Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Kicked out of his home in the Domes, Edor finds himself squatting on abandoned land, taking it on as his own and trying to eke out a meager living from the infertile soil. When his closest neighbor, Varas, offers to trade his hard-earned crop for him in the town several weeks’ walk away, Edor takes the man up on it.

Months later, when Varas still has not returned, Edor has given his hopes of getting seed for a winter crop and a beast of burden. In fact, he’s just decided that Varas has cheated him when the man returns, two slaves meant to be Edor’s in tow.

Edor frees the slaves as soon as Varas leaves, but to his surprise, the men stay with him and change his life and his land in ways Edor could never have dreamed.

BOOK REVIEW:
I have long been a fan of short science fiction, going all the way back to Omni magazine in the late 1970s; many of the authors of those stories are now considered the masters of the genre.

Lee Benoit's "Servant of the Seasons I: Autumn" quickly brought to mind the experience of reading the best of those short works and is easily on par with the introspective writing of Ursula LeGuin. The story is a masterful short work about a man's struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic future. Benoit carefully places each piece of the tale together, and it is as if the reader is treated to the fascinating image on a slowly growing jig-saw puzzle.

Through the eyes of the protagonist, Edor, we catch a glimpse of the world as it is in this bleak future, desolate and unforgiving, and we see that civilization ~ or what's left of it ~ has retreated into domes for protection. Edor has been thrown out to fend for himself, and barely survives by trying to cultivate the fields at an abandoned homestead. When he makes a deal with his questionable neighbor, sending the man to sell some of his beans for a draft beast, the man instead returns with two slaves, Tywyll and Lys.

Unable to continue without the help, Edor takes the two men on as workers, rather than slaves, and the story goes from there to tell the things that Edor learns about them, about the world, and about himself.

The story is bleak but optimistic, and the gradual changes in both Edor and the landscape around him are beautiful to perceive. The subtly different nature of Tywyll and Lys ~ their close relationship, their slow seasonal changes, and their seeming ability to speak directly with nature ~ brings wonder and hope and a touch of mysticism to the story.

I found myself very impressed and looking forward to the future "Seasons" installments. Lee Benoit has provided numerous hints of more wonders to come.

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