To be honest, I didn't know anyone was writing fantasy like this in the middle of the twentieth century. I read Fletcher Pratt's The Blue star because I've started collecting the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks, and this was the first volume published in that series, in 1969 (reprinted from a 1952 omnibus). The first interesting thing was that Lin Carter refers to 'what I call "epic fantasy"' in the introduction, writing several years before the publication of any of the books (other than Tolkien) likely to be mentioned in a discussion of that genre today, and gives a definition of it that remains serviceable for contemporary use. He specifically says that Pratt was a fan of such fiction, despite having died in 1956. Some historical rethinking might be on the agenda for me…

The world in which The Blue star is set is not very like those constructed by the later giants of epic fantasy. It is a pre-modern world, in which magic takes, to some degree, the place of science and technology. It's also clearly based on European culture. So far, so genre-affirming. But this is a world of complex social and cultural networks, many of whose assumptions might be unfamiliar to a modern reader—Lin Carter likens it to the early-modern Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that seems pretty apt. The characters are bound by webs of social obligation and political compulsion, unlike the wide-eyed proto-heroes of most epic fantasy, able to drop everything and go adventuring just as soon as monsters wipe out their village. Religious and cultural differences are major obstacles to travel, and each invented culture has its own carefully thought-through reasons to be suspicious of footloose strangers turning up with their own agendas. It's a very careful and detailed essay in the art of world-building, in contrast to the rather whimsical approach I had assumed was universal before Tolkien started taking the whole thing extremely seriously, and which is familiar to me from, e.g. Jack Vance or Robert E. Howard. There are very compelling social reasons for the characters to be the way that they are, and for all the things that they do.

It is also very explicitly and specifically a work of speculative fiction: the question 'what if, instead of X, we had Y?' is overtly expressed in a mercifully brief and entirely unnecessary framing narrative. This, again, keeps it away from the realms of whimsy—Pratt is rigorous in thinking through the consequences, and serious-minded in joining the dots between politics, religion and personal experience. The book is, in part, an exploration of gender. It's far from a radically feminist work, but Pratt seems pretty enlightened for his day (even if the interlocutors in his framing narrative do not). If women were inalienably possessed of an important aspect of material power, he asks, how would that affect gender politics? Not by a wholesale reversal, according to him, but more by a re-balancing. Women are the inheritors of property in his society, which gives them more power than in equivalent real-world societies, but it doesn't eliminate patriarchal power structures by any means.

The story shows a great deal of interest in what it would be like to be a woman in such a world, and his female protagonist's frustrations at always being subject to male sexual commodification are entirely believable. The characterisation generally is excellent, and contrasts starkly with the approach taken in most of the contemporary epic fantasy I've read. Nobody in this book is remotely heroic, and although the female protagonist comes off the best, she still has her flaws and weaknesses. The male protagonist she is paired off with (for reasons I won't go into because spoilers), is mostly well-intentioned, but he's a very confused and quite selfish young man. These two characters bounce from situation to situation, buffeted by forces beyond their comprehension or control. This narrative aesthetic, in which the protagonists' primary challenge is to unpick an obdurate complexity, put me in mind of Gene Wolfe, who I know to have been strongly influenced by writers of Pratt's era, particularly Jack Vance. Other aspects of Wolfe's writing also came to my mind—Pratt is a prose-stylist, a meticulous craftsperson, and I found his particular flavour of fantasy bygonese incredibly reminiscent of that which Wolfe deploys in The Book of the New Sun. He uses a lot of unfamiliar, archaic terminology, some of it in the form of French loan-words such as 'lazarette' or 'couvertine'. This is even more reminiscent of Wolfe; in fact, I first learned some of these words from reading Wolfe as a youth. It might read in quite a stilted manner to a contemporary audience, but for me it was a tactile, linguistic pleasure, particularly Pratt's idiosyncratic use of parenthesis.

This is quite a short book, with deliberately limited ambitions, which are realised with enormous aplomb. It's a simple story, jam-packed with ideas, and surprisingly sober in its approach, given how luridly commercial the genre was at the time. It's given me a lot to think about, and it makes me more interested than ever to excavate the history of fantasy fiction—a carpet which we often seem to roll up behind us as we walk, forgetting that we have any pre-1970s forebears other than Tolkien and Le Guin. Most importantly of all, I found it an incredibly enjoyable read.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edition of The Blue Star was published in 1969 with cover art by Ron Walotsky. Pratt wrote the novel in 1952, and it was the first work of adult fantasy revived by series editor, Lin Carter.

The story is set in a location somewhere like Europe, but with an alternate history, pre-industrial, before the invention of steam power. It reminded me of Le Guin’s fictional Central European state, Orsinia.

On the other hand, in Pratt’s world witches exist with genuine supernatural powers. Pratt’s original twist is that the husband of a witch gains a special ability when wearing his witch’s “blue star” gem, which gives the book its title. He can read the thoughts of people by looking in their eyes.

Essentially, the book is a love story between Rodvard and his witch, Lalette. Rodvard is involved with a revolutionary group; Lalette is fleeing prosecution for using witchcraft.

After presumably centuries of religious persecution, there are now few witches and blue stars. Rodvard’s ability to read minds is a valuable asset for the revolution.

Both Rodvard and Lalette are reasonably well developed characters, but flawed and unheroic. We can sympathize more with Lalette than Rodvard, as the two go through their trials. Indeed, Rodvard is an inconstant lover who has forced himself on Lalette at the outset. The book has a good collection of characters, all flawed in their various ways.

Pratt’s invention is unusual in its parallel alternate history—with witchcraft. I could imagine further stories in the same setting. The Blue Star was a worthy, though surprising, choice as the first volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Summaries of the plot suggest a conventional romance story with a fantasy backdrop, but there's a lot more going on than I expected. "What if Notes from the Underground were a fantasy of manners," how I felt reading it.

The framing device is a trio of academic type men imagining a secondary world where magic has been developed in place of gunpowder. The framing segments  position the story as artificial in the second degree; it is not to be taken solely as the preoccupations of the actual author but of those of the fictional imaginers as well.

The story is very reflective, but primarily from the perspective of its unlucky protagonists, which (especially given the framing device) does more to characterize them than to be Real Authorial Opinions about politics, religion and sex. That's good because these characters are not having a good time and there's a thorough misanthropy that colors their meditations. 

Theres very little expository infodumping, and what there is is usually in character and frustrated at one of the protagonists for being dense or failing to know something that they should already. This is a pretty early work in the scheme of secondary world fantasy, and yet it felt like it was doing a sendup of the, "as you well know," style of exposition that is cliche in that genre.

The treatment of sex deserves note; this is one of the least sexy stories I've read for the number of sex scenes it has. They genuinely don't seem to be written to titillate, but (like the political reflections) to characterize. Rodvard kind of sucks, but he doesn't want to suck, and watching him fuck up in his relationships with women is honestly an interesting way to explore that.

My main hesitation is the couple of, "no becomes yes in time for penetrative sex," moments. However, these are frankly realistic and effective characterization. I'll also give this romance from 1952 credit for actually being interested in giving us an explicit "yes," even if it's not clear that the scene would have stopped without it.

I don't have much to say about the book's politics, other than to say that despite portraying two (Amorosian and Sons of the New Day) distinctly flawed revolutions, it does seem like there's an effort not to conclude that revolution per se is always flawed. I'll take it, honestly.