The Moreva of Astroreth by Roxanne Bland

The Moreva of Astoreth (The Peris Archive Book 1)
By Roxanne Bland
Blackrose Press, 2021

The Moreva of Astoreth, Roxanne Bland’s attractive new re-issue of Book 1 of the Peris Archives, opens with a sacrilege: young priestess Morva Tehi has failed to appear at the great ceremony of Ohra-Namtar, honoring the pantheon of Peris. This would be bad enough on simple religious grounds, since she was the only morev to ignore the pealing of the bells calling all to Ohra-Namtar. But in Tehi’s case it’s much worse, since one member of that pantheon, the goddess Astoreth, is her grandmother. Bland’s readers will perhaps be aware of what grandmothers can be like if they feel pointedly disrespected. 

Tehi tries to defend herself: she’d been conducting biomedical research on the red fever that has cyclically plagued the land and had simply lost track of time. Even this is not as selfless a defense as it sounds; Tehi’s motivations spring from egotism, not altruism. “Discovering the cure was a challenge I’d taken on because no one since the dawn of Peris had been able to find one,” she thinks. “It was a war, me assaulting the virus’s defenses, the virus fending off my attacks. Our war was my obsession, and one I meant to win.”

But her grandmother suspects a darker reason for her offense: her abiding contempt for the hakoi, a people viewed as underclass by her own semi-divine Devi race. And inwardly, Tehi certainly doesn’t deny this:

I didn’t care about the hakoi. I despised them. THey were docile enough - the Devi’s spawning and breeding program saw to that - but they were slow-witted, not unlike the pirsu the É raised for meat and hide. They stank of makira, the pungent cabbage that was their dietary staple … they were stupid and smelly, and I wanted nothing to do with them.

“You, Moreva Tehi,” Astoreth pronounces, “are a bigot. I might understand if you were still a child, but you are not. You have done nothing to better yourself since then.” And with that, Tehi is effectively banished: she’s to take up stewardship of the landing beacon Astoreth-69 at the the city of Mjora in the distant, primitive northern province of Syren. And vitally: she’s to leave behind her red fever research rather than run the risk of infecting of Mjora’s hakoi. 

No sci-fi/fantasy reader will be surprised that Tehi disobeys this last injunction. Her personal battle with the red fever, combined with her bedrock disregard for the hakoi, guarantees that she smuggle her work with her on the long trip to Mjora. And there she meets Laerd Teger, the grim and towering hakoi who is Mjora’s village chief, one of her official liaisons, and no more a fan of her people than she is of his. 

Thus the scene is set for an epidemiological catastrophe, a religious and cultural clash, and a personal awakening. And Roxanne Bland does a deft, confident job balancing all of these elements and lavishing them with world-building that’s detailed enough to make Peris and its inhabitants both genuinely alien and immediately believable. 

In terms of presentation - always a key element of any Indie publication - the cover for the original 2015 edition of The Moreva of Astoreth was arresting: an unadorned horizontal view of a beautiful white-haired blue-skinned woman, clad in bright red, embracing a fatigue-wearing white man so much taller than she is that we don’t see his face. The new cover, accompanying this new reprint, is in every way better: the angle is less clinical, there’s a luminous suggested background, and this time the embrace is mutual - as a recomposition of the original, it’s entirely more involving, the perfect cover for Bland’s happy blending of fizzy romance and punchy space opera. It adds to the happy occasion of having The Moreva of Astoreth freshly reprinted. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.