The Nightward by R.S.A. Garcia: Review by Liz Bourke
The Nightward, R.S.A. Garcia (Harper Voyager US 978-0-06-334575-1, $19.99, 448pp, tp) October 2024.
The Nightward is R.S.A. Garcia’s first traditionally published novel. From the outside, it looks like a work of epic fantasy in the classic mode, in which a small team of heroes must outwit and stand against a nebulously defined threat to all they know and love. A closer examination, however, finds it taking this classic form in some interesting directions, as a child-queen-in-waiting and her bodyguard experience one of the world’s worst road trips in their flight from the Dark.
Some 500 years or so before The Nightward begins, its history says the world was subject to an “Age of Chaos” filled with terrible beasts and horrible suffering, ruled over by inimical Masters with great power. An individual called Gaiea, worshipped now as a goddess, brought the Age of Chaos to a close and ended the rule of the Masters. She sealed away the Darkness and dark magic and put it into a book, the titular Nightward, and instituted a new order, one where people live with only ordinary hazards to their daily life. Her gifts – the ability to manipulate the world in certain ways, to do certain kinds of magic – have been manifest in many people ever since, most notably in the many ruling queens of the courts of what has since been known as Gailand. The queens have stood as safeguard against the Dark and for the preservation of the world Gaiea brought into being, especially the queen of the High Court of Dun, known as the Hand of Gaiea, pre-eminent among her peers and guardian of the Nightward.
This world is matriarchal, with men excluded from positions of leadership and trans people as a recognised class but with a mildly awkward social position. The current queen of the High Court of Dun is a reformer, attempting to change the status quo, but her push for change goes too far for some and not far enough for others, while the borders of Gailand are threatened by the Ragat Army – the armed forces of a patriarchal society excluded from Gailand and believed to have no magic.
This is not all obvious from the beginning, but the picture begins to emerge as we follow The Nightward’s protagonists. Viella, a preteen princess, the “Spirit of Gaiea” (the title for the heir presumptive to the Hand of Gaiea) and her bodyguard, Luka, a man of good intentions and immense energy, frustrated to be babysitting a wilful princess rather than serving with the army (the elite women of the Dahomei, magic-wielding warriors, and the men of the Daguard, who aren’t seen as quite at their level) in the face of a Ragat incursion.
On the eve of the ceremony that would have confirmed Viella in her role as her mother’s heir, an alliance of competing factions within the court conspire to assassinate the queen and bring in the Ragat to support a coup – and unleash the Dark power of the Nightward to further their aims, using Viella’s twin brother Valan first as an unwitting pawn and then as a coerced one. These factions may have competing visions for the future of Gailand, but that matters very little to Luka, who flees with Viella to save her life, in search first of safety and then of aid to restore Viella to her court. But dark and terrible forces last seen in the Age of Chaos pursue them, and the magic (Gaiea’s gift, or blessing, or boon) that should have come to Viella with her mother’s fall is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, Luka has secrets of his own – about his heritage and abilities – that he feels he must keep hidden from the abrasive, intensely competent Dahomei who’s joined them on the road trip from hell.
Relationships, particularly familial or family like relationships, are front and centre in The Nightward. At the court of Dun, in the wake of the coup, the relationships between Valan, his father, and his father’s would-be lover, one of the coup plotters, is central to events, while Valan’s grandmother Frances and her relationships – and her ability to forge relationships – are key to opposing it. Viella, initially irritated with Luka as her bodyguard, comes to cling to him as her one trustworthy rock amid the tumult and danger that her life has become, while Luka, at first frustrated to be doing something as passive as fleeing with the queen-in-waiting when he’d much rather be taking an active role in fighting back, comes at first grudgingly and later wholeheartedly to embrace the importance of his role as caregiver as well as a protector, and to open up to the possibility of emotional connection. All the while, other characters – from generals and queens to river spirits – are working in their own ways to oppose the destructive forces that the coup has unleashed.
It’s clear, in the end, that while the world of The Nightward looks fantastical, it’s underpinned by a science-fictional logic. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic at a glance, and – though it may, in the end, be science fantasy – Garcia is playing with nanotechnology and the hinted remnants of what looks like corporate dystopia in a really fascinating dialogue with the trappings of epic fantasy. This fruitful and playful fusion of ideas and approaches recollects some of the playfulness of Garcia’s most recent (wry, deeply observed) short fiction – such as the 2023 Nebula Award winner “Tante Merle and the Farmhand 4200” or “Mid-Earth Removals Limited” – and so does its approach to family and community. No one in The Nightward is an isolated actor: They all exist within webs of connection, even when they turn against those connections.
Garcia writes with deft vigour, creating compelling characters and a clear sense of a world bursting with history and possibility, drama and threat. It’s a fast and entertaining read, and I’m fascinated to see where the characters will go – and how Garcia will continue to play with the interpenetration of science fiction and fantasy! – in the next volume.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus
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