Who Goes There?

Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin were baby-faced new writers, part of the post-New Wave era, and were even nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Tuttle won) the same year. The two were lovers in the early ’70s, and while I haven’t looked into this, I’m pretty sure they were still together when they were writing “The Storms of Windhaven” (although they had broken up, and Martin was on his way to getting married, by the time it was published). This was probably the first thing of Tuttle’s a lot of people had read, and this might still be the case given the Martin connection; but these people would be in for a nasty surprise, since Tuttle’s writing is much more in touch with horror than SF. As for Martin, I need not elaborate, only to say that the Martin of the ’70s and ’80s is quite a different beast from one of the most famous authors in the world. I can’t call myself a Martin fan (because I’ve been unimpressed by what little I’ve read of A Song of Ice and Fire), but I do like most of his early stuff.

Tuttle and Martin came up with the Windhaven setting and apparently wanted to turn it into a novel, but only after they had written this first novella, which is a self-contained narrative. And why not? It would take almost five years for a follow-up to “The Storms of Windhaven.” This was pretty popular too, getting nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and placing first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. I like it a good deal myself, for the worldbuilding more than the actual plot, and because it lacks some of Martin’s less savory habits. I have a theory or two about who wrote what, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And rest assured we’ll eventually tackle One-Wing, the much-anticipated sequel to this story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is on Luminist. Unsurprisingly most of its reprints predate Windhaven. We’ve got The Best Science Fiction of the Year 5 (ed. Terry Carr) and The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald Wollheim). Windhaven itself is still in print, for obvious reasons.

Enhancing Image

The plot itself is rather simple, but some context is needed. A sloppy reading of this story might make one think it’s fantasy, and certainly without some pieces of backstory it could be construed for fantasy. I myself barely noticed the origin of the humans of Windhaven on my first reading, along with a couple other things. Windhaven is a livable but not totally hospitable planet, mostly covered with water and prone to fierce gales and some pretty nasty local wildlife. The humans are descendants of space colonists, who had crash landed on the planet and could no longer use their spaceship; and apparently as a result the descendants have most lost touch with their far-future past, having descended into barbarism. There are basically two types of people: flyers and “land-bound.” The flyers have constructed their wings out of metal from the crashed spaceship, so needless to say it’s a precious resource; losing wings is considered just as bad, if not worse, than losing a human life. I’m putting this all up at the front since Tuttle and Martin sort of sneak in this context in breadcrumbs of exposition, which can be easily missed, although you don’t need it to understand the plot.

Anyway. Our Heroine™, Maris, is a skilled flyer; the problem is that she’s not “supposed” to be a flyer. She’s the daughter of a fisherman (long dead) who got adopted by Russ, who really is a flyer, although having lost the use of one of his hands he can no longer fly, and at the time he was seemingly sterile. “He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings.” Luckily for Russ but unluckily for Maris, a child was eventually born. Coll is Russ’s son and, having turned thirteen, Coll has now come of age to inherit his father’s wings. But Russ had previously told Maris that she would inherit his wings! Conflict is now well underway. This is made worse by the fact that flyer laws state that wings can only be passed on to family members (unless the flyer has no next of kin or gives up their wings), preferably blood-related. The Landsman, a local authority, sympathizes with Maris’s wish to become a flyer, but rules are rules and Russ is a traditionalist. To make things even worse, Coll doesn’t really want to become a flyer; he would rather be a balladeer, like Barrion, a mutual friend of theirs and sort of a rebel.

Maris is a bit of a mixed bag as a character, because on the one hand she seems to be one-note: she wants to become a flyer and doesn’t seem to have any other serious aspirations. She has a boyfriend in Dorrel, a flyer himself, but we only see them together in a few scenes and it’s not a relationship that’s made that important. She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, although in fairness she lives in a world without movies, TV, video games, or even common literature. But, to give some credit, she is driven, has a clear goal in mind, and is not objectified at any point. I suspect that Maris’s assertive characterization came mostly from Tuttle, although I can’t prove this. There’s a bit of steaminess with Maris and Dorrel, but it’s tasteful. Unfortunately one or two of the characters are not written as delicately. Russ is your typical boomer dad who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s wild ways, and he also happens to be very angsty about his disability. Obviously Russ wants to do the sports parent thing and recapture his glory days as a flyer vicariously by forcing his son, who is a square peg, into a round hole. Corm, a senior flyer and the closest the novella has to a villain, is almost a cartoon character, so zealous is he about keeping with tradition.

Unsubtle and at times problematic character writing would dog Martin for the rest of his career (some people will challenge me on this, but I think those people are wrong), but one thing Martin and Tuttle both had nailed down from very early in their careers is a sense of location. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not hard SF, but it is a vivid and plausible (assuming you’re not a stickler for details) planetary adventure that gives us a plot that, yes, could work perfectly fine in a fantasy context, but whose SFnal background gives credibility to this far-future society that has descended somewhat into barbarism. It makes sense that the survivors of a crashed spaceship would scatter over a ton of small islands, traveling by glider or boat, and having to rebuilt society from the ground up. It makes sense that a few centuries later the descendants would remember these original explorers through myth and song, and that lineage would become very important. Balladeers like Barrion would hold an important place in society because they are entertainers, for one, but also they chronicle history—and rewrite it, if need be. Barrion says he’d like to write songs depicting Maris as a virtuous rebel after all has been said and done, and he has the power to do this.

Ultimately this is a story about tradition vs. progress, or more specifically, how we should handle the past. It’s unsubtle; it’s even more unsubtle than the character writing, not that I disagree with Tuttle and Martin’s obvious pro-progress stance. Russ and Corm are bound to tradition, even to the point of making Maris’s life worse, and they need to be shown the error of their ways. This is also a story about racism and classism, by way of metaphor, because it’s pretty clear that a) the people of the different tribes don’t get along too well, and b) flyers and land-bound don’t like each other. Understandable: flyers are rather up their own asses about their wings. Our Heroine™, of course, has no bad intentions and doesn’t even know what those are. She does briefly consider killing Corm when the latter confiscates her wings, but she quickly turns this down, and that’s as dark as her character gets. I’m not really complaining—just pointing out how much of a girlboss Maris is. I don’t remember a great deal from One-Wing but I do remember it focuses a bit less on her, which I might appreciate on a reread. “The Storms of Windhaven” technically has a sequel hook, but it would still feel like a flesh-out world even if we never got a sequel.

There Be Spoilers Here

Maris steals back her wings from Corm, and there’s a chase. Despite being younger and not a “true” flyer, Maris proves to be a better flyer than Corm, which lets her escape his wrath for the moment but also results in her being put on trial before a council. The back end of this novella is weird for me because I totally forgot about the stealing part (despite it being crucial to the plot) and also remembered the trial taking up more of the story than it does. Memory is flexible, and often tells us things that aren’t quite true. I also realized, looking at my notes again, then I occasionally misspelled Corm as “Corn.” Imagine being hunted down by some conservative zealot named Corn. Anyway, the trial is technically to judge whether Maris be exiled from her hometown (or I guess home… rock?), but really it’s supposed to be a kangaroo court of humiliation, as Maris thinks:

Corm is a proud man; I injured his pride. He is a good flyer and I, a fisherman’s daughter, stole his wings and outflew him when he pursued me. Now, to regain his pride, he must humble me in some very public, very grand way. Getting the wings back would not be enough for him. No, everyone, every flyer, must be present to see me humbled and declared an outlaw.

At first everyone is against the notion that wings should be earned in some way rather than just inherited, but naturally Maris is able to convince enough of the council that what has been done for generations isn’t the only correct way to do things. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not some deep “literary” achievement but a well-crafted planetary adventure that wears its thesis and emotions on its sleeve. Its point is obvious, but entertaining to read (there’s not a dull moment here), so unsurprisingly it was quite popular with readers. It’s just a shame that Windhaven, like Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, is doomed to semi-obscurity by virtue of not being the thing that made Martin one of our most famous living authors. Of course, it’s totally possible these books wouldn’t even be in print if not for Martin’s name being attached to them. It’s also a shame that Windhaven would be Martin’s last SF novel if we’re not counting Tuf Voyaging as a novel.

A Step Farther Out

Obvious sequel hook aside, this is a nicely self-contained story that theoretically could’ve stopped here; but it’s a good thing they didn’t. This is a masterclass in worldbuilding, and it’s impressive especially given how young both authors were at the time. It’s vivid, if also old-fashioned even for 1975. It could’ve been published thirty years earlier in Planet Stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s justifiably a classic piece of SF adventure writing. We will return to Windhaven, in One-Wing, which was serialized in Analog in 1980. For some reason I remember very little of One-Wing despite having read it not that long ago. Ominous…?

See you next time.