Spiderlight

A truly delightful thing in the form of Spiderlight, Adrian Tchaikovsky's very sharp, very funny take on epic fantasy. In the best traditions of the genre a party of adventurers, all stalwart adherents of the Light, have been given a prophesy which reveals how they can kill the Dark Lord and defeat his armies of non-humans.

The story opens with the party — Lief the thief, Penthos the mage, Dion the cleric, Harathes the fighter, and Cyrene the ranger — deep in the spider-haunted woods. Here they do a deal with the mother spider, obtaining one of her fangs and one of her children to act as a guide, in exchange for Penthos not burning everything in sight. Because, while he may be a miserable failure of a human being, Penthos is, first and foremost, brilliant at setting things on fire.

Realising that their spider guide is likely to attract unwanted attention on the road, Penthos offers to transform it into something a bit more human. He succeeds, but only partially, turning Nth into something only slightly less disturbing than his original form. Accompanied by the poor creature who has no say in his transformation and who finds himself treated like a monster by those around him, the party set off in search of the secret path to the Dark Lord's tower.

Along they way they encounter the usual problems of adventurers on the road: minions of the Dark Lord; scheming priests; dodgy innkeepers; and handsome but clueless fighters. Gradually, the more open-minded members of the party come to know Nth better and start treating him as something like a friend. Obviously Harathes, being a monomanical racist, doesn't change much and Penthos is too self-obsessed, but the others gradually unbend, offering plenty of clues that there is something wrong with the simple-minded Manichaeism of Light versus Dark.

Spiderlight is both an affectionate homage to the dungeon crawling novel and sharply satirical take on The Lord of the Rings and its brethren. Thus via Lief, the most pragmatic member of the party, we get a funny monologue in which he attempts to estimate how many people live in the Dark Lord's tower based on how long the process of slopping out takes and a frank assessment of why it might be impractical for a force of any size to be encamped around any fortress set in a Mordor-like dry and blasted landscape.

Tchaikovsky takes the morality of his book deeply seriously, deconstructing the casually immoral behaviour of typical fantasy hero and replacing it with something far more subtle. Nth's treatment forms the ethical centrepiece of the book. His transformation, in which he has no say, twists him out of all recognition, changing both his mind and his body from a simple, happy spider, into something his new companions casually consider so monstrous they refuse to use any pronoun other than it to refer to him. Further, he finds himself bound with a — characteristically slapdash — geas courtesy of Penthos, which makes him suffer if he oversteps his bounds whilst also leaving the exact limits of those bounds unclear.

Nth, who sees things from a new and uncluttered perspective, also has problems with the group's attitude to killing people. He sees the blatant race-and-speciesism of casually slaughtering creatures of the Dark — creatures just like him — whilst choosing to allow its human adherents to live. And he remembers the spider he used to be and nothing in his old life seems as bad as the humans, the Light, who seem quite happy to squabble and fight and torture and kill each other — Harathes, a Church Knight, even tries to con a priest into marrying him to Cyrene, who has made it abundantly clear that she positively loathes him.

And while the conclusion may over-egg the pudding somewhat — there's a great deal of grandstanding from the Dark Lord — the ending fits with what has gone before and the final note offers some hope for Nth and his friends — who still don't include the unpleasant Harathes — and for the rest of their lives.

Very highly recommended.