Review: Skeen's Leap, by Jo Clayton

[Russ Allbery]

Skeen's Leap
by Jo Clayton

Series:    Skeen #1
Publisher: Open Road
Copyright: 1986
Printing:  2016
ISBN:      1-5040-3845-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     320

Skeen is a Rooner: a treasure hunter who finds (or steals) artifacts
from prior civilizations and sells them to collectors. She's been doing
it for decades and she's very good at her job. Good enough to own her
own ship. Not good enough to keep from being betrayed by her lover, who
stole her ship and abandoned her on a miserable planet with a long
history of being temporarily part of various alien empires until its
sun flares and wipes out all life for another round.

At the start, Skeen's Leap feels like a gritty space opera, something
from Traveller or a similar universe in which the characters try to
make a living in the interstices of sprawling and squabbling alien
civilizations. But, shortly into the book, Skeen hears rumors of an
ancient teleportation gate and is drawn through it into an entirely
different world. A world inhabited by the remnants of every
civilization that has fled Kildun Aalda during one of its solar flares,
alongside native (and hostile) shape-changers. A world in which each of
those civilizations have slowly lost their technology from breakdowns
and time, leaving a quasi-medieval and diverse world with some odd
technological spikes. And, of course, the gate won't let Skeen back
through.

This turns out not to be space opera at all. Skeen's Leap is pure sword
and sorcery, with technology substituted (mostly) in for the sorcery.

It's not just the setting: the structure of the book would be
comfortably at home in a Conan story. Skeen uses her darter pistol and
streetwise smarts to stumble into endless short encounters, most of
them adding another member to her growing party. She rescues a
shapeshifter who doesn't want to be rescued, befriends an adventuring
scholar seeking to map the world, steals from an alien mob boss,
attaches herself to four surplus brothers looking for something to do
in the world, and continues in that vein across the world by horse and
ship, searching for the first and near-extinct race of alien refugees
who are rumored to have the key to the gate. Along the way, she and her
companions occasionally tell stories. Hers are similar to her current
adventures, just with spaceships and seedy space stations instead of
ships and seedy ports.

Skeen's Leap is told in third person, but most of it is a very tight
third-person that barely distinguishes Skeen's rambling and sarcastic
thoughts from the narration. It's so very much in Skeen's own voice
that I had to check when writing this review whether it was
grammatically in first or third. The narrator does wander to other
characters occasionally, but Skeen is at the center of this book:
practical, avaricious, competent, life-hardened, observant, and always
a survivor. The voice takes a bit to get used to (although the lengthy
chapter titles in Skeen's voice are a delight from the very start), but
it grew on me. I suspect one's feeling about Skeen's voice will make or
break one's enjoyment of this book. I do wish she'd stop complaining
about her lost ship and the lover who betrayed her, though; an entire
book of that got a bit tiresome.

One subtle thing about this book that I found fascinating once I
noticed it is its embrace of the female gaze. In most novels, even with
female protagonists, descriptions of other characters use a default
male gaze, or at best a neutral one. Women are pretty or beautiful or
cute; men are described in more functional terms. Skeen's Leap is one
of the few SFF novels I've seen with a female gaze that lingers on the
attractiveness and shape of male bodies throughout, and occasionally
stands gender roles on their head. (The one person in the book who
might be Skeen's equal is a female ship captain with a similar
background.) It's an entertaining variation.

Despite the voice and the unapologetic female perspective, though, this
wasn't quite my thing. I picked up this book looking for a space opera,
so the episodic sword-and-sorcery plot structure didn't fit my mood. I
wanted deeper revelations and more complex world-building, but that's
not on the agenda for this book (although it might be in later books in
the series). This is pure adventure story, and by the end of the book
the episodes were blending together and it all felt too much the same.
It doesn't help that the book ends somewhat abruptly, at a milestone in
Skeen's quest but quite far from any conclusion.

If you're looking for sword and sorcery with some SF trappings and a
confident female protagonist, this isn't bad, but be warned that it
doesn't end so much as stop, and you'll need (at least) the next book
for the full story.

Followed by Skeen's Return.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-11-20

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>