Over the years I’ve picked up a few books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder that I remembered loving as a kid — specifically, The Egypt Game and The Velvet Room. But the one I kept wondering about was Below the Root and its sequels (And All Between and Until the Celebration), which form the Green Sky trilogy, and recently I found I could get them all in ebook from my library. So I did a binge!

And (like I did for the Seven Citadels quartet), I want to talk about whether they held up. In this case, though, the answer is “no, sort of, but not really, except for the bits that do.”

Be warned that Here Be Spoilers. Partly because I can’t talk about what does and doesn’t work here without getting into them, but also because honestly, you’ll see most of the twists coming three miles off. So it doesn’t feel like there’s much to spoil.

***

Background first, and this is part of what does work. The setting here is indeed as imaginative as I remember: a world with low enough gravity that the Kindar (a human population) live high in giant trees and glide to lower levels in wing-suits called shubas. They eat a vegetarian diet of fruit, nuts, tree mushrooms, and so on; they make tools out of the hard, sharp beaks shed by local birds; they make furniture out of tendrils of the Wissenvine that can be easily shaped while living, then harden very rapidly when cut. Their books are embroidered on silk, with disposable texts being scratched onto large leaves. Young adults who haven’t yet bonded with a mate live in communal youth halls; it’s implied that they sleep around as they please, with contraceptive “youth wafers” keeping them from having kids until they want to. Their news is spread by newsingers who stand at major intersections along the branchpaths and cry out announcements to passers-by.

They also have psychic gifts of various sorts: pensing (telepathy), kiniporting (telekinesis), grunspreking (plant control), and others that have been lost for a long time. Even those main gifts are in decline; most children lose the ability long before they reach adulthood, though in the past even grown-ups retained them strongly enough to achieve great deeds.

It is an extremely hippie society. (The trilogy was published in the late ’70s.) Children go to Gardens for classes in topics like Love, Joy, and Peace. Their society doesn’t know violence; while obviously they understand that death exists, they don’t have the verb “kill,” and it’s shockingly vulgar for someone to say “I’ll dead you!” as a non-serious threat. They don’t have words for negative emotions like anger, either, except to say that someone is unjoyful.

The main fly in the ointment is the Pash-shan. The Kindar are terrified of the forest floor below, because horrible monsters exist below ground, trapped there by the magical Root of the Wissenvine which was — in a great act of grunspreking — grown across the entire surface of the planet to hold them back. Sometimes Kindar who fall or venture too low are never seen again, because the Pash-shan reach out through the Root to grab them and kill them.

. . . yeah. No prizes for guessing there are no Pash-shan: only a population of humans exiled there long ago by the leaders of the Kindar. The people who go missing are the ones who saw something down below they shouldn’t have, or asked too many questions; they get exiled below the Root by a secret cabal within the priestly class that rules the Kindar, the Ol-zhaan.

In fact, quite a few things about Kindar society are not as great as they initially seem. Their birthrate has been dropping for a long time now, and increasing numbers of Kindar are falling victim to a “wasting” that sounds a lot like major depressive disorder. They aren’t merely encouraged toward harmony and peace; showing negative emotion of any kind is shameful, even stigmatized. Unsurprisingly, they also have a growing problem with people getting addicted to the soporific berry of the Wissenvine. The Ol-zhaan enjoy a ton of luxuries and privileges ordinary Kindar don’t get, and new recruits undergo a year of being honored and feted all over before they start taking up their training — a maneuver one of the Ol-zhaan later notes is explicitly designed to make them enjoy being treated as special and above the rest of their people.

Meanwhile, below the Root, there are different problems. The Erdlings (what the Kindar call Pash-shan) have a booming population and insufficient food — in fact, I do think the worldbuilding falls apart a bit down there, though in pursuit of interesting goals. To make them contrast with the Kindar, Snyder has them reaching out through gaps in the Root (which is magically indestructible) to set traps for animals whose flesh they eat and whose skins they make into clothes. I’m not sure the caloric economy there works, but whatever. I’m even less sure it makes sense for them to be industrialized, with metal-working and coal-burning and railcars to reach the deeper mines, a monetary economy for goods and services, and so forth. But it does make them very different from the Kindar!

***

What’s not so good here is the writing.

I don’t remember if I just gave more of a pass to the two books I re-read in previous years, or if Snyder’s writing genuinely is just worse here, but man is it not good. Possibly it’s because she was trying to reach for an elevated, High Fantasy kind of style, and instead landed on stiffness? (Though, in that ’70s way, this is revealed to actually be science fiction: the Kindar fled Earth for another planet to escape the wars there. Psionics totally count as SF instead of fantasy, doncha know.) It serves a worldbuilding purpose to have the Kindar speak of someone being “unjoyful,” but what do we gain by people engaging in their morning food-taking at the table-board? Just say they had breakfast at the table.

And there is so much repetition. Here is a direct quote from the dialogue: “I could only pense that the plans troubled D’ol Raamo. D’ol Raamo was very troubled about what they were planning to do.” That happens not only on a small scale from line to line, but on a large scale, too. Nearly the entire first half of the second book is basically a recap of the first book from different perspectives, with us wading through verbatim repetitions of dialogue, or a summary of scenes we’ve already read, or a summary of a different character reporting to somebody else about the scene they spied on.

This would be tedious enough if the first book had been jam-packed with action and we gained in richness by seeing other perspectives on those events, but . . . it really, really isn’t. I know we talk about Kids These Days having shorter attention spans and needing more action, but c’mon; in the time it takes Raamo to get to the plot, Nancy Drew would have had six thrilling encounters. The load-bearing events of the first book basically consists of: Raamo becomes Ol’zhaan, learns about the secret cabal, finds a child on the forest floor he thinks is a Kindar who escaped the Pash-shan, and learns she’s actually an Erdling. Better prose could have packed that into half the space, and left room for the events of the second book: two other characters find the way below the Root, bring back some Erdlings to try and convince the non-cabal Ol’zhaan to free them, and then when the bad guy threatens violence, everybody gets saved by a deus ex machina.

***

But then there’s the third book.

I don’t think I ever read it as a kid. Possibly I did and jettisoned it from my brain, but I was vaguely surprised to see this was the Green Sky Trilogy, and the title of the third book wasn’t at all familiar. I also remember nothing that happens in it . . . which is funny, because in some ways I think it’s better.

On the level of execution, a lot of it still isn’t very good. There is a ton of summary narration, and any notion of there being a central character — already badly tattered after the hopscotching omniscience of the second book — basically goes out the window. Tons of complex stuff just gets nodded at, and there is so much complex stuff that there’s barely any sense of narrative momentum.

But that latter happens because Snyder actually does a decent job of exploring how “hey, everybody, the monsters of your nightmares are people like you, exiled because your priestly leadership has been lying to you about the past!” does not result in instant kumbaya. Both a faction of of that priestly leadership who don’t want to give up their status, and an Erdling faction that hates them for their oppression, hive off to become radical sects opposing the reintegration of the two populations. Kindar who have spent their entire lives terrified of the forest floor cannot bring themselves to go down and meet the Erdlings who are terrified of climbing the trees. Some Erdlings embrace Kindar ways, and get ostracized by their own people as a result. There are shortages of shubas and other things the Kindar economy is not equipped to distribute to all these new people. Kindar complain in horror about smoke (which they think is instantly poisonous) coming from Erdling cookfires and about the rough games Erdling children play, which might make somebody unjoyful. Erdling parents don’t want their children taught in Kindar Gardens, where they’ll learn to repress rather than express their emotions. The dying of the Wissenvine, and with it the soporific berries, results in people who want to avoid their feelings getting addicted to a much more dangerous hallucinogenic fruit instead. Etc.

And on top of all that, two very interesting threads of tension. One involves a “tool-of-violence” — a weapon, though nobody has the word for it — that is kept by the leader of the Ol-zhaan as a lesson about the past, and also because they can’t safely destroy it. (It seems to be some kind of handheld radiation weapon.) People are horrified by it, but also some of them want to use it to destroy the people they’re afraid of so they can . . . go back to their peaceful lives where they never have to worry about violence? It’s very plausible illogic.

The other, and my favorite, has to do with that deus ex machina ending in book two. The Spirit-gifts of the Kindar and Erdlings have been waning for a long time; the story indicates this is because of the separation in their society, not just between those two populations, but between Kindar (who know only vague stories about the past), Ol-zhaan (who know the truth of it), and that secret cabal (who know about the people exiled below the Root). Unity and community appear to be necessary for the flourishing of those powers. So, when a Kindar child and an Erdling child become friends and play psionic training games together, their powers strengthen, culminating in a display of “uniforce”: the gestalt power that worked so many wonders in the past.

In the third book this results in both societies idolizing that pair as “the holy children” who will save them all. Raamo — the central character of the first book, and himself a bit more Spirit-gifted than most Kindar teenagers — has vague premonitions of the future, and he keeps futilely warning people that it is not good to hang so much expectation and responsibility on two children. It’s bad for the kids, and it’s bad for the adults, too. A chunk of the third book revolves around both extremist factions wanting to get hold of the pair and maybe do violence against them.

But — and I actively liked this part — when the two girls vanish, it’s not because either group got them. In fact, horror at the belief that their leaders might indeed have done something bad to children costs both extremist factions most of their members; meanwhile, the girls ran away with the help of some friends and have simply been hiding out this whole time. Which on the one hand was really horrible for their parents, but on the other hand, it winds up teaching everybody an extremely salutary lesson about how it’s community, not Extra Special Privileged Leadership, that is going to save them all.

***

So, yeah. Mixed bag. The worldbuilding is frequently interesting, the prose is frequently dire, the plot is lackadaisical at best, and there are some very legitimately thorny complications buried in a morass of summary narration. The Snyder estate will probably not authorize me to redo the entire thing from the ground up. I doubt I’ll feel the need to re-read them ever again, but it was — despite how often I was skim-reading — worth revisiting, for the memories and for what I’m pretty sure was entirely new to me.