula winner for Best Novella. More controversially Swirsky also won a Nebula for her story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She was also the founding editor of PodCastle, which is crazy to me because she was like, 26? She’s written a good deal of short fiction and poetry over the years, plus one novel so far.
2. “A Tragedy of Errors” by Poul Anderson. From the February 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been a minute since we last covered Anderson, made more conspicuous because he wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction. Of Anderson’s several series the most ambitious might be his Technic History, a centuries-spanning saga tracing the rise and fall of a galactic empire. “A Tragedy of Errors” takes place toward the end of this future history’s timeline.
For the short stories:
1. “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge. From the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Not quite as well-known as her late ex-husband, Vernor, partly on account of the fact that she hasn’t written much over the past four decades, but Joan D. Vinge was one of the most promising new writers of the post-New Wave era. She’s more known for her SF, but “The Storm King” is fantasy.
2. “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt. From the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. In the ’20s and ’30s Merritt was one of the most popular pulp writers, even getting a magazine named after him. I was set to review one of Merritt’s novels a couple years ago, but I could not get far into it. Well, now it’s time to correct things a bit. Curiously Merritt didn’t write much short fiction.
For the complete novel:
1. The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok. From the December 1942 issue of Unknown. Bok was known far more for his artwork than his fiction, which is understandable given that he was one of the most gifted and recognizable SFF artists of the ’40s and ’50s. You kinda know a certain magazine or book cover is a Bok work just from looking at it. That Bok died relatively young and in poverty, after having all but retired from illustrating, is tragic. Of course, we might not even know about Bok in the first place if not for Ray Bradbury acting as cheerleader for his early material. Bok was really one of the few mavericks of SFF from that era, being a semi-closeted gay man with some niche hobbies, who was also a perfectionist when it came to his art. The Sorcerer’s Ship was Bok’s debut novel and was published complete in Unknown, but would not see book publication until after his death.
Won’t you read with me?

Tag: joan d. vinge

Short Story Review: “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge

Things Beyond: August 2025