Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1-61696-414-6, $18.95, 336pp, tp) April 2024.

It’s been interesting to watch the rehabilitation of “science fantasy” as a respectable mode of storytelling over the past few decades. Once applied loosely to everything from sword and sorcery to Vancean far futures, it was derided as a “misshapen subgenre” by Darko Suvin and a “bas­tard genre” by The Encyclopedia of Science Fic­tion. But when writers as distinguished as Gene Wolfe seemed amenable to the term, and later writers such as N.K. Jemisin and Tamsyn Muir scooped up awards for novels that drew freely upon both SF and fantasy, it became increasingly evident that narratives that aren’t too worried about genre fences can work perfectly well. I have no idea whether Samantha Mills’s first novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, was conceived with any thought at all given to labels like science fantasy (although Tachyon seems to be promoting it as such), but it’s an excellent example of a novel that earns the term in a particular way: by maintaining a kind of genre equipoise. The puzzles it leaves unresolved, or only partially resolved, permit readers to approach the whole thing as fantasy, SF, or both. The city of Radezhda, where the entire novel takes place, was once visited by five gods – representing scholarship, labor, technology, agriculture, and defense – who, after bestowing various boons on the city, simply withdrew (or went back to sleep, in the view of many citizens). While other cities are stuck with praying to invis­ible deities, Radezhda’s gods left behind physical portals or gateways. This has led a few scholars, reasonably enough, to speculate that these may not be gods at all, but visitors of some sort. “They seem divine,” one such scholar muses, sounding almost like Arthur C. Clarke, “but only because the technology is so far beyond us.”

Set against this ambiguous background, The Wings Upon Her Back is a powerful epic of corruption and disillusionment. Since those five gods long ago abandoned any direct involvement with the city, governance has been left mostly to sects devoted to each of them, and they get along with each other with all the cordiality of the Five Families of New York gangsterdom. Although she grew up in a family of scholars, the teenage Zenya has long dreamed of joining the militaristic me­cha sect, charged with defending the city, whose members can earn spectacular biomechanical wings and learn sophisticated battle techniques. The sect leader Vodaya becomes Zenya’s mentor, and Zenya her star pupil. In a parallel narrative set some decades later, the now 40-ish Zenya has become Winged Zemolai, a veteran warrior who, after granting an apparently small act of leniency to a scholar who turns out to be a spy, is stripped of her authority and even her wings, and basically left to die on the streets of the city. Rescued and rehabilitated by an underground group of resis­tance fighters, Zemolai begins to come to terms with the possibility that her entire earlier career was involved less in protecting the city than in advancing the increasingly totalitarian ambitions of Vodaya, whose goal was to dominate the other sects and gain full control of Radezhda.

While the novel has its share of compelling ac­tion sequences, including a spectacularly realized battle between the winged mecha and an entire fleet of warships, its main power derives from the disturbed and disturbing relationship between Zemolai and Vodaya, who’s a chilling piece of work. Presenting herself as a supercompetent role model for the idealistic young Zenya, she grows increasingly manipulative and abusive, demand­ing personal loyalty over the actual mission of the mecha and growing more ruthless with each new action. All this becomes evident to the reader much sooner than it does to Zenya, and the fact that Zenya fails (or hesitates) to acknowledge it over the years despite endless red flags raises questions about the possibility of real redemp­tion in the later narrative. While a few secondary characters emerge as memorable, such as Galiana, a rebel leader who works hard to gain the older Zemolai’s trust after her rescue, the later timeline reads like an extended epiphany, gradually shifting into atonement. While Zemolai’s agony in grap­pling with her past is manifest, she’s sometimes reduced to simplistic formulations like, “It’s the path you choose that matters. It’s how you live your life.” That’s not going to cut much mustard with the likes of Vodaya, of course, and however heroic Zemolai eventually becomes, the most unsettling figure in The Wings Upon Her Back remains Vodaya herself, who looks all too familiar in our own political lives these days, and perhaps in a few unlucky personal lives as well.

Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.

This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.

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