#AtoZ Challenge: D is for Daughter Of The Forest And Gordon R Dickson

On the fourth day of the A -Z Challenge, in which I’m writing about my favourites in SF and fantasy, I present to you... D Is For Daughter Of The Forest and Gordon R Dickson! 

Daughter Of The Forest is by Juliet Marillier, who is one of Australia’s top fairy tale re-tellers. It is the first of a series called Sevenwaters, about a family living in mediaeval Ireland, but it is also a standalone novel inspired by the fairy tale “The Six Swans” - that’s the Grimm’s fairy tale in which a young woman goes looking for her six brothers who have been turned into swans, except for once or twice a year. They can only be restored if she makes them shirts from nettles without speaking. She marries a passing king, while continuing her task, but his mother does not like her at all and accuses her of witchcraft... 

This novel sets the story in early mediaeval Ireland and the “King” is a Norman lord from England. I remember being amused when a reference to the characters of this story was worked into the author’s Blackthorn And Grim trilogy. I won’t go into great detail here, because this author has had quite a bit of coverage on this site, including a couple of interviews, the most recent being the one on Blackthorn And Grim. But the book is beautiful historical fantasy - read it if you haven’t! 

Meanwhile, on to another author I am very fond of, who has passed away, alas, but wrote some novels and stories I adored. 

The author is American Gordon R Dickson. I am still making my way through his work, because he was very prolific. I will just go through a couple of his series I particularly love. One is the Hoka series of short stories, which he wrote with fellow spec fic author Poul Anderson. 

The Hokas are a race of live teddy bears. The term is really “ursine” as in “ bearlike”, but they are cute enough to be considered as teddy bears and that’s what the authors call them. The Hokas are totally lovable, but they are very bright and imitative; if they see, hear or read something they really like, they simply live it. In the first story, “The Sheriff Of Canyon Gulch”, a young Earth man arrives on their planet only to find himself in a Western! In another story, he takes a group to Earth where they see a performance of Don Giovanni and become the characters from the opera’s story. They’re non violent, so nobody actually gets killed - and the story is hilarious, the human hero trying desperately to sort things out, as they have decided he is the Don! There are several stories in the series, collected in books such as Earthman’s Burden and Hoka! but there is also a novel, Star Prince Charlie, in which a Hoka tutor living the role of an Oxford don decides that his young charge Charlie Stuart is Bonnie Prince Charlie while they are spending time on a planet that reminds him of the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s time and becomes Hector McGregor, a wild Highlander! 

His most famous series, though, is the Childe Cycle, centred around the men and women of the Dorsai. Dorsai is a planet which is poor and so the only method of income it has is to hire out its young men and women as mercenaries. There are ongoing characters, such as Ian and Kensie , the devoted brothers. It’s military SF with mystical elements, but when I read it, many years ago, it had far more female fans in my circle of friends than male. There was a good reason for that: Ian, the brooding brother who suffers tragedy, and didn’t we all want to comfort him! And the author must have known that, judging by how the female characters in the novels reacted to him, but they were all good, strong characters in their own right. 

Actually, me, I just love military SF, quite a lot of which is written by women, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon and Tanya Huff. But yes, I did drool over Ian anyway. 

The stories are exciting, but also have characters you can care about deeply. That’s important to me as a reader.

Dickson was connected with filk singing, a specifically science fictional form of song creation. We haven’t had it in Australia in many years, at least not to a great extent, though we do have some wonderful filk artists. Gordon R Dickson performed, but the fans created a lot of Dorsai-themed songs and a group known as the Dorsai Irregulars. I believe that they became the security teams for SF conventions in the US. 

You shouldn’t have any problem getting hold of Juliet Marillier’s book and the Dickson books are certainly available in ebook. 

Go and get them!