Throwback Thursday: Mordant’s Need Shows Us a Dark Reflection of Epic Fantasy

Stephen R. Donaldson is one of the most divisive best-selling SF/F writers of all time (and mystery writer, too, come to think of it, thanks to his The Man Who … series). Most of the focus is on his epic, 10-book Thomas Covenant series. You can generally figure out who you’re going to get along with at any random gathering of fantasy fans by sorting folks into those who dig the series and those who hate it with a fiery passion.
YetDonaldson also wrote another accomplished fantasy series, one that deserves at least as much attention as the saga of a leperous rapist: the Mordant’s Need duology, comprised of the novels The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through. Published in the mid-1980s, they books are still in print, but don’t get talked about much these days—which is a shame, because in them, Donaldson crafts a complex story exploring the nature of reality and existence in ways I’ve never seen in any other fantasy, or, in fact, another novel in general.

The story
Mordant’s Need begins in our own reality, where a young woman named Terisa Morgan lives an empty, sad life. Supported by her father, she drifts, purposeless, struggling with depression and a crippling fear that she doesn’t actually exist. To assuage her existential fears, she’s decorated her apartment with mirrors that serve as constant reminders that she is, in fact, real.
Terisa is visited—accidentally—by an apprentice Imager from a world called Mordant, a young man named Geraden. Imagers practice magic that is based entirely on mirrors, which are used to translate images into reality; for example, an Imager can cause a mirror to display a dragon, then bring that dragon into corporeal form in Mordant. As a result, Geraden, an inexperienced Imager, sees all of Terisa’s mirrors and concludes she must be a powerful Imager herself, and he begs her to come back to Mordant with him to help his world> Mordant is under assault by an unknown Imager who is translating monsters on a regular basis, undermining a society already destabilized by a senile king, a corrupt court, and a guild of Imagers in decline. Without really understanding why, Terisa agrees, and is transported into a frightening and unfamiliar fantasy landscape where she is regarded with suspicion and treated as a real danger.
The subtext
So far so standard—the world of fantasy literature is filled with stories of people living drab, sad lives on Earth, only to become heroes in a fantasy universe. What sets Mordant’s Need apart is Terisa’s passivity: Donaldson smartly avoids having her Mary Sue into a kick-ass hero upon contact with the magical air of Mordant. For some, Terisa’s hand-wringing and confusion at her expected role is frustrating, but for me it creates beautiful tension: her hesitance feels real, and the restrictions it placed on her agency feels like a tightening spring that you know will eventually explode.

Most interesting is the way the magic system is used psychologically. The Imagers, who pull creatures and other things from mirrors, are divided on an essential question: do the things produced by magic exist prior to their appearance in the mirrors? Few fantasy series actually explore the existential and moral implications of their magic systems, but Donaldson makes it the cornerstone of this one. His protagonist fears she doesn’t exist, and finds herself in a world where a large portion of the people she meets believe fervently that in fact she didn’t exist until they made her exist. That tension alone makes it a series worth reading.
Donaldson builds on this foundation masterfully, however, offering a complicated cast of characters who shift along muddied lines of morality, a mystery villain, and a series of plot twists that drag Terisa, Geraden, and Mordant itself towards inevitable disaster, keeping readers white-knuckled as victory begins to seem get more and more impossible with each page. In an age in which everyone is looking for complex fantasy books with complicated, real characters, this one shows the upstart newcomers how it’s done.
What fantasy series deserves rediscovery?