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.