Ryman, Geoff. The Unconquered Country. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994. [Currently out of print.]

Psychiatrist Dori Laub, writing about the difficulty of narrating events such as genocide, observes that "The horror of the historical experience . . . is, indeed, compelling not only in its reality, but even more so, in its flagrant distortion and subversion of reality." Little wonder, then, that many fantasy writers - practitioners of a genre often considered escapist, rather than realistic - have produced powerful work about historical trauma, texts in which fantastic images and language represent the strangeness reality assumes in moments of extreme violence.
One of the most successful narratives of this type is Geoff Ryman's The Unconquered Country, set in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Originally published in 1982 in the British science-fiction magazine Interzone, Ryman's story went on to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 1985 and the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in the same year. An expanded version of the novella is included in Ryman's collection Unconquered Countries, now out of print, but well worth tracking down.

The main character of The Unconquered Country is Third Child, a young woman who supports herself by growing living machinery in her womb. Her livelihood embodies the pain of military occupation: "When Third was lucky, she got a contract for weapons. The pay was good because it was dangerous. The weapons would come gushing suddenly out of her with much loss of blood, usually in the middle of the night . . . ." We learn about Third's childhood in a peaceful land destroyed by invasion; we learn about the pain of leaving old homes, who in Ryman's story are living, feeling creatures. "They had to leave their old caring house behind. They tethered it to a stake. It knew it was being left, and couldn't understand why. . . . Deserted houses sometimes died of love." We watch Third, shell-shocked by loss, acknowledge her love for her fiancé only after he has been killed in combat. "I am like the cat, sometimes," she tells his dead body. "When things are near me, I pretend I do not want them. I think I do not care for them, in case they are taken away. Most things get taken away." One of the novella's most harrowing scenes describes the forced evacuation of a hospital, in which marching, crippled patients are joined by talking medical equipment. "`I am a delicate piece of lifesaving equipment,' said a little beige box on muscular, human legs . . . . `Please treat me with care.'" The box is destroyed, of course, as are doctors and patients. Third survives by learning to cherish ghosts, such as the singing crow she believes to be the returned spirit of her husband; but at last the bird, too, is killed by soldiers. Most things get taken away.

Third regains what she has lost only at the end of the novella, when she dies and is reunited with the ghosts of everyone she has loved. Her spirit and the spirits of her country remain unconquered. "The temples would be there waiting too, and the villages, and the houses. The houses would greet their families with their cries for the dead." This final grace, however, cannot justify the pain that has come before. Ryman's strange and beautiful story uses the metaphors of fantasy to pierce hearts calloused by the numbing realism of the evening news.

Susan Palwick
Department of English, UNR