Is it a "Girly" Book?
I've been asked this question by a couple of readers who were just picking up the book. And it's an interesting question.

Is it primarily a romance? No. There's romance in it, but it's not about a courtship.

Is it about a woman? Yes. And it's about a woman who is not filling a male gender role in society. Gull is not a warrior princess. And that's one of the main points.



In the beginning, science fiction and fantasy didn't have many female characters, certainly not female viewpoint characters. Most of the female characters were The Girl. The Girl is the prize at the end of the story, Dejah Thoris continually in need of rescue by John Carter. Occasionally, there was a female Clue Fairy, a mysterious and inaccessable minor character whose function in the story is to give the heroes a clue, like Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings.

And sometimes there was The Warrior Princess. Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings is an excellent example of the archetype of the young, virgin, innocent woman who would rather be a man, and given her choice dresses as a man and steals a male gender role for herself.

Sometime in the early 1970s we began to see The Warrior Princess as the main character. From Mercedes Lackey's Talia to David Weber's Honor Harrington, The Warrior Princess came to the fore. It was clear from the beginning that she was special. The Warrior Princess is usually the only one. She's doing something that ordinary women don't do. She's gifted in ways that normal women aren't. She's psychic, she's chosen, she's the last heir -- in some way the rules that apply to other women in her culture don't apply to her. She does everything men can do and does it better. She's a master duellist, a crack assassin, a skilled strategist, etc.

The things she does are important because they're the things men do.

And usually her story ends one of two ways -- in her tragic death, or in her retirement from being a Warrior Princess. She "steps down" to an ordinary female role when she falls in love or when she has a child. And the story ends. Because after those events, what else is there to say about her?

The lives of "regular" women, women not living in a male gender role, are too unimportant to read about.

The Warrior Princess gave women my age (born in the 60s) a new way of looking at life. You didn't have to be The Girl. You could be The Warrior Princess instead. But as inspiring as that was, and as important as it remains, there are two big problems with that.

What if you don't fit the archetype? What if, by nature, you're simply not suited to the archetype? What if you don't want to fit into a male gender role? Does that mean everything you do in your life is going to be boring and unimportant?

Everyone gets old. The Warrior Princess is an archetype for the young, for the maiden, for the young woman starting out. What happens when you're fifty? Or sixty? No one can stay The Warrior Princess forever. Are you then ok with "diminishing?" What if you don't want to just throw in the towel?

I think it's important that our stories talk about the full range of human experience. Throughout human history important and interesting things have been done by people of both genders, playing a variety of gender roles. Our popular fiction chooses to focus on a few. Why not talk about Ruling Queens? About Sacred Whores, as Jacqueline Carey does in Kushiel's Dart? About the neglected male archetypes of The Priest and The Psychopomp?

In Black Ships, I've chosen to talk about the archetype of The Priestess. Dedicated to the Lady of the Dead as a child, nothing is more important to Gull than her faith. In fact, she's willing to sacrifice everything else in life for her faith, including the prospect of love or family. She is quite literally a mouthpiece for a goddess. Her "self" is submerged in her service to the divine.

This is an impulse I think quite a few young people understand. To belong to God, to submit to Spirit, however the words of their faith phrase it, it's a powerful archetype entirely different from The Warrior Maiden.

The thing Gull discovers, in the course of her lifetime's journey, is that the sacred is not necessarily separate from life, that she does not have to "go apart from the dance". It is from Kos, ordinary man that he is, that she hears what may be the most important thing she learns, "Be with us in our joy." Being a woman does not diminish her as a priestess. Loving human beings does not cleave her from the divine, but rather enhances her wisdom. Friends, family, children, and community are not weaknesses, and life grows richer with age.

Is it a Girly book? Yes, in that it focuses on a female protagonist and a female archetype who is not a Warrior Princess. There aren't a lot of sword fights and big battles. This isn't about that.

Black Ships is about the struggle of a people to survive, when there is no direct way to simply defeat their enemies. It begins with a people already defeated. And I think that struggle is anything but boring.