Just tacking this onto another review post for efficiency’s sake. Hope you don’t mind, Thoth!
(I read The Epic of Gilgamesh way back in high school, and I’m afraid I don’t remember enough of it to have any real opinions about it, other than, “it’s an amazing and lucky miracle that it survived long enough to be recorded in modern languages.”)
The Prodigal Sorcerer is one of the Magic: the Gathering novels that were published by HarperPrism back in the mid-nineties, and generally aren’t acknowledged as canon any more, although technically anything that doesn’t contradict more modern setting details is still canon. They’re out of print, so I’ve had to buy them off of Amazon, though I did get lucky back in college and find a copy of The Cursed Land at a traveling used book sale that came to Arizona State University’s campus. That’s the only one I’ve read prior to this, and happily I found that not only was it a good story, but nothing in it contradicted modern Magic, allowing me to safely accept it into my headcanon as “definitely really happened.”
TPS was also a very enjoyable story. Going into nineties fantasy, it was easy for me to expect both of them to be dated, with a focus on male protagonists, solving problems through violence, and other stereotypes characteristic of early nerd culture. And both novels proved me wrong in excellent ways. Both had a woman as the primary protagonist, and while war is present in both, and especially in TPS, it’s portrayed as the weakest option for fixing problems in both, and both have some degree of getting to know opponents, and working together with them to solve problems. TPS doesn’t quite jive with modern canon as well, but it was mostly things that aren’t really the author’s fault, as the color pie wasn’t as defined back in those early days.
Spoilers follow from this point for The Prodigal Sorcerer. There’s going to be one paragraph with some potentially uncomfortable subject matter, which I’ll warn for just before it arrives, in case the content isn’t your thing. [I’ve actually wound up moving that to the very bottom below my signature, so it’s safe to read up to that point.] The rest of this review should be G rated.
The most basic theme in TPS is of how racial prejudice can blind people to overlook actual dangers. We don’t really know much of the overall world where TPS takes place, thanks to a magic Magewall that keeps the valley of narrative focus largely cut off from the rest of the plane. Within the valley, barring a few members of races that aren’t focused on, are humans, elves (called Garans), and Viashino (Magic’s race of lizard-men). The human leader Tagard wants to unite everyone in the valley, but the problem is that the Viashino have what seems to be the only fortified city within the magewall. He unites the humans and Garan to attack it and take it over, and then creates a united council of human, Garan and Viashino to make democratic decisions —woops, he got assassinated. And then his daughter Talli has to get over her prejudice towards the Viashino (Viashino had killed her mother years ago) to keep the uneasy three-way alliance together. Naturally, not a single one of the characters ultimately revealed to be villainous in the end is Viashino, and most of the conflict is caused by other humans. I liked that—that the protagonist was so focused on hating the lizard-folk who were so unlike her, that she overlooked the threat coming from the more similar species, and lost her father for it. (I mean, I like the message behind it, not that bad things happened to her.) Another more minor detail that I liked: a lot of fantasy fiction is written from a human perspective, so any character whose species isn’t described “defaults” to human. But the narration in TPS is always aware that humans are by no means dominant. It always explicitly names a human a human, and even human characters will refer to others as humans, rather than people. Because they live in a world where not all the people are humans!
The viashino are a bit off-brand for the color pie. They were mostly Red-mana creatures back in the early days, but with their fortified city of Berimish, their preserved cultural heritage, and their thriving, orderly markets, the viashino of this plane are pretty solidly White. I do still like them; the details that they prefer climbing straight up walls rather than using stairs, and don’t know their own biological sexes until they mature to a certain point, make them feel more like a race of actual lizards that evolved sentience, rather than humans who got a scaly visual overlay. They just . . . don’t quite match modern viashino in Magic. Although within the context of the novel, it does at least keep consistency with respect to enemy color pairs, as the human culture is pretty clearly red here. They live in caves, are easily driven to anger, and have close bonds to their immediate communities. So at least the Red vs. White conflict is properly present.
The Garan elves are also a little iffy to me. Abhorring constructed weaponry is certainly Green, but the reason the Garans forbid weapons feels more Red. Basically, they had such violent wars against each other in the past that they nearly wiped themselves out, and learned carefully controlled hand-to-hand combat in order to force some control and caution over combat. First of all, I recognize this as being ripped off of Vulcans, even as a non-Trekker. But secondly, yeah. Having such uncontrolled emotions is blatantly red in M;tG, even at the start, so it feels weird. Still, it is a creative new take on why a given culture of elves forgoes metal weaponry.
But for an absolute home run with the color pie, we have the humans of Suderbod, in their swamp-based kingdom just outside the Magewall. I love that Sumner actually worked the geography of swamps as M:tG’s source of Black mana into the culture of the humans who live there. Living in a low, dirty land means there’s a heavy cultural focus of cleanliness, with the need for public communal baths beating out public propriety against nudity as a cultural norm, and the fact that those with higher social status are more able/compelled to wash frequently. The clothes and even armor of the Suder sport garish bright colors in contrasting geometric patterns, which would show off any physical muck more clearly, giving the wearers an even greater incentive to keep clean. The best part is (and I didn’t even realize until I happened to notice a copy of the Prodigal Sorcerer card on the back of the novel) that those color schemes were inspired directly by the older art on that card; even the floppy hat and forked beard were incorporated into the fashions of the Suder. It’s ultimately a minor detail, but it’s still rather cool that Sumner took every detail he could from the one card (I know of) that inspired the novel.
So ultimately, considering this novel’s age, it’s still decently in-line with modern M:tG, and isn’t much a blend of stereotypes from outdated nerd culture. Pretty nice! I’m looking forward to reading more of these out-of-print M:tG novels, and making posts about them, even though I’m almost certainly the only one here who’s bothered to track them down and no one will have anything to add.
Hm. I think I’ll just push that one unpleasant paragraph off to after my usual outro stuff, so folks can skip it if they don’t want to read it. It’s going to be discussing non-graphically the leader of Suderbod intending to molest a teenage elf male and a teenage human female. There’s nothing else of real value from this point, so stop reading and don’t scroll further if that’s not for you.
—doctorlit, about to go on an epic wiki walk about M:tG after not really paying much attention to it for years
“Some Viashino think spoilers are nice to look at, that’s all.” “Some Viashino think spoilers are nice to look at, that’s all.” “Some Viashino think spoilers are nice to look at, that’s all.” “Some Viashino think spoilers are nice to look at, that’s all.”
Okay, the unpleasantness begins here: yeah, the leader of Suderbod, I forget . . . Solin, that’s the name. Apparently he’s way into bedroom stuff, and went after two of the main characters, mainly because of the boy—he had never been with a Garan before. I don’t feel it really added anything to the narrative. It’s mostly there so Solin’s one underling can leave him alone with the wizard girl so she could kill Solin and let the underling take the throne. But it could have been, you know, a dinner party to hear Garan fairy tales, or whatever. The only reason I even bring the scene up, and the only detail that somewhat vindicates its presence, is that it kind of reverses the gender expectations of the setup: Solin goes after the boy first, and the girl is the one who saves him by saying “take me instead” and then magicking Solin to death. That at least makes for a nice finale to the scene, but again, it would have been nicer for the novel not to contain that scene to begin with.