RSA Garcia’s magical Nightward: Not what it seems

AS a writer, RSA Garcia is fond of portents. The very first chapter of her upcoming book, The Nightward, is littered with them. Clearly bad things are going to happen as that first chapter proceeds, and apparently quite soon.

The final chapter toys with the reader, offering some particularly surprising twists and turns, before ending with a whopper of a foreshadowing.

I’d encountered Garcia’s writing rather late, with the publication of her novella Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 in Uncanny Magazine (https://cstu.io/757828), an endearing work of hard science fiction written almost entirely in local creole.

That story recently won the author a Nebula Award, one of the premium indicators of arrival in the universe of speculative fiction.

But it was with growing apprehension that I began to read the first few chapters of The Nightward.

A confession here: I am not a fan of the various fantasy branches of speculative fiction. My preference drifts to hard science fiction, but meanders outward from there into various realms populated by concepts and notions that are anchored, no matter how tenuously, by some tether of logic, science or supportable narrative logic.

So alternative histories? Great. Anything involving magic and actions that are inexplicable in-world? My attention begins to drift.

So here’s what I can tell you about The Nightward. There is a lot of magic. There are also magical creatures and what summary shorthand would describe as possessed zombies.

Guiding my mind back to the matters at hand is Garcia’s solid sense of world-building, though the book really should offer a map to orient things, at least geographically.

She is clever enough to bring her presentation of Gailand to life with measured, but descriptive bricklaying, slowly building awareness of the world that her characters inhabit. There is an above-average number of people of colour in this world, as well as several people who are notable for their pale aspect. I had a sense of braided, kinky locks in majestic designs in the courts and streets of her imagined world.

But the author rarely spells anything out explicitly, choosing instead to drop a fractional description here and a quiet reference there.

She’s also not afraid to kill her characters after investing thousands of words in their creation and establishing emotional attachments that reach beyond plot-driven narrative connections to touch the reader.

And yes, that even includes the reader who affects indifference as the story seems to canter along what appear to be the predictable narrative ley lines of fantasy fiction.

The author is also quite keen to inject into the book a sense of her own Caribbean experiences. There are smells of curry, potato pies and stewed chicken in the air and fashionable saris and shalwar kameez among the well-to-do and people of station. To the reader unfamiliar with this Caribbean garnishing, it is a thing of little consequence. The sense of them is clear enough, but for a Caribbean reader, the response will either be a thrill of recognition or a bit of confusion, since these localising affectations have no impact whatever on the narrative.

This surprised me somewhat, as I kept looking for some payoff for their inclusion, given the powerful presence that Garcia’s carefully limned Caribbean atmospheres have in Farmhand 4200. That story could have been written about another place entirely, but benefits significantly from the intimacy of Garcia’s understanding of the island’s culture and its people.

Such fussing is out of place, however, in a larger appreciation of The Nightward, which may tap into the spells and steel that forge camaraderie in traditional sword-and-sorcery epics, but which also stealthily benefits from a well-known story architecture by using those tropes as its foundation.

If I have any quibble about the author’s handling of the staging of this work, it is that there is a certain slipperiness in the description of the fights that punctuate the book. Small skirmishes are executed with authority, but larger engagements suffer from a fuzziness about what’s happening where.

This may be the result of a reluctance to get into gruesome details about the consequences of these battles, but it’s hard for the reader to get involved in a physical confrontation when it’s too easy to lose track of what’s happening between combatants.

However, as a result of this squeamishness, the book is entirely accessible to younger readers, who are unlikely to suffer nightmares about the dark creatures that show up to do evil deeds.

A couple of hundred pages into her story, though, Garcia begins to engineer a bold twist to the story, one that made me begin to reassess her intent in the work to that point.

The Nightward is the first half of a duology that will be completed with a sequel in 2025.

The final seeds of portent that the author scatters about in the final chapters of this first book suggest that years will have passed in its sequel. Protagonists are put to narrative sleep while new players are loosed upon the fictional world, suggesting that through a reorientation of understanding, the book’s direction is likely to turn the tale in dramatically new directions.

Could it be that Garcia hasn’t been able to resist that most Trinidadian of metaphors, the meggie, in her plotting of this work? It wouldn’t be the first time that a science-fiction author has built a persuasive structure, only to tear it down to reveal something even more unusual and intriguing.

It’s tempting to think of The Nightward as an updating of the concepts that Roger Zelazny explored in Lords of Light and Anne McCaffrey popularised with her Dragonriders of Pern series – but I think Garcia is up to something different but equally surprising here.

Dead queens. Murdered fathers. Bloody betrayals at court. A brutal chase that goes to ground after more than 300 pages. Is all this a preamble to something else entirely?

Bring eeet, ma’am!

Nightward will be published on October 15. Readers can pre-order it now from online major retailers such as Amazon, B&N, Indigo bookstores in Canada, etc, or from Paper Based Bookstore, St Clair. You can also buy it from major retailers and Paper Based after the launch.

RSA Garcia is undergoing treatment for cancer and has a GoFundMe active at this link: https://cstu.io/3ce9cf.