The Silicon Mage by Barbara Hambly

[madimpossibledreamer]

More a review after the fact, as I didn’t scribble down many notes while reading.  Overall I liked it.  I didn’t read the previous book, but it works perfectly well as a standalone novel, surprisingly.  I’d even say, despite the focus on ‘main character is here to save her lover’, it’s a pretty good feminist book, with a caveat—it doesn’t appear particularly intersectional.  Some vague spoilers below.  Also, warning for this review and for the book: discusses sexual assault/coercion, not in great depth but it does happen.  Discussion of ableism (big part of the book though it's more complicated than just 'it's wrong') and probable homophobia (very quick and could be waved away, but probable).

 

Joanna is an example of a good female hero.  Her particular strength is programming, and she’s also pretty practical (with limits, imposed by the magic happening).  I like that they actually had a conversation about the practicality of wearing a dress vs wearing pants without making either be a value judgment (it’s not ‘you have to wear pants or you’re not a hero!’ or ‘a dress is too feminine’, it’s ‘I don’t want to draw attention’).  I am slightly sad that her worm program didn’t work, but her knowledge of computers and technology did save the day.  She’s essential to the plot and has valuable skills that are actually used without the need to have her fight to be a good character.

For a fantasy medieval world, it’s slightly better, equality-wise—women can be mages and warriors, with absolutely no judgment or thoughts that they’re lesser.  Nobles are not as lucky, since forced marriages appear to be just as common, and, well…there are unfortunate implications there.  Likewise, magic is used to make someone want to sleep with someone else, and unlike when this mind control happens in Buffy, this is actually quite frankly referred to as what it is (I was shocked to see the r-word).  It is actually used several times to properly describe things, although once it’s used in a joke in bad taste, so I wouldn’t say it’s perfectly written, and it definitely could use warnings for readers that might be sensitive to such things.

One of the minor villains is referred to as a pervert.  I’m hoping it’s just because of the pedophilia, but given that it’s a trait occurring with homosexuality and those are commonly paired in villains (this is one of the few notes I made at the time I was writing it, comparing it to Baron Harkonnen)…it’s probably giving it more credit than it deserves.

The other issue is the ableism.  It’s really hard to tell where this falls, since there’s some good and some bad, but at the very least I think while well-intentioned it’s somewhat problematic.  Depression is an external force the villain is performing on the world through his spells, because draining life-force is what he’s using to sustain the computer spell-program.  (One might compare it to a similar thing from the Secret World.)  Their quest is to stop him and consequently stop the depression-spells.  It’s made implicitly if not explicitly clear that there’s not always such a cut-and-dried solution.  One can’t simply slay all of depression like it’s a mythical monsters—sometimes, like when a loved one dies, it’s a natural reaction, and using magic to kill off the emotion is not a good thing.  (Therapy might be an option, except when you can’t quite talk about these things because they occurred in another world that’s hard to get to and most people don’t believe exists.  On the other hand, there’s some element of forced self-care present through each of the spells [I will get dressed and eat even if I don’t feel like it and allow my lover to comfort me even if it doesn’t feel like it helps at the moment] that just…disappears, later on, and legit…no, lady, keep that up!) 

And it’s not like the villain is the only one who’s insane—one of our heroes, the aforementioned lover, Antryg, is called the mad Mage on the cover and often through the book.  It’s just that, well…there isn’t much justification given for this label.  My best guess is that he was labeled this way by the other wizards/mages (I’m not entirely clear on if these are used interchangeably or if there are differences but it might be worldbuilding from the first book) because he has the audacity to say You-Know-Who is back in town.  (No, Rowling didn’t rip off this novel, as far as I know, but the main villain has a similar kind of mystique attached to his name, is obsessed with immortality, and is gathering an army of followers, albeit from using mind-controlling spells, so I feel the comparison is appropriate.)  He seems “sane” enough, the affable, absent-minded rambling professor who could kill you with a spell in self-defense if he had to.  There’s a bit of the Doctor about him, particularly Five or Ten, with a “Oh, right, didn’t I tell you, there’s a secret way out of this room!”  [Oh, hey, apparently Hambly mentally cast Tom Baker as him, so, you know, not far off.]  (Again, there might be more based on the first book, but just based on this one there is not really much reason to be calling him the Mad Mage.  Joanna especially shouldn’t be using the term as she knows for a fact what he is saying is true!)  It might also be a Lovecraftian thing: one of his specialties involves the Lovecraftian space-between-worlds called the Void that Lovecraftian entities can use to traverse the dimensions (they’re called Abominations).  Too much knowledge of the multiverse, in a Lovecraftian world, drives you insane, and if that’s the parallel the author is drawing on, I understand the use, but it doesn’t make it okay.  I forgot that part of it is also an act to get his captors to lower their guard, but really, still, Joanna shouldn’t be using the label in that case.

In contrast, problematic as it might be, in Deadly Premonition the protagonist York is seen talking to his imaginary friend quite often.  Now, in both, the neuroatypical hero is allowed to be a hero, but in Deadly Premonition we actually see why a diagnosis could be made.  This book basically throws around the label a lot, says that it’s okay to not be neurotypical, but does not actually do any work in depicting it because it doesn’t seem to understand it.

The villain is also on several occasions described as insane, but merely because he doesn’t think through all the consequences or ignores the fact that there might be consequences (something every human does at some point, some more than others, many of which can be described as neurotypical) and disregards the pain and suffering of others (potentially narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder, but then, many of the white male shooters described after the fact as ‘possibly insane’ are most likely neurotypical, motivated by perceived injustice rather than any mental abnormalities; neuroatypical people are likely to be a victim of a crime rather than commit one).

The other reason I don’t think the author understood the ableism is because I think she accidentally wrote Joanna as autistic and didn’t realize it.  Now, not realizing it is fair—autism wasn’t well-understood in the 80s, particularly not female autism, which was severely understudied because almost anything involving women tends to be severely understudied and also because women weren’t thought to get autism so nobody bothered looking for it, especially as it can but doesn’t always manifest differently in women.  She is very serious, intelligent, and thinks about her own thoughts in a very computerish way (“I think in subroutines”).  There is a decent amount of her emotions within the book (which, obviously, autistic people have emotions!!) but whenever she’s feeling out of her depth she consistently returns to her practical mantras.  This is especially true when she’s overthinking something or the anxiety is getting to her.  She doesn’t fully understand how to interact with people, getting lost in her own thoughts and messing up her conversations sometimes.  (The inappropriate joke is also from her, so that could maybe be another piece of evidence.)  There are other things, but it’s more of a feeling than anything, and at least at the moment I’m not rereading the book to find every single line that agrees with this reading.  Honestly, given the time frame of writing and some of the other above issues with the book, I half suspect it might be because the other couldn’t envision a different non-autistic sort of computer programmer, but hey, I like this representation, at least.  Pity the rest of the book doesn’t match it.