Red Waters Rising – Laura Anne Gilman

The Devil’s West, in an alternate America, occupies the middle of the continent: In the east, the United States stops at the Mississippi River. In the west, the Spanish territories are similar to Spanish holdings at their greatest historical extent in our world. Between - east of the Rockies, west of the Mississippi, and reaching into what we would call central Canada, is a region colloquially known as The Devil’s West. It’s not a country; there is no government. It is a territory whose inhabitants are subject to an Agreement. (Roughly speaking, inhabitants are bound to respect native rights and not to be generally harmful. We are not given details.)

The Agreement is overseen - and loosely enforced - by a possibly-supernatural person (?) who might actually be the Devil, for all we know. He has kept Spanish and US armies stay on their own side of the borders, and has been known to intervene personally in extreme emergencies. Normally, he does not intervene personally. He now has an enforcer - a sixteen-year-old named Isobel, who is very new at this. In the first two books she rides the territory with a mentor - learning the territory and dealing with major supernatural problems.

In “Red Waters Rising”, Gilman tackles a much-harder writing challenge: The problem Isobel needs to address cannot be ‘solved’. It is social, political, and messy. Spain and the United States will keep pressing because to them TDW looks like frontier territory going to waste. There are plenty of people near both borders who would like to be part of something large and glittering, rather than part of a messy semi-anarchy. And the Agreement turns out to be more fragile than the first two books made it appear.

Gilman meets the writing challenge well, but not brilliantly. Hard social problems don’t get solved, so much as ameliorated - and that’s not as satisfying to read about.