2024 read #140: A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper.

A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper

239 pages

Published 1981

Read from November 9 to November 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Eight long years ago — maybe three or four subjective lifetimes ago — I was reading the first book in this series, The Road to Corlay, on a fateful Tuesday in November.

I already owned A Dream of Kinship, but in half-conscious superstition, I avoided reading it afterward, packing it up in moving boxes as I spent the following eight years bouncing from New York to Ohio to North Carolina and back to New York. Now that the worst has happened again, and Trumpenfascism has thrown open the door to Christian Nationalism, I figured: Fuck it. Might as well go ahead and read the book I’d irrationally been avoiding this whole time.

In a future of melted ice caps, sea level rise, a militant church, and a return to feudal polities, the Kinsmen are a standard-issue love-and-brotherhood movement founded by a standard-issue white guy messiah in The Road to Corlay. Kinship picks up a few months after the death of Thomas the piper, with the church and its secular enforcers moving in to destroy the heretical Kinsmen, even as a child is born and grows up into another white guy messiah in his own right.

Sci-fi authors of this era couldn’t get enough of the idea that a very special white boy would convince the world that cosmic love held the universe together. The setting’s gender norms are straight out of the 1950s. Women characters who start out as fighters either die or live long enough to become madonnas. The faith of the Kinsmen is little more than hippy-ish Christianity, spiced with some far-out clairvoyance. Such powers are hereditary — meaning the messiah, whether the author consciously thought it through or not, has a stink of eugenics around him.

There’s also a through-line that the church’s officials are attracted to boys, which isn’t presented in the sense of “men in power like to abuse power,” but more in the gross old “haha, priests are gay” line of bullshit. 

Cowper’s prose was the highlight of The Road to Corlay, but even that was a disappointment here. Much of Kinship is couched as a historical review looking back on the events of the novel from the perspective of the religion they promulgated. That can be a fun narrative device, but it’s applied inconsistently here, and, in my opinion, not done well.

I don’t think I’ll bother to persevere into The Tapestry of Time. Well, probably not. Maybe four years from now, if I’m still around.