Birthday Review: Two Novels by Dorothy Heydt

Today is Dorothy Heydt's birthday. Dorothy was a regular on the wonderful Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.composition back in their glory days (late '90s, early 2000s). And she wrote two enjoyable novels. Here are my capsule looks at those two books.

Capsule Review of The Interior Life

The Interior Life is an odd fantasy published to seemingly no notice by Baen in 1990. I had never heard of it until I saw a rave review by Jo Walton on rec.arts.sf.written. It's by Katherine Blake, who turns out to be Dorothy J. Heydt, a regular rec.arts.sf.written poster. It is quite different and original, and very good, marred perhaps just a bit by a somewhat anti-climactic ending, with a bit too much pat character pairing off. The story is told on two tracks, as the protagonist, Sue, a midwestern housewife and mother of three, gets her life under control and becomes involved in her community, as well as helping her husband get a key promotion, all the while following a storyline in a fantasy world (of her invention? or a world to which she has some quasi-telepathic connection?).  In the fantasy world, the Lady Amalia follows her brother into the Darkness, which has been slowly engulfing their land for two centuries. She encounters the Lord of Darkness, and some of his slaves, and learns an important secret about the source of his power. The story leads up to a predictable but still well-handled and original confrontation between the literal forces of Light and Dark. Both base plots don't sound terribly fascinating in description (which I suspect is why the book was ignored), but the story is absorbing reading: largely for the background details: Sue's dinner parties and PTA meetings, the details of castle life and war preparation in Amalia's world. Oddly, I found myself more involved in Sue's mundane struggles than in Amalia's heroic efforts, though the latter are quite interesting.  Blake/Heydt also avoids over-obvious parallels between the two storylines.

Capsule Review of A Point of Honor

Dorothy J. Heydt's new novel is A Point of Honor.  Heydt is the author of an intriguing 1990 fantasyThe Interior Life, as by Katherine Blake), and also of a whole bunch of stories published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's magazine and anthologies. A Point of Honor takes "cyberspace" concepts in a sufficiently new direction to be worth it. The novel features Sir Mary de Courcy, a rather successful player of Chivalry, a virtual reality jousting game. After she wins a tournament, she accepts a virtual estate as forfeit from one of her foes, then she finds her real life threatened.  She hides out with one of the creators of the Virtual domain where her new estate is located, and they embark on a virtual quest to find out if there is anything fishy about the estate she has won which might justify the attacks on her. The story is exciting enough, and a good read, but it suffers from a couple of common flaws. The first is that, this being a virtual environment, the author doesn't hesitate to bend the rules outrageously in the favor of her protagonist: this is well-rationalized, but it does tend to reduce suspense a bit.  The second is that the solution to the mystery was unsatisfying: basically, the bad guy didn't seem to me to have -nearly- enough motivation to attempt murder repeatedly.