What Might Have Been: Steven Bauer’s Satyrday
One of the interesting things about going back to the beginning of any tradition is seeing how things might have gone. Seeing, that is, possibilities unexplored and roads not taken. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of what, in retrospect, is an earlier stage of evolution. Sometimes there’s a sense of a missed chance. And then sometimes you can see why things went the way they did.
I’ve written here before about my fascination with underexplored elements in 80s fantasy. In this context I have an elastic definition for ‘80s,’ beginning in 1977 — arguably when the modern mass-market fantasy genre was born, with the publication of Brooks’s Sword of Shannara and Donaldson’s Illearth War — and ending whenever seems rhetorically convenient (I go back and forth, and any ideas in comments about when 80s fantasy ended will be read with interest). Particularly earlier on, there’s an odd mix in these years of idiosyncratic, individual tales alongside a developing commercial genre; in all, a lot of stories trying out techniques and approaches, a lot of writers finding out what works and what doesn’t. We remember, on the whole and more or less, the stuff that works. But sometimes it’s interesting to see the stuff that misfires and see other possibilities for the genre.
Steven Bauer’s Satyrday is mentioned in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy, where they call it a satire. I will say up front that I didn’t get that sense from the book and have no idea what it’s supposed to be satirising. It’s a book that mixes animal fable, Greek myth, and the then-emerging fantasy staple of a young boy coming to adulthood by engaging in a quest to defeat a dark lord. A great owl has captured the moon and holds it captive as part of a plot to gain ultimate power. But not far away, a satyr named Matthew has brought up a human boy named Derin, and at the urging of a raven named Deirdre they set out to free the moon and thwart the owl’s schemes. The adventure’s less than compelling, but there are nice passages and if the book doesn’t entirely come together, there’s still an engaging weirdness to the ingredients.
