Baker wrote this like a stage magician with a sense of humor; it's a mosaic of tricks that one has seen tiresomely often, and just as you roll your eyes there's a flash on the other side of the stage. The usual tricks got your eye off the rabbit, which is now a - nother thing. Also, the usual tricks are done well, as in a pleasant stage magic show.
One can tell that it began as juvenilia. There's a lot of in it, and probably a lot of nineteenth-c. gentlemen's adventure stories. I wonder if the hero was originally much younger; he has to decide what to do with unusual powers, but it isn't a "Boy Finds Hands" story because the hero is an adult when we begin, and can use his hands, and has to choose what for.
I thought the mythological background was especially good in being about right for the California Dreamtime antecedents of non-indigenes living in California. It isn't a rewrite of the actual native mythology; nor is it particularly a transplant of pastoral European myths; it is fit for a region of traders and travellers and cities of short life-expectancy. Not California as it specifically actually is, but closer than ' bean rows. Baker also sort of does this in her SF series, In the Garden of Iden &ff., in which Secret Things have been going on on Catalina and in San Francisco for a long time.
ISBN: 0765308185
So wrote clew in SF&F. | TrackBack