In 2010, authors Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell released two intertwined novellas, “The Alchemist” and “The Executioness”. This February, Saga Press re-released both of those novellas along with two brand new stories in the collection The Tangled Lands.
All four of these stories are set in the city of Khaim, last remnant of a legendary empire. It’s a land where anyone can perform magic. And every spell kills the world just a little bit more.
Bacigalupi is the author of The Windup Girl (set in a far-future Earth affected by rising sea levels and genetically tampered crops) and The Water Knife (set in a not that distant future that’s slowly dying from worldwide water shortages), so it’s no surprise that The Tangled Lands involves an environmental disaster, although this one is in a fantasy setting.
The city of Jhandpara and most of the magical empire it commanded are both long gone, but everyone is still feeling their effects today. It isn’t ever explicitly stated, but magic seems to have acted like a virus or other pathogen, triggering an immune response in the planet itself.
The result is the bramble.
Bramble vines are attracted to magic, and magical spells cause them to sprout and grow faster. The bramble vines are poisonous to the touch, causing paralysis and eventually death, and they can only be killed with fire. Entire villages will work from sunrise to sunset burning back the bramble (making sure to collect and destroy the seeds that the vines spit out when they’re burned), but they lose ground every day. More and more refugees arrive in Khaim, fleeing the vines that have swallowed their homes, and the use of magic is banned to try to slow down the spread of the brambles.
This becomes a rather large problem. Magic is easy, it’s practiced across the world, and in many cases it’s necessary. Sure, magic users can do big flamboyant things like making literal castles in the sky, or minor everyday things like casting a spell to find a lost piece of paper. But then you would have mothers being able to use magic to cure a birth defect, or famers casting a spell to keep a disease from killing all their livestock. No one admits that they’re using magic, but everyone does it, and everyone knows that a spell causes a bramble to sprout somewhere, not necessarily nearby.
Saving the world involves everyone deciding to do the right thing, which simply can’t happen if everyone suspects that someone else out there…isn’t. Use magic and the brambles will grow, or don’t use magic and the brambles will still grow, and you can watch your neighbors and your rulers get to reap all the benefits of magic that you’re turning down. It’s an impossible choice, and that’s what the stories are mostly about, people having to make impossible choices while knowing that all the options are bad.
The bramble wall marches ever closer, and cares not at all what intentions I have when I use magic. It only cares that there is magic to feed upon.
“The Alchemist” introduces us to this world, and it’s definitely my favorite in the collection. Jeoz has had to watch his fortune dwindle away while he tries to find an alchemic way to destroy bramble so people can use magic again (and not coincidentally so he can use magic to cure his six-year-old daughter’s wasting disease without breaking the law). By some miracle he actually manages to find what he’s been looking for, and he takes the method to Khaim’s mayor and the powerful Majister who’s the only person legally allowed to use magic. I knew as soon as Jeoz marched into the Mayor’s office that this was going to go badly (there are always powerful people who benefit from the status quo, no matter how bad it is), but I thought his invention was just going to be destroyed. I didn’t imagine how Jeoz’s invention was going to be twisted.
The rest of the stories build off of this beginning. “The Executioness” features a middle-aged mother who’s already having the worst day of her life, and then her home is destroyed and she has to set off into the bramble-filled wilderness to try to rescue her children. We then jump several years into the future to “The Children of Khaim”, told from the point of view of two refugee children who get to see first hand how people take advantage of the worst effects of bramble poisoning. The collection finishes with “The Blacksmith’s Daughter”, where a family of blacksmiths tries to survive in a civilization where the wealthy have the power to make impossible demands and then punish people for not delivering.
Bacigalupi and Buckell have different writing styles which balance and compliment each other in this shared world. Bacigalupi focuses on the bramble, its makeup, its effects, and all the unique ways that this environmental disaster is affecting society. Buckell focuses more on the characters and how they deal with what’s going on around them, with the brambles acting more as a setting and a plot device, something that could be substituted with a plague or an invasion of monsters. Bacigalupi’s characters spend a lot of time dwelling on everything they used to have and all the lovely things their wealth could do for them. Buckell’s characters have always been poor – or close to it – and he writes transformation stories where ordinary people have to change into something they hardly recognize in order to survive.
But no matter who’s writing them, all four stories are amazingly dark.
As horrifying it is to have an entire civilization about to be killed by a plant, the very worst things that happen to everyone are because of the horrible things that fellow human beings do to each other. This is especially true for “The 
Blacksmith’s Daughter”, where a completely powerless individual is holding on by her fingernails to something, anything, that will help her rescue her family in a situation where running for your life with nothing into a lethal wilderness is actually the smart choice. Bad things happen, and then happen again, and just when you think things can’t get worse suddenly the main character is getting beaten half to death by a snot-nosed nobleman she’s not even allowed to question, much less hit back.
We’ve only gotten the smallest taste of this world with these four stories, leaving the door open for Bacigalupi and Buckell to add more and possibly invite other authors to contribute. I’m not gonna lie though, it’ll take a while before I can psyche myself up to dive back into this. It’s a little tough to wade though something as relentlessly grim as these stories are, and that’s even without all the parallels I can draw between this world and ours, and the ways I can imagine society transforming if we start to run out of living space. Or water. Or breathable air.
The lovely cover art is done by artist Krzysztof Domaradzki.