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Title | The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
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Author | Kai Ashante Wilson
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Tor.com - 2015
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First Printing | Tor.com - 2015
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Title | A Taste of Honey
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Author | Kai Ashante Wilson
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Tor.com - 2016
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First Printing | Tor.com - 2016
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Category | Fantasy/SF
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Demane, The Captain, Aqib bgm Sadiqi, Lucrio
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Main Elements | Gods, sorcerers
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Website | ---
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 The Sorcerer of Wildeeps
Since leaving his homeland, the earthbound demigod Demane has been labeled a sorcerer. With his ancestors' artifacts in hand, the Sorcerer follows the Captain, a beautiful man with song for a voice and hair that drinks the sunlight.
The two of them are the descendants of the gods who abandoned the Earth for Heaven, and they will need all the gifts those divine ancestors left to them to keep their caravan brothers alive.
The one safe road between the northern oasis and southern kingdom is stalked by a necromantic terror. Demane may have to master his wild powers and trade humanity for godhood if he is to keep his brothers and his beloved captain alive.
A Taste of Honey
Long after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public services, the divinity seeks arcane assistance among the local gods.
Aqib bgm Sadiqi, fourth-cousin to the royal family and son of the Master of Beasts, has more mortal and pressing concerns. His heart has been captured for the first time by a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio. In defiance of Saintly Canon, gossiping servants, and the furious disapproval of his father and brother, Aqib finds himself swept up in a whirlwind romance. But neither Aqib nor Lucrio know whether their love can survive all the hardships the world has to throw at them.
I read these two novellas nearly a year apart, and I have to thank Tor.com from making them available for free.
The first one was the more challenging to read, you had to figure out where you are in the world. Now I knew the author was writing a black LGBTQ tale, so locating them in Africa wasn't too hard, but when in time, or a completely alternate version of our world? After all we have a sorcerer, capable of magic that both earns the respect and the fear of the other men hired to protect the caravan. But what is the source of the magic? Ah, that's where you run into Clake, where any advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. Seems he's from a bloodline of people who have evolved beyond our normal human form and have developped powers, but it's all about genetics. Thus I'll suggest we're in the future, while at the same time technologically, the regular people live in the past. The advanced humans appear to have space stations, while the rest still travel by beast of burden. But the world is just the backdrop to highlight a tale of two men, in love but who cannot be public about it, and their responsibilities will force them apart. This one wasn't so much a romance as a SF/Fantasy adventure with an inter-dimensional beast that attacks the group and can only be destroyed at great cost.
In the second we start with a Dalucian soldier (for what I can gather, he's essentially Roman), and a young man named Aquib. For ten days they fall in forbidden love. While the Dalucians accept male pairings (you couldn't marry, but the elder could adopt the younger...kinda icky in a way but was understood the relationship was one equivalent to marriage and not father/son...after all historically Ancient Romans didn't approve of homosexuality either), this is not accepted by Aquib's religion. Also he has responsibilities to his family, to marry higher up the hierarchy. And thus the boy must decide, between the love of his man, or the love of his family. We jump back and forth between the those ten days of his affair, and his lifetime lived after after he made his choice. Thus in contrast to the first novella, this is a character tale, no great adventures (Aquib is no warrior, though he has skills with animals), but one that makes you think about paths taken, and those that are not, what might have been.
And Wilson doesn't just give a little twist to the lives of his male characters, females get a little change in their position in society too. While men still seemed to run the society, men don't learn to read, those little doodles on paper was "women work". As were things like mathematics. Being a female computer engineer that gave me a smile. It was fun having the women talk about advanced physics and the men going around saying "tikky" instead of "telekinetics".
Thus it was challenging when deciding how to categorize these two tales. I put them under Gods, Angels and Demons, since there are divine bloodlines at play. But those divinities are really just advanced genetics, so it went under Science Fiction as well, and then finally, we have people with what appear to be magical powers too, so Wizards it is! And if anything I love these tales more because of this confusion, as it makes you think not only about the relationships portrayed but even the labels we apply to the books we read. I hope there will be more tales set in this world. They do not need to, nor should they, touch on either of these, but I'd love to learn a bit more about version of reality.
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