Review: The Book of Gems, by Fran Wilde

Review: The Book of Gems, by Fran Wilde

by Rich Horton

This is the third in a series of novellas from Tor.com set in Fran Wilde's Gem continuity. The three books are widely separated in time -- The Jewel and Her Lapidary (2016) concerns the fall of a kingdom controlled by royals who manage the power of magical jewels, and their "lapidaries", who protect their linked royals from falling prey to the danger of the jewels. The Fire Opal Mechanism (2019) is set much later, when the jewels and their powers are myths, and a couple of people are battling to save independent knowledge from a sort of press that devours and summarizes books, creating a sort of mishmash of all the knowledge. 

The Book of Gems (2023) is set a while later. Dev Brunai studies the stories about jewels, and the fragments of The Book of Gems that survive, and works on making synthetic jewels that can do some minor things, but have nothing like the power of natural gems. Dev aspires to be admitted to the Society that controls gem research. But now she has realized that her mentor, Dr. Netherby, has stolen her very promising research and gone away to the valley located where the old jewel kingdom had been. There is an archaeological dig there, and they have unearthed the old Palace. But Netherby has disappeared. Without the Society's approval, Dev -- who is actually descended from people living in this valley -- heads out to try to track down Netherby, with the hopes of finding out anything he has learned, and advancing her own research as well.

Once there, she realizes that Lurai, the woman running the inn she stays at, is actually her cousin. And, with some reluctance, Dev and Lurai sneak out to the location of the dig, finding a hidden way into the Palace. This is fraught for both of them, because their goals are not quite the same, and their perceptions of the reality behind the jewels are different -- Dev with a more scientific view, Lurai with a more magical view (to a gross approximation.) But both are severely affected by the latent power of the buried gems. And what they find in this Palace points to a dangerous but important new understanding of the jewels, of the mysterious Prince of Gems, and what direction their world must go to accommodate the jewels' power but control it.

This is a nicely written book, and in many ways it is doing what I hoped to see after The Jewel and her Lapidary. I had found The Fire Opal Mechanism an unanticipated sidestep into an oddly more science fictional world. The Books of Gems seems on the road to resolving this conflict -- to creating a wholly understood sort of Science Fantasy milieu. I was involved in Dev and Lurai's story, and I found the questions (stated and implied) to by worthwhile. Having said that, I feel like the three novellas are incomplete in a sense, and what I really want is more -- more backstory, and more filling in of the real way the gems operate, and of how they (and such tools as the tem-powered escritoire they use for communication) are seen "scientifically", as it were. In a way perhaps this threatens the mystery some fantasy generates, I admit. I don't know if Wilde plans more stories in this sequence (there are already a couple of related short stories), or if she plans to write a full-length novel -- and I don't want to set her any assignments! But I imagine a rather grand novel, incorporating and expanding on what we already have, might really be something. In the interim -- or perhaps forever! -- these are some fine novellas set in a quite original universe.