Pladek’s debut novel, Dry Land, is a historical fantasy set in the First World War, focusing on an uncommon topic in fantasy literature: forestry. In addition to its environmental and war themes, and its careful engagement with queer realities, Dry Land also offers a refreshing take on magic. Yet perhaps most importantly, Dry Land is a story about personal and social limits, some of which can be breached, others which can’t.
Rand is a young German American forester working as a surveyor in the forests of Wisconsin, while the First World War rages in Europe. Rand has been involved in environmental activism since he was a teen, including working on a famous, failed project to revitalize a marsh. He feels strongly about nature, but it still comes as a shocking development to him when he discovers that his touch can make plants grow.
His teammate and lover, the Mexican American surveyor Gabriel, has secrets of his own: as his evening fiddle playing makes obvious, he should be playing in concert halls, yet there he is in the woods, braving the muck and the damp. When Rand starts sneaking out at night, Gabriel initially assumes Rand is sleeping around… but in fact he is experimenting with his power.
His days grew stumbling. He yawned into his elbow and shouted the wrong signals to Gabriel, who frowned, though he said nothing.
But his nights were transcendent. The dark woods blossomed beneath his fingers. With each test he pushed himself harder. Despite his growing collection of pine scales, maple keys, and basswood nuts, he had started small, with whatever bulbs lay already dormant in the earth. After two nights of flowers he advanced to shrubs, raspberry canes and stalks of red dogwood; finally, in another three, to trees. His first spindly sugar maple took such a concentration of energy that he fainted briefly against it. (p. 13)
Magic as a plot element can be used as a writing shortcut to avoid detail; Pladek does the opposite and brings every bulb and pine scale into close focus. His caring, thick description of nature shows a deep awareness that Dry Land owes just as much to the Wisconsin landscape as his protagonist Rand. The novel is thoroughly researched—as the author mentions in the acknowledgements, he read early forestry manuals and field guides. Yet Dry Land isn’t only a novel about nature as much as it is embedded in nature.
Once Rand’s power is revealed, he finds himself pressed into participating in the American war effort—even though, as someone ethnically German, he is often viewed with suspicion. But Dry Land isn’t entirely a war novel either, even as Rand is shipped into Europe.
He did not begin seeing evidence of the front until the fields had risen into hills patched with woodland. The shellfire was now regular to the northeast. At some point he began following the signs—scoops of earth from old barrages, a biplane’s timber skeleton half sunk in mud, and men, on foot or pumping handcarts or queued before a field hospital, men lapping sluggishly back and forth like a gray tide.
As if he were surveying, he triangulated their flows and followed. (p. 106)
In the built environment of a large city, or amid the utter destruction of warfare, Rand’s gaze remains the forester’s, the naturalist’s, the surveyor’s.
Dry Land is also a queer novel. In present-day terms, Rand would probably be considered bisexual, his lover Gabriel gay, and his best friend, the socialist activist Jonna, a lesbian woman alongside her partner Marie. The characters struggle against the queer-exclusionary nature of the setting; from raids on bars to gay bashing, from the terror of the military to internalized oppression. As Jonna tells Rand: “I thought I was like you, and could make myself take the easy way out. But then, you’re doing it the hard way anyway.” (p. 76-77)
Every character finds their way differently in this world, but all of the paths they take are presented with an intimate, yet not voyeuristic attention. Without describing the plot in detail, the book takes this approach in a more general sense too—never lingering on the violence, but not ignoring it either, and showing a rich internality of experiencing it. At one point, this includes a death wish as tangible as it is unfetishized.
In more than one sense, Dry Land is about limits. Rand rapidly comes up against the limitations of his magic and, throughout the novel, struggles with whether these limitations can be overcome through sheer effort, careful planning, or in some other way. Often they can’t. I found this both relatable on a personal level and refreshing. In fantasy, such limits are often laboriously spelled out with ‘laws’ of magic, but Pladek’s comes across as a more realistic approach, matching the general realism of the narrative.
Rand thinks of himself as a scientist, not a magician. He’s also a proponent of John Muir’s idea of preservation, advocating for preserving the natural “wilderness” as opposed to managing it for human ends, including industrial exploitation. But in the course of the novel, Rand finds out about the limits of science, too: “He’d thought he was being a good scientist. But nothing about his gift had ever been solved by this sort of science.” (p. 149)
His foil and antagonist Dr. Manning, the eugenicist doctor assigned to supervise him in the military, presents obvious, easy-to-reject views of science with his talk of “breeding” and “degeneracy.” Yet Rand himself has more subtle biases that go to the core of who he is and what he does: “He was a scientist; he should have known conservation was not accomplished deus ex machina.” (p. 217) He considers in detail what he sees, but he ignores what he doesn’t, what he is—in the most literal meaning of the word—segregated from seeing. Being a German American during WWI, he experiences sometimes physically violent ethnocentrism as one of “the enemy” and is at the same time able to take advantage of his own whiteness. All this is shown thoughtfully, unfolding step by step, drawing the reader in.
The ecological and the human all intertwine. What is “wilderness” and what is people’s role in interacting with it? Why is American environmentalism often tinged with the messianic, and what happens when magic enters the equation? Dry Land presents complication, difficulty, escape and not-escape; and the book leaves plenty of room for us to agree or disagree with Rand’s decisions. I have already read it twice while writing this review, and I’m confident it will reward even further rereads.
This is a thinky, reflective novel, with plenty of interiority and an avoidance of common fantasy plot beats. You won’t necessarily know where the plot will go, and it’s not the “hero’s journey” omnipresent in present-day Anglo-American storytelling. For all his magic, Rand isn’t a hero and the plot isn’t an extended training montage. It is something much, much closer to life, with all its pain and sense of wonder. It reflects on genre publishing—and not favorably—that this book came out from a university press, and for this reason it might be less noticed. I for one will continue telling people about it, and at the risk of employing the cliché: this is one of the not-to-miss speculative novels of 2023.
