Once unquestionably the most powerful species on the planet, humans now face a fierce new competitor for supremacy. Wraeththu: a species born of Man in Man's own shadow. A species that began with a single homeless boy who, by a simple sharing of his blood, unleashed the mutation that began the transmogrification of Man.
The Enchantments of Flesh and Sprit begins the story of Pellaz, a young human male who doesn't stay that way for long. Even in Pellaz's remote town-a scattering of buildings on the edge of a great desert-it is known that something unsettling, and possibly dangerous, is afoot in the bigger cities to the north. Grim rumours link all manner of sordid and unnatural goings-on with the appearance of gangs of boys who call themselves Wraeththu. Boys in appearance, but changed somehow. Tribes of Wraeththu are said to be the scourge of the cities: marauding, drug-abusing, young men who fornicate amongst themselves. Their touch is lethal to most, but transfiguring to a rare few, all boys.
When the stranger Calanthe arrives in Pell's town, seeking shelter and hospitality, Pell realizes before anyone else that Calanthe is Wraeththu. Something about Calanthe-his unnatural charm, his disquieting comeliness-draws Pell to him. Much to his horror, Pell realizes that if being Wraeththu means being like Calanthe, being with, Calanthe, then he must also become Wraeththu. Before long, the two are fleeing Pellaz's home town together, off for places and adventures unknown and definitely unimagined by either of them.
The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit is the first book of Storm Constantine's very queer positive Wraeththu trilogy. From the perspective of Pellaz the initiate and his more experienced companion, Calanthe, it chronicles the early days of Wraeththu and the beginnings of what promise to be Wraeththu's ascension to supremacy. The Wraeththu trilogy is a seminal work of queer fantasy, and of fantasy generally. The Wraeththu are a rare and special treat: clearly imagined, rivaling the members of Tolkein's bestiary, and strongly infused with animating spirit. They have the power to challenge your notions of gender, sex, friendship, and love. They will stay with you long after you put the books back on the shelf.
A winning feature of the Wraeththu is that, though they are hermaphroditic, they have nothing in common with their many bland, colourless cousins elsewhere in speculative fiction (think Star Trek: The Next Generation's "J'naii", the very embodiment of bland, passionless hermaphrodites). Wraeththu, on the contrary, are more virile and passionate than the split-sexed humans they succeeded, characterized as they are by extremes of both compassion and brutality. Various of their characteristics, beginning with the fact that all original Wraeththu derived from human males, reveal them to be slightly more masculine than feminine. For the most part, however, they display a well-balanced mixture of traditionally male and female characteristics: their styles of dress, temperaments, and sex roles are fluid, changing to meet the occasion, and not to conform to gender roles.
It is to Wraeththu's hermaphroditic nature that the novels owe their queer content. After being incepted into Wraeththu, Pell struggles for a time with his newly dual sex and consequent new sexual orientation. His initial uncertainty, though, is quickly overwhelmed by his attraction to Calanthe. To Constantine's unending credit, she does not dwell unnecessarily on explaining or justifying Wraeththu sexuality. Wraeththu are not, thankfully, an excuse for Constantine to hold the reader captive to her extended personal musings about sexuality (as is sometimes, tragically, the case). Wraeththu are all gay or queer or whatever one chooses to call it, and they are just fine with that.
Another noteworthy aspect of the Wraeththu trilogy is that, while it is in many respects a conventional quest story, it does not suffer from a bipolar morality: there is no infallibly good hero, no irredeemably evil villain. In fact, it would be difficult to characterize the "morality" of the series as a whole-it seems to shift from book to book, and only completely resolves near the end.
Constantine herself has said that the first volume of the series is not her best work; that is true, but it should not deter the interested reader. Still, a particular bother is the overabundance of obnoxiously obvious foreshadowing. Oftentimes, Constantine outright tells us what is going to happen next, if not (but nearly) in quite so many words. This takes the edge off several otherwise unexpected turns of the plot. Far worse, in this regard, is the glossary at the end of the book. Most readers will want to studiously avoid looking up character names in the glossary, or idly browsing through it, as many of its entries contain hugely revealing spoilers, including information about the novel's resolution). Happily, the second and third books of the series are written in a significantly more mature style which will easily erase from the reader's memory any awkwardness encountered in the first volume. Be warned, though, that my caution about looking names up in the glossary applies equally strongly to the second and third volumes in the series.
The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, and the Wraeththu trilogy it begins, easily warrant classification as must-read classics of queer speculative fiction. Constantine's sometimes-playful, sometimes-serious manipulation of sexuality and gender is delightful and not to be missed.