The Curve of the World is the last novel by the biologist and science fiction and fantasy writer Vonda N. McIntyre. As well as enjoying a long career as an influential SFF writer, winning Hugo and Nebula awards, she was a feminist organiser and activist within the SFF community and a pioneer in collective self-publishing online. She died in her hometown of Seattle in 2019, shortly before a new edition of her first novel, The Exile Waiting (1975), was published by me at Handheld Press. In 2022, the film The King’s Daughter, based on her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, starred Pierce Brosnan as Louis XIV encountering a race of aquatic humans. These “sea people” are recurring presences in McIntyre’s work, from her short stories “The Genius Freaks” (1973) and “The End’s Beginning” (1976) to one of her collaborations with her long-time friend Ursula Le Guin, “The Natural History and Extinction of the People of the Sea” (2008). The Curve of the World was a return to novel-length fiction, and while the sea people are almost invisible as active players, their legacy is crucial to the plot. They and this legacy are the sole fantasy elements in this novel. It is alternate history with a very light sprinkling of supernatural stardust.

In The Curve of the World, we encounter the Idaeans, a Minoan bull-dancing civilisation dominating trade routes and peace-keeping at the eastern end of the Sunset Sea, which we know as the Mediterranean. For those who need a time-anchor to keep themselves grounded, while this setting might be considered prehistoric it might also be early medieval. Writing exists but it is a technology for specialists, much like numeracy. In this world there is no trace of a Roman or Persian Empire, though Pharoah rules the Egyptians and is lazy about desilting the dangerously shallow sailing channel that in our timestream we have rebuilt as the Suez Canal. Moses, Christ, and Mohammed have not (yet?) appeared, and the Idaean worship of the Moon goddess seems to be one among several sophisticated placatory belief systems.

However, as Vonda says in the acknowledgements, “Do not try to match the Idaean timeline to ours because your head will explode.” Towards the end of the novel the protagonist Iakinthu, who holds the Idaean position of Gephyra (trade manager, chief negotiator, and political operator), mentions the conch-shell alarm system that was last used when a tsunami hit Knossos a thousand years ago. This might place the action of The Curve of the World at around the equivalent of 500 BCE in our timeline. However, we don’t know whether the “great wave” that Iakinthu speaks of is the same as the force of water thrown at Crete and the eastern Mediterranean by the immense eruption of Santorini in 1600 BCE. This is where our heads are at risk. Let’s move on to what we do know.

We can be sure that this period’s technology is Iron Age, using nothing that we don’t already know from archaeology. There is no gunpowder, no automated projectile weapons, no industrial metalsmithing. Sailing technology is well advanced, with clinker-built ships powered by large sails (which originated in the early fourth century CE in our timeline, but let’s not draw conclusions from that). Since it’s now considered that a full-size ship’s sail would take about a year to weave, that suggests the availability of a considerable labour economy, and indeed enslaving is a preoccupation in the plot, undertaken by, among others, black-sailed, leather-clad male barbarians. We don’t know how these antagonists navigate their ships, but their quarry, the Idaeans, have a secret. Iakinthu’s lover Aranthau, who captains her ship the Flying Fish, is descended from the sea people, and can read the routes and sense trouble ahead when he immerses himself in the deep. He can also, it turns out, negotiate, painfully, with sea monsters.

Iakinthu and her companions encounter a sea monster because they are on a voyage into the unknown. Iakinthu’s foster, or given, child Renthizu has reached manhood, and she has decided to return him to his mother so he can choose with which family he wants to live. On a trip to exchange other given children with the People (an allied tribe which I equate with the Bronze Age Scythians, or Amazons), the Flying Fish encounters its companion vessel the Dolphin in dire straits. It has been captured by the black-sailed barbarians, and its crew, their friends, have been murdered, their bodies pinned to the gunwales. The barbarians are overpowered by the crew of the Flying Fish, and after the violent battle a small and angry barbarian boy is rescued from the hold. He is recognised by Iakinthu’s given daughter Kilinkizu as her lost son, born to her in slavery. Iakinthu gives the boy a new name, Bdarde, bestowing it from her dear friend Bdarde-who-was, killed in the battle. But Bdarde-who-is proves livid to be given a woman’s name.

This is a matriarchal world. Pharoah is a woman. Among the People, for example, men’s activities are severely restricted and boy babies are kept for breeding and labouring only. In the more moderate Idaean culture, women are the decision-makers except where a man has special skills, such as in seafaring or languages. In Idaea, fatherhood is largely undiscussed and considered unimportant for a person’s place in society. Yet different cultures are intruding on the Idaean world. The black-sailed barbarians have a severely patriarchal and violent society in which women are slaves and work is strictly gendered. Bdarde-who-is has been brutalised and indoctrinated to scream obscenities at women and threaten their rape and torture by the crew of his father’s ships, when they come to get him. Since Kilinkizu cannot now relinquish her son again, and since she wants to keep her promise to return Renthizu to his unknown family, Iakinthu decides to stick to her plan. They will continue to sail across the Sunset Sea to the Horns of the Ocean (passing modern-day Gibraltar), and onward to the Sunset Country in the Untameable Ocean in the west.

This is an epic fantasy voyage from the cradle of human civilisation to the North American continent. The encounter with the sea monster is only one of Aranthau’s several painful discoveries that demonstrate his sea-people enhancements can be limited by natural forces. Likewise, the Idaeans’ revenge on the barbarians—and, let’s be clear about this, their kidnapping of the child they rename as Bdarde—brings trouble on their heads, no matter how pure their motivations and how sacred the bonds of mother and child.

I am not convinced by Kilinkizu’s recognition of the boy as her son, since her baby was taken from her, she says, at a day old. But this slight niggle demonstrates the problems with which the editors of The Curve of the World had to grapple. The draft of the novel was in its fifth iteration when Vonda died. In the foreword, Aqueduct’s publisher, the novelist L. Timmel Duchamp, describes the editing process that she and Nisi Shawl undertook with two other editors to get the text ready for publication. It’s not known how much patching and shaping they needed to do. I suspect that the “Knossos” mentioned above was a missed placeholder name in the text for the city named in the rest of the novel as Kunusu, in the Idaean heartland, one of many loose ends and undeveloped threads that presumably had to be left unfinished, since it wasn’t known what Vonda planned to do with them. The novel’s shape is fairly smooth, but it feels too long, with the truly powerful vitality of the first quarter diminishing through the remaining three quarters into a travelogue of strange peoples and natural wonders.

It is nonetheless a magnificent achievement. I first read The Curve of the World in three long sessions throughout one day. I could not put it down (well, I had to eat), because Vonda’s slow, deliberate worldbuilding is profoundly absorbing. Initially we assume that Iakinthu inhabits a perfect utopia for women, but the slow-burn hints about the repression of males in these cultures make the narrative feel genuinely urgent: After all, the volcano god is gendered male, and the cracks found each morning in the buildings are getting larger with every subtle earth tremor. Will the big one hit, and if so, when?

The imperative is to read on to find out what happens, and to discover what wonders Iakinthu and her companions will encounter next. But after the Nth dramatic encounter, the Mth strange wonder, and the Qth description of a communal meal or urgent sex (olive oil and red wine feature heavily in both), I was getting impatient. Travel is fine; wonders are wonderful, but if they don’t serve the plot, then why are they there?

There is certainly peril: The voyage past the erupting coastal volcano in what I think must be the Gulf of Mexico is a fantastic piece of writing, a superb reimagining of the effects of volcanic geology on frail sailing vessels. The threat of the barbarian ships who pursue the Flying Fish across the world is truly chilling, amped up by their echo, the irredeemably horrible child Bdarde-who-is. There is a tense period of forced fraternization with a people whose threat Vonda doesn’t need to spell out since we know what the Aztecs did with their captives’ hearts.

Vonda’s irrepressible love for devising alternate technologies seems to have been undimmed. I was charmed by the Idaeans’ vast, black water reservoir jars which squat on the roofs of their houses: so efficient, and so practical, and so civilised an indication of the desire for hot bath water. I was less convinced by the clever way of getting the Flying Fish across the neck of land currently occupied by the Panama Canal: This has the feel of a witty but impossible idea that Vonda refused to let go.

With so much olive oil being expended in bathing (strigils ahoy), eating, and giving as gifts (they carry a lot of gifts), I am also interested in the apparently infinite stowage capacity of the Flying Fish. The party meet a useful translator, whom they name Bridges Words, who can speak to them in this world’s universal trading language (a wise invention), and can somehow also speak all the languages they encounter up the west coast of North America. The point at which Bridges Words becomes Iakinthu’s personal Babel Fish was when I knew that Vonda had left the plot behind and was wholly focused on worldbuilding. And then the party meets two stranded Nipunu people, who wear kimono, who are called Genji and Murasaki. Really?

The Curve of the World begins as an intriguing and dramatic adventure and ends as a rather over-egged travelogue of wonders. It’s so sad that we won’t know any more about the Idaeans, or their extraordinary alternate world of cognate nations and civilisations. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey, even if I ultimately found myself regretful about some of its technical aspects.