While transcribing the Skiffy and Fanty Show’s episode about Jo Clayton’s Diadem from the Stars, I remembered again how much I loved her Diadem series and its spinoffs, and numerous other books of hers. It’s a bit baffling to me how little she appears in SFF genre conversations these days; a quick online search turned up little besides her entries in Wikipedia and at SFE, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (which misgenders a character in one of her plot summaries), a brief mention in James Davis Nicoll’s Fighting Erasure essays for what’s now Reactor, and a tribute page at archive.org.
I can only speculate about some possible reasons for this: First, as just mentioned, there’s the general trend to forget the contributions of female speculative fiction authors (see here). Second, her science fiction tends toward space opera or even science fantasy, with psionics and outright magic (plus a lot of sociological elements), and she wrote a lot of pure fantasy, too; these subgenres seem to garner less critical respect than “hard” SF. Third, many or most of her books deal with unpleasant topics including rape; child abuse; sexual, religious and racial/species discrimination; corporate exploitation, and ecological devastation. Fourth, I don’t think she won any awards.
But Clayton deserves to be remembered, and in my case at least, reread. If she were still alive and writing, I would absolutely nominate her Diadem novels for the Hugo Award for Best Series. But she died of cancer in 1998 at age 58 of cancer. Although it’s heartening to see how her SFF community supported her in her last years, and what success she won while alive (publishing 35 novels and selling 1.25 million copies), I still want more recognition for her now.
A few years ago, when I was planning to move states, I decided to revisit the nine-book Diadem series (and four spinoffs) before selling or giving them away, but after refreshing my memory, I just couldn’t leave them behind. They’re so good!
Admittedly, the first book in the series, Diadem from the Stars, is a challenging read that deserves numerous content warnings. HERE BE SPOILERS! Heavy spoilers for the first two books, and brief spoilers for plot points through the rest of the series: Pregnant protagonist Aleytys, an empath/healer despised as a witch, escapes the rural patriarchy that raised her and treks across the planet to seek a spaceship that her previously-fled spacefaring mother told her about in a note she’d left. Along the way, Lee contends with a mind-controlling rapist and picks up a jeweled headband or diadem that sinks into her head and seems to disappear. There is a lot of interesting character development, but it’s more of a survival slog than a fun adventure. The second book, Lamarchos, is also pretty bleak: Lee is now a mercenary on a treasure hunt across another unpleasant planet, raising her infant son; she learns about some of the diadem’s gifts, including martial arts, but is betrayed by another mercenary in the end.
For many readers, I’d actually recommend skipping the first two books in the series and starting with the third book, Irsud, because this is where things really get interesting and much more engaging to me. Aleytys wakes up on a planet with insectoid rulers over a human population; she’s been bought as an egg-host, due to her psionic potential, but implanted with a psi-dampener to keep her controlled. She has up to a year before the queen-egg will wake up and take her over; meanwhile, she’s plotting escape and revolution, falling in love again, and getting acquainted with the inhabitants of the diadem — alien tech that stores the memories and, apparently, souls of its wearers when they die. Aleytys can let them out to temporarily pilot her body; the warrior fights some of her battles, the sorceress can slow time briefly, and the singer knows a lot more about technology than Aleytys, at least at first. But what our heroine really wants, after she deals with the current situation, is to get off this planet and go after her baby, taken away at the end of book 2.
Throughout the rest of the series (Maeve, Star Hunters, The Nowhere Hunt, Ghosthunt, The Snares of Ibex, and Quester’s Endgame), Aleytys finds her son and loses him again, takes and leaves more lovers (human and not), finally finds a partner, is pursued by people who want the diadem, is attacked by an old frenemy of her mother’s, and finally finds the planet of her mother’s people. Along the way she takes various mercenary-style jobs, usually involving infiltrations and personal extractions, supports several revolutions against colonizers and corporate overlords, discovers how to free the diadem inhabitants, and learns a great deal more about herself, her powers, and her heritage.
Two of the former diadem dwellers get their own books after Aleytys’ series ends. In Shadow of the Warmaster, warrior Swardheld Quale tries to rescue a scholar enslaved after being convicted of crimes she didn’t commit, to shut her up about corporate exploitation. When the musician Shadith’s trilogy starts with Shadowplay, she’s studying at the University planet but gets caught up in an evil, egotistical artist’s plan to foment a devastating civil war and sell Limited Edition recordings of that; in Shadowspeer, Shadith and her allies seek revenge, and in Shadowkill, Shadow is enslaved again, eventually forming a very uneasy alliance with her foe as they fight to turn the tables on their subjugators. (One of my favorite chapter titles ever, in any book by any author, is “WORMS IN THE WALLS, WASPS IN THE RAFTERS: Wherein Mimishay learns the folly of messing with Dyslaera and distorting the creations of dedicated artists like Ginbiryol Seyirshi” in book 3.) I love these spinoffs just as much as the original series, and Shadowkill is the Clayton book that I’ve reread the most (at least half a dozen times).
Readers of this column will have picked up by now on Clayton’s frequent theme of slavery and similar forms of subjugation. It’s indeed a theme that recurs often in Clayton’s work; sometimes it’s about blatant exploitation and even extinction of entire populations, and sometimes it’s politely/cynically labeled as “contract labor” status imposed upon individuals (initiated by debt or the justice system) that may just happen to silence those people and last for generations. It can be based on species, race, geography, politics, economics, or other factors, but Clayton always illustrates its dehumanizing evils as her protagonists maneuver through these situations and sometimes overturn them. (Rereading now, this reminds me a lot of Corporation Rim behavior in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. Contract labor is far from a new theme in science fiction, but Clayton certainly writes it well.)
Sexual subjugation (and resistance to it) is also a frequent subject for Clayton. Many planet-bound low-tech societies in her books are more or less patriarchal, usually more, and often downright misogynistic. Even in the high-tech galactic culture, there are religious orders and corporations that discriminate against women. Against all this, however, there are a few matriarchal societies, such as the Amazon-like plains-riders in The Snares of Ibex, and many individual strong and smart women who lead families and clans and/or start businesses or lead scholarly expeditions. Feminists will find a lot of resonance in these books.
Also, I should mention that although sex and lovers are frequently mentioned in the books, Clayton never gets graphic about it. Moreover, some of these are homosexual pairings, and in Shadith’s trilogy, at least, many characters are asexual or aromantic, from several dedicated career women to some plant people who reproduce themselves through budding.
I do adore the variety of characters throughout Clayton’s work. Point of view shifts a lot throughout the later Diadem books, so we see many events and situations through other people’s eyes. Maeve starts out from the POV of Gwynnor, a furry, pointy-eared forest dweller who is disturbed by the fire-haired human woman who smells funny, but he works with her to stop the corporate tree-fellers. Ghosthunt is largely told through the perspective of an oppressed woman who sees Aleyts as a possible catalyst for an uprising. Shadith’s trilogy encounters lots of fascinating aliens, from the catlike Dyslaera hunters and the lizard-poet Kikun to even stranger species.
But what’s really great is the individuality of these characters. Lots of people have their own complex desires, connections, and goals, but Clayton is skilled at sketching personalities even for side characters with just a few words. The only ones who come close to cardboard are various guards, and the Omphalos cultists, but even though all the cultists encountered are sexist, exploitative, and evil, some are dedicated, curious scientists, and some are doing what they can to work within a flawed system. Some of the books get pretty deeply into antagonists’ perspectives although remaining clear about they evils they’re perpetrating.
The cultures of Clayton’s worlds are also fascinating. Her primitive worlds are quite distinct from each other. Galactic civilization has a lot of social tidepools and estuaries where people have their own ways of doing things. Clayton intersperses poems and songs through a lot of the later Diadem books, and especially the Shadith trilogy, that really make these imagined civilizations come alive.
[Kikun] knelt beside the dead man and sang a Going-home for him.
We drink from different rivers now
O stranger, O enemy
We always have.
Surprised from life
Your heartsoul dances on a dry plateau
Cries out to me: Why?
O stranger, O enemy,
I do not know.
Loudly your voice calls:
You sent me
Show me the way.
…
I hear you
O stranger, O enemy
My hands draw the double spiral
…
Run, then rest
O stranger, O enemy
Do not let anger snare your feet
Hold you from the blessed
Go quickly and do not remember your death
Or he who gave it unasked…
— from Shadowkill
Moreover, although I’ve mostly discussed the Diadem novels and spinoffs so far, these are by no means Clayton’s only books or series worth reading. In particular, the Duel of Sorcery fantasy trilogy has some really great moments and themes, including a mutant’s travails and tutelages in Moongather, proceeding with formerly free peoples struggling against an oppressive patriarchal theocracy that takes over very rapidly during Moonscatter. I really enjoyed a onetime traitor’s evolution into a priestess of an olden maiden-mother-crone goddess throughout this trilogy, and I was wowed by developments in the conclusion, Changer’s Moon.
The first two books in the trilogy are pretty pure fantasy. But in the conclusion, an odd god who sometimes calls himself Changer, sometimes Coyote, pays off a debt by allowing the beleaguered protagonists to pass through a Mirror into another world and recruit help. This world, or at least the country visited, is similarly under a religious and sociological crackdown, but in this case, it’s a technologically advanced, bureaucracy-led society, very similar to a dark near-future that many of us here can see looming now.
Clayton doesn’t specifically call this America, and there are plenty of other science fiction writers who have warned about the possibility of theocratic takeovers, but she writes very convincingly about the dreary disappearance of rights and pleasures as people wonder how to endure and when their breaking point will be. (One of Clayton’s viewpoint characters in Changer’s Moon is a social worker/educator/fiction writer driven to contemplate criminality when her publisher stops printing her books during the crackdown, and she can’t pay for cancer treatments, which feels terribly prescient for a 1985 book.)
Sometimes the breaking point is in choosing to submit and be crushed, but sometimes one can make the choice to turn from endurance and small resistance to outright rebellion. Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get an outside helping hand for that, but nothing like that will make a difference until people decide that enough is enough and band together and fight for a better life.
As a different character, ex-Professor Braddock, tells other rebels pondering whether to surrender or keep resisting:
“When they leaned on me, told me what I had to teach and how I had to teach it, I sputtered a bit, they leaned harder, I caved in… I remind you, I didn’t fight them, I didn’t do more than protest very mildly, at the beginning. Kept my mouth shut, did what I was told like a good boy. And still they kept after me, never trusting me a minute, just looking for an excuse to haul me in for interrogation… This last time, though, it wasn’t questions and a few slaps, it was cattle prods and purges, and wanting to know about friends of mine… They’ll question you about things so crazy you can’t believe they’re serious… They’ll come back at you again and again until you’re crazy or dead. No matter what happens here, I’m not going back alive.”
He actually reminded me quite a bit, in my most recent reread, of Arton Daghdev in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, one of the Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel this year, although his fate was rather different.
I’ve written before, for instance in my review of Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer, about growing numbers of creatives writing, composing, and creating art these days that warns against growing corporate control over workers and culture in general. But it’s worth revisiting writers from a few decades ago, who did an excellent job of portraying the rich tapestry of cultural possibilities, the value of individuality, and the importance of resisting oppressive hegemony, whether capitalistic, theocratic, or some combination of totalitarian features. Far from discovering that her books have been visited by the suck fairy in the intervening decades since she wrote, I have been excited to realize Jo Clayton’s novels are even deeper, richer, and more rewarding now than I had realized at the time. These books are engaging, with interesting plots and sympathetic characters, and they also have some fairly serious things to say about who gets to control society. I strongly recommend checking out her work.
