Most underrated book: The Ivory Tower series, by Doris Egan.
Who is Doris Egan? You totally know her. She writes/produces House, Dark Angel, Smallville and the latest Torchwood, among others. Her Ivory Tower books are just as awesome.
Why are they underrated? They’re out of print. Again. I lost my copy of Gates of Ivory this summer and had to buy it used online. Totally worth it. I would do it again if I had to.
What are they about? Because I’m lazy, I’m just going to copy what I wrote in the anthropology paper I did on The Gate of Ivory:
In The Gate of Ivory, by Doris Egan, the main character and narrator Theodora, who was raised in a scientific, reasoning society, finds herself stranded on the planet Ivory, unable to leave because she has no money. While trying to survive by making a pittance as a tarot card reader, she maintains her cultural distance from Ivory’s ethnocentric and self-serving society. Then, she is hired as a card reader by a sorcerer, a profession which defies all her scientific understanding. She is flung into Ivoran civilization and forced to adapt and develop a sense of cultural relativity.
Ivoran culture often clashes with Theodora’s own ethical belief system. Ivorans make a game of killing people, and revenge is taken freely. They also are extremely materialistic and Theodora comments that the closest the planet came to a universal religious statement is the phrase “Everything can be converted to money” (Egan 270). As a result, bribing the right official allows a person to get away with anything. In addition the entire population is paranoid, because only family is honor-bound not to kill each other, and that “only because there had to be someone they could trust” (Egan 45). Wide windows only face into a house’s courtyard and not into the dangerous world, and even small towns have poison testers to sample communal meals, all of which is an attempt to maintain safety in an unsafe world.
Theodora’s detachment from the Ivoran ethical system deteriorates when she is hired by Ran Cormallon, a sorcerer and head of a wealthy house. She reads magic tarot cards to aid him in his sorcery business, which often includes cursing people or
murdering them. She defies her ethical system when she gains the opportunity to exact revenge on the person responsible for her mugging, a sorceress named Pina. Ran arranges for a sorceral mishap to occur while she is working, and her employers professionally condemn her, causing her career in the capital to end. Revenge doesn’t turn out as Theodora had hoped though, and she feels guilty, especially since Pina was reduced to tears. She tells Ran that she thinks they went too far, and he replies, “You think you can forgive your enemies. That’s crazy. One day your new friend is going to bring you down with your own knife and serve you right” (Egan 30).
Why do I love it? A big reason is the setting. Egan manages to make a rich and textured cultural and physical setting without shoving epic description down your throat. If it weren’t for all the murdering, I would move to Ivory and spend my evenings in the capitol, sipping tah with my friends and debating if we should catch the naked floor show at the Lantern Gardens. Or maybe we would take a ride in a carriage, pulled by a “modified” animal that you control with a box with the buttons “stop” and “go.”
The plot is fast-paced and interesting, and Theo is the perfect first-person narrator to take you along as she sinks into Ivoran culture. Her rational thinking is coupled with a somewhat neurotic personality that makes her question her own motivations. (Though she does loosen up when she drinks.)
Sci-fi or fantasy? Both. There’s interplanetary travel, aircars, escalators and the Net (a computer system that’s all in the cloud). However, there’s also sorcery, lots of pastures and forests, and no skyscrapers. The sci-fi/fan elements enhance the world, but take a back seat to the characters and the plot.
Buy it. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.
What's book do you think is underrated?
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