Fleurty Naturelle

Fiction Week!

Tremontaine

by Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, and Patty Bryant

The first tale I came across that takes place in Ellen Kushner’s nameless City, oft referred to as Riverside (although in fact Riverside is the name of one of its districts that functions as a kind of official Seedy Underbelly), was The Death of the Duke, in the Starlight 2 Anthology from 1998. It is a devastatingly effective little chunk of fiction; it’s my favorite work in the Riverside biblioverse on account of how I can’t reread it without tearing up a little, still.

I was very excited to hear about Tremontaine, because I feel like this world lends itself especially well toward short fiction. Tremontaine is a collaborative serial project from various authors that takes place as a sort of prequel to Swordspoint, the 1987 novel that introduced us to the Swords-Without-Sorcery niche that these short works and novels fall into surprisingly neatly.

That’s right, this is a fantasy series with no magic. No dragons either.

The best part is, you don’t really notice that until someone points it out to you. In a lot of ways, Tremontaine reads like historical fiction, reminiscent to some of Pre-Revolutionary France, but in my personal opinion, more like late Renaissance Italy….just less racially diverse. 

It seems as though what Tremontaine is trying to bring to the table is a more broad and contextual look around the city where all of these intrigues, assassinations, lavish balls, duels-to-the-death and gritty romances are taking place. It’s also the first real tale since The Death of the Duke to attempt to place the City in context of a more global world (hardly redundant in the light of Micah’s plotline!), in which we might ask questions like how the City makes the money that finances the excesses of high society, where do the cloth and jewels that decorate the wealthy originate, and what about the chocolate we’ve read so much about, costly and prized for the nobility’s morning breakfast trays?

Tremontaine opens with the arrival of Ixkaab Balam, a young woman from a trading family from the other side of the world, a culture that appears based on indigenous mesoamerican empires. After all, this trade is where the City’s luxurious chocolate comes from, the finest grades worth its weight in gold to the nobles in their houses on The Hill, and even the dregs find their way into the taverns and inns of Riverside. 

Ixkaab has been sent by her family (in mysterious disgrace of some kind) to some relatives who are more or less permanently ensconced in the City in order to oversee their family’s monopoly of being the only source of chocolate for the continent on which the Action is taking place. I appear to have decided she’s the main character, mostly because she is a brown indigenous fencing lesbian super-spy-in-training, who can’t stop thinking about ant eggs and their resemblance to white people’s skin, and is understandably my favorite.

Also in the cast of characters are the Duchess Tremontaine, whose political and economic machinations are explored in the foreground rather than being part of the setting as they have been in other works; Micah, an autistic farmgirl whose obsession with mathematics somehow lands her in the center of a plot to uncover the Kinwiinik (Ixkaab’s people) secret to global navigation; Rafe Fenton, a spoiled trader’s son, idealistic mathematician, and tiresome young lecher who seems mostly there to cause conflict and bone the Duchess’s husband; Tess the Hand, a blowzy forger from Riverside who Ixkaab becomes almost instantly and understandably enamored with; and Vincent Applethorpe in his heyday, who some might remember as the one-armed fencing master from Swordspoint who caused the legendary swordsman Richard St Vier himself to exclaim, “How is it that I’ve never heard of you??”

The format of Tremontaine as a serial collaboration between six different authors can be perceived as a bit on the experimental side, but in my opinion any risk involved has paid off in spades. While each contribution/chapter/episode does have its own unique flavor, the consistent characterization is what keeps the series coherent and fascinating to read. Even those unfamiliar with the Riverside biblioverse could stand to give this a try; in fact, I’d recommend it as a starting point just based on what’s been published so far (Episode 8 is forthcoming December 23).

As for me, I just can’t stop reading it. The first episode, Arrivals, is available for free, and that, of course, is how they get you hooked. Each piece of the story is a substantial bite unto itself, and is good enough that I found myself putting off each one to save like a treat at the end of the week (or day), like a rich dessert. I could wish that the preceding tales from riverside had been more explicitly racially diverse from the beginning, but although the story does have a faint hint of a ‘fix-it’ air, the action sequences and the characterization is everything I could ask for, really. The choice of diversifying authors in order to diversify the fantasy City where all of this is taking place was definitely the correct one, and overall I’d say if this format was an experiment, it’s a rollicking success.