Adventures in Lesbian Fiction:

Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Earth Logic is the second novel in Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic series. The first one, Fire Logic, I loved to death, largely though not entirely because of the love story between Karis the earth witch and Zanja the fire blood. The other things I loved about Fire Logic include: very good world building, excellent development of the elemental magic system, great characters, a lot of heart, and what I thought was a very astute grasp of the problems of nationalism and postcolonial politics. The world of the series is a land called Shaftal (and its neighboring countries) which has been invaded and semi-conquered by a foreign army called the Sainnites. The Sainnites are professional mercenaries who were exiled from their own country, although initially nobody in Shaftal knows this. So for most of Fire Logic, you have the Sainnite army trying and failing to subdue the country fighting a Shaftali resistance led by a woman named Mabin who headed up the last legitimate government, and whose objective is to get the Sainnites out of the country completely and for good. The basic message of Fire Logic, however, is that in order to make any progress you have to be able to cross boundaries, challenge certainty, and be willing to understand and accept the enemy. And this is what fire bloods are good for: doing things that appear, in the short term, to be insane or unjustifiable, but which make that kind of change possible.

Anyway, Earth Logic picks up a few years after Fire Logic left off. Karis, who was identified as the next G'Deon of Shaftal many years ago but who due to circumstances that are too complicated to explain here has never been able to take up her position, is living with Zanja and the rest of the gang from Fire Logic in relative obscurity. Over the years, Zanja has gotten increasingly frustrated with what she sees as Karis's refusal to accept her responsibilities (the G'Deon is basically the link between the Shaftali and their land, and under the old system had an extremely important role in the political and religious life of the country). Circumstances make it clear that somehow, Karis will have to become the G'Deon, but she refuses to do it on the terms offered to her by her former adversary Mabin. Zanja and the gang decide they need to work out a way to make it possible for Karis to act, and thus begins what becomes a very strange plot.

Because much of it is predicated on something that's a real spoiler, I can't say too much about the details. What I will say is that Earth Logic is a very different kind of book from Fire Logic, though it includes many of the same characters and offers many of the same pleasures. Where Fire Logic was driven by the interpersonal relationships between the characters, Earth Logic is more concerned with what almost becomes a philosophical quest to discover a solution to Shaftal's problem--which is summed up by the question that one of the characters poses to another who is about to lay out a card reading: "How can Shaftal defeat the Sainnites without destroying itself?" In other words, how does a conquered people regain its freedom without taking on the identity--and repeating the worst atrocities--of their oppressors? This is a question that our own world has generally found to be almost impossible to answer; and the fact that the resultant reading is so complicated that nobody can make head or tail of it is Marks's acknowledgment that she may not be able to do it either. But she has put a tremendous amount of intelligence, heart, and imagination into her search for alternatives, and although I was at times frustrated by it I did find Earth Logic entirely compelling.

There are, for instance, important plot elements that in my opinion do not 'make sense' rationally, but which make sense as a demonstration of the power of storytelling to make change possible, which is what this book is really about. Each of the five sections is introduced by a folk tale from a different culture, each of which is simple and yet at the same time will give you food for thought for a solid week. They're all very inventive and often very funny, but deadly serious at the same time. Medric, who readers will remember fondly from Fire Logic, spends much of the book working feverishly at completing A History of My Father's People, which he is convinced can save the world if only he can get 500 copies printed up and distributed by winter. And that's something that I really do value about Marks's universe: a faith in the power of story to succeed where ideology, technology, and the military fail, and create the possibilities that the world desperately needs. Constant readers will realize that this is also one of the core values of the Women On Fire universe, as is the opposition that Medric's book lays out between justice and mercy. Like Theamh, Medric is convinced that a fixation on justice alone is only going to make the evil greater, and that as soon as you relinquish mercy in order to defeat your adversary, you have lost the war.

For all of Karis's difficulties she proves irresistible once she's finally on the move, and despite everything the book puts you through it delivers a resolution that's satisfying and, yes, happy, without being cheap or contrived. It does your heart good just to get there, and I can only hope that Marks's book will become a small part of the process of trying to work out a solution to our own problems. One of the things that frustrated me most about our book group's discussion of Fire Logic was the refusal to take it seriously. There is, to be sure, a lot of fantasy that's pure escapism, and a lot of fantasy that's pure crap. But genre fiction can matter, just as much as any other kind; and Earth Logic is no lightweight. Everything that humans know about the world, we know through stories. Finding a way to tell a good story--not just an entertaining one, but a story that might actually show us a way to be better than we are--is a serious business, and that's exactly what Earth Logic is.

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