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Windhaven: A Novel Paperback – October 16, 2012
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“Told with a true storyteller’s voice: clear, singing, persuasive, and wonderfully moving . . . a truly wonderful book.”—Jane Yolen
From #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and acclaimed author Lisa Tuttle comes a timeless tale that brilliantly renders the struggle between the ironbound world of tradition and a rebellious soul seeking to prove the power of a dream.
Among the scattered islands that make up the water world of Windhaven, no one holds more prestige than the silver-winged flyers, romantic figures who cross treacherous oceans, braving shifting winds and sudden storms, to bring news, gossip, songs, and stories to a waiting populace. Maris of Amberly, a fisherman’s daughter, wants nothing more than to soar on the currents high above Windhaven. So she challenges tradition, demanding that flyers be chosen by merit rather than inheritance. But even after winning that bitter battle, Maris finds that her troubles are only beginning. Now a revolution threatens to destroy the world she fought so hard to join—and force her to make the ultimate sacrifice.
“Martin and Tuttle make wonderful professional music together . . . shifting easily from moments of almost unbearable tension to others of sheer poetry and exhilaration.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“A powerful flight of the imagination . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.”—Roger Zelazny
“It’s romance. It’s science fiction. It’s beautiful.”—A. E. van Vogt
“I didn’t mean to stay up all night to finish Windhaven, but I had to!”—Anne McCaffrey
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateOctober 16, 2012
- Dimensions6.13 x 0.77 x 9.18 inches
- ISBN-100345535499
- ISBN-13978-0345535498
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A powerful flight of the imagination ... wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence."—Roger Zelazny
"Told with a true storyteller's voice: clear, singing, persuasive, and wonderfully moving. They have made a mythic land and peopled it with unforgettable characters. It is a book for adults and children who have dreamed of flying with their own wings, and for story listeners of all ages for whom dreams are as potent as realities. A truly wonderful book."—Jane Yolen
"It's a romance. It's science fantasy. It's beautiful."—A.E. van Vogt
"The pace never slackens, shifting easily from moments of almost unbearable tension to others of sheer poetry and exhilaration. Martin and Tuttle make wonderful professional music together."
-- Fort Worth Star-Telegram
For George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones:
"Grabs hold and won't let go. It's brilliant."-- Robert Jordan
"A grand feast and pageant: George R. R. Martin has unveiled for us an intensely realized, romantic but realistic world."-- Chicago Sun-Times
A Clash of Kings:
"Destined to be one of the best fantasy series ever written."-- The Denver Post
"Rivals T. H. White's The Once and Future King."-- The Des Moines Register
For Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend:
"A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire."-- Neil Gaiman
"Stunning. This novel shows us that what we hide from ourselves, and what we make up, may be more real than reality itself."-- Library Journal
Lost Futures:
"Lisa Tuttle's best fiction is like a slow settling of vast planes of thought and emotion -- luminous, quiet, wry and often bitter. The edges almost always admit other worlds, sometimes horrific, whose full import may be revealed, fully and skillfully, in a single, telling line."-- Kathleen Ann Goonan, The New York Review of Science Fiction
About the Author
Lisa Tuttle won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1974 and has since gone on to author numerous short stories and novels, including Lost Futures, which was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and The Pillow Friend. More recently she has written several books for children. Texas-born, she now lives with her husband and daughter in a remote area on the west coast of Scotland, where the scenery and weather are very similar to the seascapes of Windhaven.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
She flew better than she ever had before, twisting and gliding between the air currents without thought, catching each time the updraft or downwind that would carry her farther or faster. She made no wrong choices, was forced into no hasty scrambles above the leaping ocean; the tacking she did was all for joy. It would have been safer to fly high, like a child, up above the waves as far as she could climb, safe from her own mistakes. But Maris skimmed the sea, like a flyer, where a single dip, a brush of wing against water, meant a clumsy tumble from the sky. And death; you don't swim far when your wingspan is twenty feet.
Maris was daring, but she knew the winds.
Ahead she spied the neck of a scylla, a sinuous rope dark against the horizon. Almost without thinking, she responded. Her right hand pulled down on the leather wing grip, her left pushed up. She shifted the whole weight of her body. The great silver wings -- tissue thin and almost weightless, but immensely strong -- shifted with her, turning. One wingtip all but grazed the whitecaps snapping below, the other lifted; Maris caught the rising winds more fully, and began to climb.
Death, sky death, had been on her mind, but she would not end like that -- snapped from the air like an unwary gull, lunch for a hungry monster.
Minutes later she caught up to the scylla, and paused for a taunting circle just beyond its reach. From above she could see its body, barely beneath the waves, the rows of slick black flippers beating rhythmically. The tiny head, swaying slowly from side to side atop the long neck, ignored her. Perhaps it has known flyers, she thought then, and it does not like the taste.
The winds were colder now, and heavy with salt. The storm was gathering strength; she could feel a trembling in the air. Maris, exhilarated, soon left the scylla far behind. Then she was alone again, flying effortlessly, through an empty, darkening world of sea and sky where the only sound was the wind upon her wings.
In time, the island reared out of the sea: her destination. Sighing, sorry for the journey's end, Maris let herself descend.
Gina and Tor, two of the local land-bound -- Maris didn't know what they did when they weren't caring for visiting flyers -- were on duty out on the landing spit. She circled once above them to catch their attention. They rose from the soft sand and waved at her. The second time she came around they were ready. Maris dipped lower and lower, until her feet were just inches above the ground; Gina and Tor ran across the sand parallel to her, each beside a wing. Her toes brushed surface and she began to slow in a shower of sand.
Finally she stopped, lying prone on the cool, dry sand. She felt silly. A downed flyer is like a turtle on its back; she could get on her feet if she had to, but it was a difficult, undignified process. Still, it had been a good landing.
Gina and Tor began to fold up her wings, joint by foot-long joint. As each strut unlocked and folded back on the next segment, the tissue fabric between them went limp. When all the extensors were pulled in, the wings hung in two loose folds of drooping metal from the central axis strapped to Maris' back.
"We'd expected Coll," said Gina, as she folded back the final strut. Her short dark hair stood out in spikes around her face.
Maris shook her head. It should have been Coll's journey, perhaps, but she had been desperate, longing for the air. She'd taken the wings -- still her wings -- and gone before he was out of bed.
"He'll have flying enough after next week, I expect," Tor said cheerfully. There was still sand in his lank blond hair and he was shivering a little from the sea winds, but he smiled as he spoke. "All the flying he'll want." He stepped in front of Maris to help her unstrap the wings.
"I'll wear them," Maris snapped at him, impatient, angered by his casual words. How could he understand? How could any of them understand? They were land-bound.
She started up the spit toward the lodge, Gina and Tor falling in beside her. There she took the usual refreshments and, standing before a huge open fire, allowed herself to be dried and warmed. The friendly questions she answered curtly, trying to be silent, trying not to think, This may be the last time. Because she was a flyer, they all respected her silence, though with disappointment. For the land-bound, the flyers were the most regular source of contact with the other islands. The seas, daily storm-lashed and infested with scyllas and seacats and other predators, were too dangerous for regular ship travel except among islands within the same local group. The flyers were the links, and the others looked to them for news, gossip, songs, stories, romance.
"The Landsman will be ready whenever you are rested," Gina said, touching Maris tentatively on the shoulder. Maris pulled away, thinking, Yes, to you it is enough to serve the flyers. You'd like a flyer husband, Coll perhaps when he's grown -- and you don't know what it means to me that Coll should be the flyer, and not I. But she said only, "I'm ready now. It was an easy flight. The winds did all the work."
Gina led her to another room, where the Landsman was waiting for her message. Like the first room, this was long and sparsely furnished, with a blazing fire crackling in a great stone hearth. The Landsman sat in a cushioned chair near the flames; he rose when Maris entered. Flyers were always greeted as equals, even on islands where the Landsmen were worshipped as gods and held godlike powers.
After the ritual greetings had been exchanged, Maris closed her eyes and let the message flow. She didn't know or care what she said. The words used her voice without troubling her conscious thought. Probably politics, she thought. Lately it had all been politics.
When the message ended, Maris opened her eyes and smiled at the Landsman -- perversely, on purpose, because he looked worried by her words. But he recovered quickly and returned her smile. "Thank you," he said, a little weakly. "You've done well."
She was invited to stay the night, but she refused. The storm might die by morning; besides, she liked night flying. Tor and Gina accompanied her outside and up the rocky path to the flyers' cliff. There were lanterns set in the stone every few feet, to make the twisting ascent safer at night.
Product details
- Publisher : Bantam (October 16, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345535499
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345535498
- Item Weight : 14.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 0.77 x 9.18 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #381,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,586 in Sword & Sorcery Fantasy (Books)
- #9,727 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
- #12,758 in Epic Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
George R.R. Martin is the globally bestselling author of many fine novels, including A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons, which together make up the series A Song of Ice and Fire, on which HBO based the world’s most-watched television series, Game of Thrones. Other works set in or about Westeros include The World of Ice and Fire, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. His science fiction novella Nightflyers has also been adapted as a television series; and he is the creator of the shared-world Wild Cards universe, working with the finest writers in the genre. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lisa Tuttle began publishing fantasy, horror and science fiction stories in the 1970s. Her first novel was WINDHAVEN, written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin. She was one of the founders of the original Turkey City writers' group (aka the Turkey City Neo-Pro Rodeo) along with Tom Reamy, Steven Utley, and Howard Waldrop. She has worked as a television critic and journalist, taught creative writing courses, and has written children's books and non-fiction in addition to continuing to write novels and short stories in the realm of the fantastic. Her stories have appeared in "best of the year" anthologies, and have won the John W. Campbell Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the International Horror Guild Award.
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Top reviews from the United States
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written ,of course and completely drew me into the plot. Enjoyed it very much and hardly put it down.
The "scrappers" won, but not without war and bloodshed. They cut apart the ships to fashion wings, and on that day the flyers were born. Because of the lack of base resources, it's not possible to make more metal for wings, only the supporting structures around them, but the material was nigh indestructible, and the story implies that its been around for thousands and thousands of years.
The first part/novella entitled "Storms" details Maris's struggles to literally earn her wings and the right to fly. Wings are passed down from flyer to offspring, which has created a hierarchy with the flyers (also) literally above whom they refer to as the "land bound." Russ, a flyer, takes interest in Maris one stormy day. Her father is long dead, and her mother thinks her a burden so has no compunctions about allowing the flyer to adopt her as his own. Since Russ has no children, he decides to train his adopted daughter as a flyer, which makes Maris's dreams of flight a reality...until him and his wife have a trueborn son. But though Coll sings like an angel, he can't fly like one. Maris is beyond any doubt the better flyer, but tradition dictates that the wings go with the blood. As stated in the blurb, Maris does manage to win that arduous fight, but not without loss, and not without destroying a tradition that has been held since the time of the star sailors of old.
The second part is called "One-Wing" and refers to the character of Val who bears the title, but it becomes something more. When Maris wins the right to fly, she opens it up for other non-flyers to compete against the elite flying families so that skill not birth determines who soars. It...seems like a theme is being explored in ASOIAF with that idea that the right to rule should be dictated by fitness and not blood. Those that win wings instead of being born to them become known as "one-wings" because many of the old flying families consider them "half a flyer" instead of whole. This originated from Val One-Wing who is actually a far better flyer than many of those born to it. Maris and him butt heads during the annual competition to see who will keep their wings and who will lose them, but several events including an extremely disturbing scene, which make Maris reconsider his position and realize that she may very well be the first one-wing.
The final part of the book is "Fallen," and the name is literally apt. Maris has to rebuild her life after a terrible accident, but she can no more escape that life than she can escape the truth of how she reshaped society.
While Windhaven was extremely compelling at the start with high stakes, it slowed down dramatically in the middle. It was oddly meta how the action rose and dipped like a flyer on the breeze and makes me wonder if Martin and Tuttle purposely made this so. I flew (sorry these puns are really easy to make) through the fist part because there was a great deal for the main character to lose: When one has known the sky to be without it would be the worst kind of hell, and indeed the initial quote captures this indelibly:
"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward; for there you have been, and there you long to return."
-Leonardo da Vinci
Though I have no wings, I have a soaring imagination and to lose that or be maimed in such a way to make it impossible breaks my heart in empathy. That did much to carry this story where characterizations weren't all that strong. Who's who in flyer families is a fairly important concept, but it was hard to keep track of who had flyer blood and who won the wings so worn. The middle of the second novella's slow down occurred since the impact on Maris herself was greatly lessened. It was more about what would happen to those not born to flight who wished for half a chance. Since the only character I was fully invested in was Maris (and Val a bit for his contrarian nature, disdain of born flyers, and flyer culture), it lowered the stakes. You know Maris will be fine because she's one of the best flyers in the world even if she is technically a one-wing. The final book heightened the tension once more, and that carried all the way to the epilogue and end. I suppose if you're going to have a a dip in the action, the middle is the best place for such an eddy.
I did enjoy the almost whimsical nature of the writing. Tuttle tempered Martin's sometimes overly raw and visceral description, though I'm a fan of that to be honest. I'm interested now in some of her solo works and did indeed add a few to my Goodreads list.
I would recommend this book. The concept is compelling and again shows Martin's skills at world building. In reading Tuttle's solo works, I hope to be able to weed out more of her contribution to the tale. It certainly has a different mien to it than Martin's grittiness laced with beautiful poignancy.
I technically gave this book 3.5 stars, but Amazon does not allow half-ratings...I suppose this is fitting especially here since trueborn flyers are disdainful of one-wings or half-flyers ;)
After reading what's so far been published of ASOIAF, I was afraid anything else I read of his would fall flat. I found, with infinite relief and excitement, that I was wrong. I even read The Dying Of The Light, which was one of his first, and very sci-fi, and ALSO extremely and thoroughly satisfying.
If you've gotten to this page, you are already a reader qualified to understand and appreciate this style of writing. While not challenging, or chalk full of metaphors etc, it is still a great book. It made its way in to my dreams at night, that's for sure.
If you're just looking for a fun read that'll make you stay up till 2am just for more, this is a good choice.
#book #bookreview #windhaven #georgerrmartin #scififantasy
Top reviews from other countries
As we follow Maris and her battle to continue to fly, we also learn of the original colonists and how they accidentally encountered Windhaven. The worldbuilding is excellent with wonderful descriptions of the storms that regularly sweep the planet and the air currents that generally keep the flyers in the sky – and occasionally fling them into the sea. It is a hard, dangerous life and flyers keep to themselves, forming close ties with each other, while despising those who are not able to fly.
A particular decision is made that overturns a tradition that has begun to cause problems – and in a less nuanced, clever book, we would get a variety of adventures involving talented flyer Maris and that would be that. However in this book, decisions have consequences that no one foresaw. The rest of the book continues to follow what befalls Maris, while also exploring the fallout from those decisions and how they impact upon the traditional way of life on Windhaven for both flyers and land-bound alike. I love the way this plays out and how the previous faultlines in society are not only heightened but previous prejudices are also strengthened.
This is a clever, thoughtful book that nonetheless also delivers an engrossing story full of adventure and incident, featuring a sympathetic and believable protagonist. Highly recommended for fans of quality colony adventure… quality fantasy… quality books, basically. Read it and you’ll see what I mean.
10/10
I loved the book. It has amazing characters. It has a great story, or three great stories to be accurate. It was a powerful book and really inspiring.