Young People Read Old SFF

The Warlord of Saturn's Moons

Eleanor Arnason

Young People Read Old SFF

9 Feb, 2025

This month’s Nebula finalist is Eleanor Arnason’s 1974 novelette The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons. First published in New Worlds 7, Warlord was a Nebula finalist in 1976, Warlord juxtaposes the heartwarming space adventure tale spun by Arnason’s protagonist with the grim reality in which the protagonist lives. 

As is usual for Young People Read Old SFF selections, Warlord was well-received. Warlord has been anthologized many times in the half century since it first saw print. I own it in three anthologies and one collection. No surprise. Rereading Warlord, I see themes relevant to the world in which we now live… as much as I might wish that were not the case. 

But will young eyes see the same story I do? Let’s find out!

The Warlord of Saturn’s Moonscan be read here.

Kris:

This is a story I am very glad I read. It is just the right salve for these dark times. Our author feels both depression over her life not turning out the way she hoped and horror at the state of the world. She cannot bear to hear the news and reporting corporate malfeasance is a dead-end. This is absolutely me right now.


But through her writing we see that she has not given up hope. Even though he is nameless character designed to motivate the heroine, our author comes to truly care for 409. Not just in the sense of an attraction but that she truly wants to find a way to help him.


And that’s something so important to hold on to, even as we go through some dark times right now and we may feel powerless but whilst we can still care for each other we can make it through. Even if we have to take a break from the outside world, we don’t have to give up forever. As she says:


“Where there’s life there’s hope and so forth, I tell myself.”

A few stray thoughts:

  1. A bit of a rarity seeing a short story from a British publication make the novelette list. But given that this year there were 11 nominees, makes it slightly easier.
  1. The story opening with her pondering about being a crazy cat lady feels a bit on the nose irony for contemporary politics.
  1. Metafictional stories are catnip to me, so it probably helped add to my love.
  1. Reading it makes me really crave tea!

Brian:

This feels like the reverse of ​“Eyes of Amber,” which we talked about a hot minute ago. Whereas that story borders on the meta, The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons jumps straight into it and tells us upfront that the story within the story, of the heroine trying to rescue 409, is merely the product of an aging cat lady’s mind. But then of course it is. Then again, Arnason was fairly young when she wrote this, and also very early in her career (she would’ve been writing professionally only a couple years at this point), so obviously we shouldn’t take the narrator as a self-insert.

Maybe I should read more ​’70s SF to get a better grasp of this, but the Vietnam War doesn’t seem to come up often in a literal sense; on the other hand, it does pop up regularly for those with eyes to see. Of course, the most famous examples would be Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, which are rather unsubtle allegories for the conflict. ​“The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” is, at face value, about a woman coping with loneliness by entrenching herself in her work as a writer, but it can also be taken, albeit with some plausible deniability, as an allegory for an American civilian coping with a generation of young men returning from a war they had no say in. It’s not much of a jump, given 409 would have been one of those young men.

I like this story almost more as a thought experiment than as a traditional narrative. Can we feel empathy for characters while also being reminded constantly that said characters are fabrications? When we read fiction, or at least good fiction, we are tricked into believing these fictional people are real, even if it’s something decidedly unrealistic like SF or fantasy. But Arnason tries, and at least I think she succeeds, to get us to feel emotionally attached to the narrator/heroine and 409 despite also knowing they aren’t real. It’s a bit of a tricky tightrope to walk, and it’s also surprisingly earnest, unlike a lot of metafiction which tends to be ironic.