Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt
Published by Baen Books
Cover art by Dave Seeley
Cover design by Carol Russo
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
When Sarah Hoyt first announced this book on her blog, According to Hoyt, I was immediately excited. It looked like a book that would hit a lot of the same buttons that Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series did (before it got hung up as he struggled to write the concluding book, tentatively titled Master Alvin). Magic on the American frontier, complete with familiar historical figures of the formative years of the United States, in a familiar world made strange by the intrusion of fantastical elements.
As I noted in my review of Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, first volume of the Alvin Maker series, the American fantastic tradition is rather thin on the ground, pretty much limited to the various tall tales of Paul Bunyan et al. and the dark fantasy/ cosmic horror tradition of Poe and Lovecraft. The US is a young country -- an Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way, while an American thinks a hundred years is a long time -- so American writers who wanted to create epic fantasies with thousands of years of backstory of elves and dwarves and the like tended to unthinkingly imitate Tolkien. But American writers, not familiar with the landscapes and biota of Europe, tended to unthinkingly substitute familiar American ones, often not even realizing that pecans and cacti and raccoons and red-winged blackbirds looked oddly out of place amidst the castles and knights of the typical medieval or pseudo-medieval settings.
Which made Card's imagined magical frontier America such a breath of fresh air. Magic works, but it's the folk hexery of the ordinary people, not the wizardry of typical fantasy. Card made it feel real, and even more important, made it fit with the secular myth that is the settlement of the American frontier, and imagined how the presence of functional magic would change the way that historical mythos played out, from the conflicts with the various indigenous tribes to the struggles over slavery.
This novel is set somewhat earlier in American history, but certainly still within the "pioneer and frontier" period of American history. Instead of the Thirteen Colonies breaking with the mother country in a Revolutionary War, they were sundered from Britain in the cosmic catastrophe that followed the sorcerous destruction of Halley's Comet nearly two decades before the Revolutionary War would've occurred. Magic has been loosed upon an English-speaking America that struggles to stand on its own, and there is growing evidence that not all of that magic is good, or even neutral.
Benjamin Franklin, who even in our own world was viewed as a "wizard" for his various scientific and technological explorations, has gained extraordinary powers in that unleashing of magic, and with them considerable extension of life. So he's still around and active enough to be meeting with Merriwether Lewis -- the man who, in our world, was one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase.
Except in this imagined world, Lewis is in St. Louis to hear Franklin speak on magic -- until the city is attacked by a dragon that is trying to set the wooden city on fire. Lewis pitches right in to fight the fire, and in the process attracts Franklin's attention as a potential leader for an expedition to get around the magical barrier which blocks the Colonies from communicating across the Atlantic with the mother country, by instead going west and trying to cross the Pacific.
So Lewis begins to put together an expedition into the vast unknown lands to the west of the Thirteen Colonies. He turns first to William Clark, whom he knows and can trust in a position of leadership over what will necessarily be rough men, unaccustomed to discipline. Because he is going to be recruiting the hunters and trappers who range across these wild lands, dealing with the various tribes and generally functioning as independent agents rather than employees. Many of them are used to living rough when they come back to civilization too, drinking hard and playing hard in the trading posts and border towns.
And it's a wise decision, because their company hasn't gone far from St. Louis before three of these men decide to steal a cask of whiskey and run off into the wilds to drink it. An indiscipline that in normal times might have fetched them a harsh beating at best, and quite possibly hanging for desertion if they were considered to be under military discipline -- but not the horror that arises to launch itself against the camp.
The narrative voice does not use the term zombie, since it had not yet been borrowed from the various Afro-Caribbean dialects into the English of North America at that time. Instead, Lewis thinks of these reanimated corpses as "revenants," a more general term. But once their onslaught is defeated, he does the only decent thing he can for the poor souls whose bodies were pressed into service by some mysterious malign force, presumably the same one that sent the dragon to attack Benjamin Franklin in St. Louis. He lays them to rest as best he can, although he doesn't know the rites of their particular faith traditions, and hopes their souls can find peace.
Now Lewis and Clarke are racing not against the coming of winter, but also against the evil that stalks the land. They build a makeshift stockade, Fort Mandan, to hole up in during the worst of the season.
And then a young woman comes running to them. Heavily pregnant, she is fleeing a vision of a dragon who has sworn to take her unborn child and turn him into a vessel for its vile purposes. When she tells Lewis that her name is Bird Woman, Sacagawea in her own language, he immediately recalls his own vision of a dragon looking for his lost bird and her egg, and wonders whether they have both received communications from the same malign entity.
However, he doesn't have any time to puzzle on those things, because Sacagawea needs to deliver her baby, now. And in her youth and her exhausted state, it's not going to be an easy process. Lewis finally turns to a folk remedy of some of the local tribes and cuts up the rattle of a rattlesnake into bits tiny enough for her to swallow. At last she delivers the little boy, whom she names Jean Baptiste after his grandfather, in accordance with her husband's wishes.
He proves a healthy child, and is soon the delight of the entire encampment. They nickname him Pompy, which is said to be a term meaning ruler or leader in the language of one of the local tribes.
As winter begins to give way to spring, everyone is excited to leave the cramped quarters of Fort Mandan behind and get moving again. However, Lewis is also all too well aware that the warming weather will give strength to the mysterious Enemy lurking beyond the walls, an Enemy which keeps peeking into Lewis's dreams.
But Sacagawea wants to be reunited with her husband, a sentiment that leaves Lewis somewhat uneasy. He knows the story of how she was captured by an enemy tribe, sold into slavery, and won along with another woman of her tribe by this trapper of mixed French and Native American ancestry. Although it appears that he doesn't always treat her very well, she seems to have a certain affection for him, even if rooted primarily in obligation.
On the way, they have another encounter with the dragon, in which both Lewis and Sacagawea fight a magical battle over a river that the Enemy seems to control. This one of those few books where the cover image is actually an illustration of a scene from the book, and it works.
When they finally reunite with Sacagawea's husband, he is in dire straits. Miserable and confused, he seems to be under the thrall of some evil spell. Worse, the farther they go with him in their company, the more they come under magical attack. Increasingly it becomes obvious that yes, he is the tool of an evil sorcerer, and it will take great magic to free him, if it is even possible to do so. Magic that will involve reconnecting with her own people, the Snake or Shoshone people, and her brother who is a powerful shaman among them.
This is a Baen book, so you can rest assured that it will not end in disaster and crushing despair. But victory often comes at a price, of the sort that makes the happy ending more on the order of bittersweet.
And then there is the reveal at the end, which gives us a situation reminiscent of Jerome Bixby's "It's a GOOD Life" -- except played across an entire continent rather than just a single Midwestern small town. A reveal that changes everything that had been assumed about the Sundering.
Although this novel is complete in itself, I really hope there will be further novels in the Arcane America setting. There are just so many ways they could take it from here, and given that this volume has won the Dragon Award at last year's DragonCon, it's clear there's a fan base for this world, and for this particular subgenre.
Review posted June 18, 2019.
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