Oldies But Goodies
{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review
Windhaven by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle
by Karen S. Wiesner
Be aware that there may be spoilers in this review.
In an attempt to spend less money on books that so often I don't even enjoy, early in 2025, I figured out how to check out ebooks from the app my local library uses for this purpose. Using Libby for my library system, I can check out ebooks and audiobooks. Unfortunately, it's limited. A lot of the books I like to read aren't available on it. Incorporating audiobooks into my reading repertoire has been something I've been intending to do for years. I began by purchasing audio cds a few years ago, but that got expensive. The apps that offered free audiobooks are restricted. Unless you pay, your selection is little more than books in the public domain. The Libby app does have a decent amount of audiobooks available (though rarely immediately, requiring me to put holds and wait) that are more modern. I don't want to spend the money on audio cds nor audio services like Audible. So this was a valid solution.
Windhaven was the second audiobook I checked out on the library app. It's actually a sci-fi "fix-up" novel written by Martin and Tuttle, who became friends in 1973. Initially, it was three novellas: "The Storms of Windhaven" (1975), "One-Wing" (published in two parts in 1980), and "The Fall", which was specifically written for the expanded novel. The authors did a "fix-up", providing a prologue and an epilogue, when all three parts came together in one volume.
In this novel, the inhabitants on the fictional, stormy water planet of Windhaven are descendants of human space travelers. Crash-landing on Windhaven centuries before the events in the book, they've spread out and settled on the islands around their water world. Gliding rigs were made from spaceship wreckage to allow the inhabitants of the various islands to communicate with the rest of the world's population. As seems to be the case with these things, flyers in this setting have become pretty snobby and consider themselves superior to landsmen, as evidenced by the fact that only flyer families are allowed access to the "wings". In other words, no landsperson--however talented at flying--would be legally allowed to fly "professionally".
The main character is Maris, a young peasant girl, daughter of a fisherman, who wants more than anything else to be a flyer. When she grows up and is given access to wings through her stepfather, politics force her to give them up to her stepbrother Coll, who wants to be a singer, not a flyer. The politics of the world are set to change by these two siblings. The story details how they manage this, but the world doesn't necessarily become ideal even with changes.
Originally, two more books were planned, but the authors moved on and they didn't happen. I'm personally glad about that. I felt like these went on long enough. I learned about the term "fix-up novel" in the course of reading Windhaven and also learned the sad and disappointing lesson that a technically near-perfect story doesn't actually make it good. Windhaven is almost flawlessly written. It has everything it needs and nothing more. However, though it included everything I might want in a novel and there was nothing at first glance wrong with it, it also didn't really inspire me. I didn't hate the characters but also can't say I loved or even cared about them all that much. Their internal and external conflicts were well constructed, though not particularly compelling or unique. Overall, I wanted to know so many richer, vibrant details about the setting that could have made the book truly riveting, and much, much more about the original humans that came to the planet. To me, that would have been a more captivating tale instead of this one. I think Windhaven is more for readers who might find an "Amelia Earhart pioneer" tribute story mashed up with a science fiction landscape engrossing.
Karen Wiesner is an award-winning,
multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.
Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/
and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog
Find out more about her books and see her art
here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor
Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/
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