Black Sun Rising

My local library growing up was underground.  I’m an effort to save space and energy, the Walker Library was a street level parking lot, with the library underneath, accessed by stairs going ominously down, or a dingy elevator.  The stairs led to a roomful of books, so I was delighted. Here I encountered Taran Wanderer and David Eddings’ Elenium (I have no memory of the first, and read the second obsessively for years, in case you want an idea of my taste).  Here I read enough Encyclopedia Brown to learn what makes bookkeeper such a special word and how to cut fishing line with your bare hands.  Thanks to a very strange sample catalog search query, I grew up thinking there was a book called “Wuthering Heights OR How to Succeed In Business Without”.  I also found C. S. Friedman and Michael Whelan at the Walker.

Gerald Tarrant was gazing at me out of a big thick hardcover, with purple ropes of fae spilling all around him.  I couldn’t get Black Sun Rising checked out fast enough.  And then once I got past the vivisection, the world unrolled before me.  The visual appeal of the fae that practitioners see spilling throughout the world, and the spectacular light show of magical discharges in major cities.  The predatory rakh, guilty priest, and of course the tantalizing image of a world in which belief is enough to change reality. I had, and still have, a special place in my heart for any fantasy novel that treats institutional religion with more complexity than either fraudulent and corrupt on the one hand or simply literally true, with gods and magic made real on the other, and Black Sun Rising is one of the best examples I have read.  Over it all loomed Gerald Tarrant, the evil wizard drawn back towards humanity from the farthest reaches of darkness.  I have owned and discarded or given away more copies of Black Sun Rising than any book not about hobbits, and it is one of my most frequent rereads.

Friedman’s novel, first published in 1991, will be familiar to anyone who read fantasy of that era, even if they never discovered this particular book.  On what is revealed to be a far away planet colonized by people who left earth in a starship long ago, magic is real. The fae swirls around the planet, frothing to the surface during earthquakes, tidal confluence, and other moments of transformation.  Natives to the planet can use the fae, but only a few humans (adepts) have that power. Others can learn, including our apparent protagonist, Damien Vryce, but for the majority of humanity, the fae manifests our subconscious. Specifically, fears and hatred become demons, which manifest bodily and feed on humanity.  Erna may be beautiful, but it is also dangerous. Vryce, the mysterious (and evil) adept Gerald Tarrant, and Senzei Reese are thrown together with Ciani (an adept who has lost her power and her memory), and Hesseth, a rakh - one of Erna’s native inhabitants, in order to hunt down a greater evil. Adventures ensue, magic is performed, men strut and posture (the book at least has the grace to note this is what’s happening), good people die, secrets are revealed, hurdles are overcome, and goals are achieved, if not quite in the way the fellowship intended.  Black Sun Rising is a fine example of fantasy novels in the era before grimdark took over, and I recommend reading it if you haven’t yet.

I returned this year with an eye towards the fae, which makes real the fears and dark desires of the human intruders on the planet.  What would it be like, I wondered, to read about a power that manifests all our negative emotions in the midst of the 2018 news cycle?  Damien Vryce is a priest whose religion preaches turning away from the power (and danger) of the fae in favor of seeking to live like the legendary half-remembered Earth that colonized Erna.  Vryce, however, is part of a new initiative: a group of priests who learn to use the magic of the fae, trying to harness the power they wish ultimately to destroy. At a key moment, Vryce, who has previously described his faith as “a dream, -that I would die to uphold, or kill to defend” (p. 39), and that another character sees as a catalog of “Ghouls killed, demons dispatched, converts made.” (p. 66) is presented with a dream of a world without the fae, one where he cannot sense the people or world around him, and is unable to heal an injured companion.  “For the first time in his life, he knows the rank taste of terror … ‘It’s the dream you serve. A future the Church hopes to make possible.’” (p. 309-311) As metaphors go, it’s almost too on the nose.

But there’s little more to be extracted after literalizing the metaphor of manifesting our deepest fears.  People will make compromises with power, and will feel guilty about it, and these compromises will make their stated goals drift further away and having made those compromises they will keep compromising.  Friedman is telling and important truth in Damien’s relation to the fae, but after acknowledging that Damien is a compromised character in the opening chapters of the novel, there’s not much further to go with the uneasy assertion that even the people who think power is bad still pursue it.

The Walker Library has a Wikipedia page and at least one book about it: There Goes the Neighborhood: Ten Buildings People Love to Hate.  A dungeon full of books is less appealing to the adults who think that libraries should be able to serve as community gathering places than it was to me.  Also, the underground room was insufficiently waterproof, which meant that even the primary goal of “holding books” wasn’t something the library could do well (It has since been beautified and replaced.  I will miss it). There was a fundamental flaw at the heart of the building, and so eventually it crumbled.

At first the gaps in Black Sun Rising were those I expected.  There are women central to the narrative, but the primary agents of the story are men.  Ciani is adored (and indeed is the reason both Damien and Tarrant compromise their principles), but exists primarily to motivate the men.  Hesseth gets in some good digs at the patriarchy - “‘I meant rakh men,’ she corrected. ‘Who knows what humans are good for?’” (p. 449), but she’s a woman acting within it without ever challenging the arrangements.  Moreover, Hesseth is a “native”, and her people are literally animals made more human-like by the fears and understanding of evolution that humans brought with them. Again, as a description of how colonialism works, the fae provides a powerful metaphor, but there’s still something inherently limiting in a native character overcoming her instincts to travel with civilized humans.  Black Sun Rising is, in the very predictable ways of many fantasy novels of the 1990s and even today, entrenched in a racist, colonialist, patriarchal worldview it can (at its best) notice, but never transcend.

As I got further into Black Sun Rising, I found myself pitying Damien, but as much for the world he is forced to inhabit as for the choices he makes.  The fae is a manifestation of human unconscious - of the darker impulses we keep bottled away. For all but a special few, the magic that sustains Erna literally relies on conflict between our emotional and rational sides to manifest.  The intensity of the fae, similarly, is driven by geologic activity. Stop earthquakes and you stop magic. Magic is given both its strength and its form by conflict. Is it any wonder that in this world there exists a priest of a religion seeking to banish the fae who learns to wield it?  The founder of Damien’s religion was an adept, naturally able to wield the fae, and condemned by the church he founded. Which, since human emotion is made real in this world, actually condemned him to an afterlife of damnation. The logic of Erna is inexorable. Reality is shaped by the conflict between desires and reason, and these cannot be brought into harmony.

Around the time I reread Black Sun Rising, I applied for membership at my local Quaker Meeting.  Credal statements are hard with Quakers, but seeking “that of God in everyone” is as close to a creed as many will get.  A corollary of this is the faith that “that of God” is within you, and one can (and should) try to live in harmony with that inner voice (depending on who you ask, this idea of Integrity is one of a handful of core Testimonies).  There may be views more antithetical to Quakerism than the inevitability of conflict between what we believe and what we want, but I can’t think of any offhand (conflict, generally, comes close: Peace is another of the core Testimonies)

Damien is unable to live in my world, and I would be unable to follow my faith in his.  By making manifest human unconscious, and giving that unconscious a demonic visage that feeds on humanity, Friedman makes real a world that has no place for a spark of transcendent goodness and connection within humans.  One cannot live with Integrity in the world of Black Sun Rising, or pursue Peace based on the recognition of a mutual connection.  Just as Tolkien’s Orcs make the lie of racism literally true in Middle-Earth, and so make it a smaller and less welcoming place, Friedman’s fae makes real one model of human identity, cutting off the existence of others.  Particularly in a novel where religious faith is treated with nuance and respect, this truncated identity increasingly felt like a fundamental flaw.

It was wonderful to return to Erna, and Ciani of Faraday, Hesseth the rakh, and the rest of Damien’s companions.  I continue to appreciate how aesthetically compelling the world is, and how powerfully Tarrant’s personality shapes the story and the companions gathered around him. I do enjoy Black Sun Rising, and I remain grateful to the author for treating faith as something more rich and complex than a longing to be manipulated by charismatic con men or the literal presence of magic.  I will reread Black Sun Rising, and I recommend it very much.

But I also felt sad as I came to the end of the book.  Sad for Damien and the others around him, and sad for the world they live in.  At best, if Damien’s faith is accomplished, he can hope to live in a deterministic universe where reality is unchanged and predictable.  The people he shares it with will have a thin veneer of civilization covering an unconscious that tends towards fear, anger and despair. If his faith is not borne out, and the status quo maintained, he will live in a world where fear and confusion give rise to demons that feast on humanity.  There is little room in Damien’s world for hope, or a connection between people that can be greater, or safer, than the sum of its parts. And that truth saddens me. Erna is a rich and compelling world, but for myself, I choose the fragile hopes and community that can be found here.