The Curve of the World – Vonda N. McIntyre

I bought “The Curve of the World” because McIntyre wrote a science-fiction/fantasy blend I admired. The book was well crafted, but it was more guided tour than story.

The setting is an alternate history, not in the common sense of the world being different because some events turned out differently, but in the sense that it’s a different history inspired by ours. There is no way to ‘date’ the story coherently, but it is basically iron age - call it 500 BC - with some elements from a millennium earlier and some from a millennium later. (The blurb says ‘bronze age’, but iron knives, iron nails, and what may have been a Thera eruption about a millenium earlier.)

The main characters are from Crete. (We are never told that they are from Crete, but mediterranean, double-headed axes, dancing with bulls…) Crete has, or is part of, a significant trade network, and it has a custom of exchanging fosterlings with other lands. When fosterlings grow up, they decide which land to call home. ‘Curve’ is the story of a voyage to return a fosterling (he is actually a rescued child, but he has the status of a fosterling) to his home. He only barely remembers his home but, from what he remembers, the reader will recognize it as being in the Pacific Northwest. So it’s an extremely-ambitious voyage.

The voyage is a guided tour of sexual politics and polities, more than of other civilizations. Crete is matriarchal to the point where it is considered bad manners to speak of children’s fathers. We never see Egypt, but we are told that the Pharaoh is female. ‘The People’ are mostly female, and foster out most of their boy children. The northern pirates are at the far end of the women-are-chattel spectrum.