Wednesday, April 15, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Driftwood by Marie Brennan





Full Disclosure:  This novella was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 14, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Driftwood is the latest novel by author Marie Brennan, the author of The Memoirs of Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons).  I really loved that series and its spinoff novel because of how well it built a series based upon Brennan's knowledge of anthropology, archeology, and science, together with great characters, a lot of wit, and a fun fantasy world.  It's really great and you should read it.  So naturally, when I saw her upcoming novel* on Netgalley, I put in a request immediately, and so I obtained Driftwood for this review.

*Driftwood is around 200 pages long from what I can tell, and is at best a short novel and may even be short enough to be considered a "Novella" - certainly I've seen books of similar length called as such.  But the marketing text on booksellers' sites lists it as a "novel", and so thus, shall I.  

 Driftwood is very much in the same vein as the above, a short novel with some strong characters and a very anthropological focus: namely, how do people respond when their worlds begin their inevitable end?  And I mean this literally, the story is essentially a series of tales of "Driftwood", the place that worlds go after their apocalypses, where they merge with other worlds as they slowly die out.  Each tale is particularly interesting and explores different grounds, all centered around characters interacting with a mysterious man who seems to survive everything.  It's a really well done set of tales and if this is the first in a new series, I would definitely look forward to more.

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Driftwood has been a thing seemingly forever, a place where worlds end.  Or really, a place for worlds that have already ended.  For Driftwood is where worlds that suffer their own apocalypses go, or the bits that seemingly survive of them.  Those bits first appear out of the mist that borders Driftwood, and then slowly start to get smaller and pushed towards the center of Driftwood - the Crush - until they eventually disappear.

Some worlds handle their entry into Driftwood, and their eventual ends, better than others - being willing to mix blood and trade with the other worlds they now neighbor instead of demanding racial and political purity - but all worlds require their own form of adaptation to their end.  And eventually, they disappear - everyone does.

Except for the strange man known as "Last", the man who has seemingly been in Driftwood forever and never faded.  Many seek him out, seeking some clue to how their world can survive, which he refuses to give them.  Others seek him out for his experience and guidance in knowing all the worlds of Driftwood, so they can learn to adapt to the end.  But no matter what, Last endures as everything and everyone else disappears.

Until one day, Last seems to have disappeared.  In memory of the one person in Driftwood who seemed to be eternal, the residents of Driftwood come together and tell their stories of how he helped them, or at the very least affected their lives, and try to figure out who Last really was.....or is.
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Driftwood is the type of "novel" that is often kind of hard to distinguish from an anthology - the novel is bookended by two short segments told through first person, and then contains a framing device story - the seeming funeral of Last - to tell a series of stories about the time people sought out Last for Aid.  So if you're looking for a cohesive story of a single character, you won't find it here - Last isn't ever the main character of his stories and what we know about him comes generally from unreliable sources, no matter how well intentioned and the short first person segments.

Instead, we have a series of stories that are essentially telling the tales of how different peoples and individuals tried to deal with the ends of their worlds - and the ideas that their worlds were not special or as unique as they once thought.  Driftwood provides the perfect setting for these tales: made up of different shards of worlds that all follow their own rules, which merge into each other over time before disappearing.  Even the inhabitants do this, to the point where peoples find themselves interbreeding to become unrecognizable as part of any given world - the drifters - where any "one-blood", a person whose ancestry is purely of a single world, stand out more than anything and languages tend to merge the deeper you get into a pidgin.

And so this world provides for the stories of peoples adapting and learning to cope with the inconceivable.  So you have a high chancellor braving his king's order not to visit the "false" outside worlds in order to find an outsider from a world that could heal the dying king, the last of a lineage without which his people would not know how to go on.  You have a woman who desperately searches for a way to obtain an object her people left behind in a part of her world that is now too dangerous to enter, an object that means everything to her people.  You have a historian who wants to chart and map Driftwood as it is, just for fun and knowledge, and is willing to take dangerous risks to pull it off.  You have a priestess and leader who seeks out Last to obtain memories long lost of her people, so they can teach the young what once was.  You have a boy, a true drifter without a world, who seeks something, a purpose or greater being to make the difficulties of Driftwood make sense.  And you have a pair whose story is so short and surprisingly I won't say any more about.

These stories are very well done, and again, show the anthropological side of Brennan's stories and interests.  Not everyone will react well to the end of everything - god knows we can see that today - but more will than you think (and Brennan perhaps makes this argument by having only one of the five major stories be focused upon someone acting destructively - and even then that person is driven less by the destruction of his world than other influences).  But there are, even for coping and trying to survive positively, a number of ways to get by, and these stories show a good variety of such in interesting ways that really captivate.

It's a fascinating novel that works well and ends on a really nice touch, and I'd love to see more with this world, though I admit to being unsure what Brennan would do with it.  But that's why I keep reading her as she manages to meet or exceed my expectations repeatedly. 


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