book review: The Riddle-Master of Hed

by: Patricia A. McKillip

There must be something in the water in the Pacific NW that creates/gestates classic F/SF authors.  McKillip is from Oregon, Frank Herbert was inspired to write Dune while working in Oregon (and is from Washington), Ursula K. LeGuin lives out here… more I’m sure.  Obviously there’s the newer writers like Jay Lake too.  And maybe me (someday! Although who knows if I’ll still be here, certainly a huge part of my formative writing will have been done here).

Yep, I said “classic F”.  While nothing in this book really jumped out at me as “crazy cool” and, indeed, much of it felt a bit muddled and like very important things were left out, it still had a great classic fantasy feel and I enjoyed it in spite of all the plot weirdness (of which there was a great deal – the MC goes to great extremes not to do things, only to suddenly be convinced to do them, then decide not to again… that whole back and forth was quite annoying in the way it was presented).

I *was* quite disappointed to find that there weren’t really any riddles in the sense that I was used to them (None of that “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening?” stuff).  Instead “riddle” in the context of this book seems to me “A question about some historical event that a moral can be drawn from.”    Nothing a reader can actually solve.  I mean, literally, one of them is something like “Who is the one with three stars and what will he bring?”  That’s not a riddle so much as a question about the future or a prophecy.  Others are things like “What did the king of so and so do?”   Yeh… so, disappointing “riddles” aside, the world was interesting enough and the intrigues curiosity arousing enough that I’ll follow along.  The ending was kind of odd and abrupt.

THREE AND A HALF STARS

Fun, classic fantasy.  Maybe quality-of-plotting-wise it’s only a three, but there’s a good sense of the fantastic here, and I like the world.