*Note: this review contains material not suitable for minors.
On the planet Quarn, Dinun is a young man who makes his living foraging outside of his settlement for things he can bring back to his village and barter or use, such as doem skin, rejer hides, talin wood, and his fossaker’s specialty, gemstones. The story opens with a domestic scene, and it appears that Dinun has a wife and three children. We learn soon enough that Dinun is the only openly gay man (“invert”) in his settlement of Getake (he knows first hand –literally — that several of the local men prefer invert sex), but that his government makes the idea of having little “tax reliefs” so enticing that he has an arrangement with their mother.
As he forages, Dinun comes upon a wounded Angel, whom he calls Moon.
Angels have no speech, but communicate via telepathy. This makes the reading slightly awkward, as Somerville uses italics surrounded by double colons to communicate emotions and italics with quotation marks to communicate words:
“Yes. You. Mind. Take. Slow.” ::Tired. Pain.::
Angels are a silvery, furred, winged, very tall and very lightweight species whose existence on Quarn predates Dinun’s people, who colonized Quarn after things went badly on Earth. The first colonizers had been a bit obsessed with Angels, and geneticists had mixed the two species using technology since banned and knowledge long since lost. (there seems to have been a second kind of apocalypse on Quarn, since Dinun makes reference to a space station which has been dormant for 200 years). Dinun and his people are descendants of these experiments. But in general, Angles keep to themselves, preferring to avoid encounters with other species. Dinun had never seen one before meeting Moon.
Angels have a reputation for perfection and for bewitching nonAngels, and Moon is immediately besotted.
Dinun learns that full-blooded humans have attacked Moon and his people, killing a few and stealing several of their young. This presents a mystery, as there are not supposed to be any full-blooded humans on the planet.
As Dinun helps Moon heal and escorts him back to his people, he begins to fall in love with him. Angels are quite free with their affections and their bodies, and view sex as a natural and joyful part of life. Moon and Dinun have maybe three fairly brief but explicit sexual encounters, which tend to do less to move the relationship forward, given the matter of factness with which Moon approaches them, than to serve to give Dinun his first open and positive sexual experiences.
On Wings, Rising is definitely a romance, so things end up ok for the Angels, and the couple ends up together. This is not a high conflict book, as Dinun and Moon are very good people who care for each other. The drama is created mainly by the external threat and disagreements as to how to handle it, and also by their cultural differences.
For example, at one point Moon begins to slice flesh from the face of a dead human to eat. The argument Moon and Dinun have about this raises hard questions about what makes the difference between prey and a victim. Why shouldn’t the Angels eat a dead human, when he has tried to kill them, and when their own supply of food is so unpredictable? Dinun’s people need less of an excuse than that to eat other species.
I liked it that the Angels were so different from humans. While I really enjoy other series, like Meljean Brook’s Guardians, in which some characters have wings, they are basically humans with wings that appear when needed. In contrast, Somerville creates a totally alien being in Moon, not just in physical appearance, but in language, culture, and even gender:
With his belly exposed, Moon used his hand to separate folds of skin Dinun hadn’t noticed before in his panic to stop the Angel bleeding to death. The folds covered bare. pink skin, forming a pouch. The pouch had small protuberances that might be nipples on the inner surface.
…
Angel fathers spent a whole year secluded with their infants, the first three months or so fasting and in mental communion with their baby.
Baby Angels would bond after their first year with their mothers, although I am not in general sure how important women are to the Angels’ culture.
I was very intrigued by the worldbuilding, which I felt was done with amazing thoroughness and speed in this short book. Somerville paints a very compelling picture of a complex history across multiple species and planets, and of two very different cultures. I wanted spend more time there, and am happy to know there is another book in the Encounters series, Reaching Higher.
The Angels are a kind of primitive people. They live in leather tents, they don’t even have wheels, never mind weapons or other sophisticated tools. Although they are called by words for things in nature with positive connotations such as “Flower” or “Cloud” (no “Fungus” or “Turd”), Somerville doesn’t make them noble savages (they get irritated, for example). But the innocent vibe was definitely there, helped along by the fact that they were angels. Angels may refer merely to another species in the world of Quarn, but the word has unmistakable connotations of goodness, indeed purity, for most readers.
Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps my own personal inability to find the idea of sex with furred creatures hot (shit. I am anti-wing.), I found myself drawn to this book more as Dinun’s story than as a romance. I loved this character, who is tested and grows so much in the pages of this book, as the Angels place him in a quasi-leadership role. Dinun’s sexual preferences may have made him an outcast, but he eventually has to admit that his solitary career as a forager and his distant relations with others also partly reflect his own reluctance to commit fully to his own life.
