The Unconquered Country by Geoff Ryman
"The Unconquered Country" is a speculative fiction novel by Geoff Ryman, set against the backdrop of a fictionalized version of Cambodia during the regime of Pol Pot. The story follows a young girl named Third Child, who lives in a village inhabited by the Unconquered People, known for their unique, living stilt houses and magical elements. The narrative explores themes of survival, cultural identity, and the devastating impacts of war as Third Child's life is uprooted following an attack by neighboring forces. As her village is destroyed and her family suffers tragic losses, Third Child's journey takes her to the grim shantytown of Saprang Song, where she struggles to survive under harrowing conditions.
The novel intricately weaves fantastical elements with stark realities, illustrating Third Child's internal conflicts and the external chaos surrounding her. Her relationship with Crow Dung, a soldier aligned with the Unconquered People, highlights the tension between love and loss in a war-torn landscape. Through poignant imagery and haunting experiences, Ryman captures the profound sorrow of cultural erasure and personal tragedy, as Third Child ultimately confronts her ghosts and chooses to transcend her painful reality. The book serves as both a reflection on individual resilience and a commentary on the broader human experience amidst violence and upheaval.
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The Unconquered Country
First published: 1986 (shorter version, Interzone, 1984)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy—cultural exploration
Time of work: Undefined
Locale: The Unconquered Country, primarily the city of Saprang Song
The Plot
The Unconquered Country: A Life History was written in 1982 after Geoff Ryman’s trip to Thailand and his secondhand observation of the genocide perpetrated in Kampuchea (then Cambodia) by the Pol Pot regime. The setting of Ryman’s book is an analogue to Kampuchea, with distinctive fantastic elements such as villages composed of living, loyal stilt houses and figures on advertising billboards that detach themselves at night to sing jingles to passersby.
Third Child lives in a village of the Unconquered People. The Neighbors, helped by the weapons of the Big Country, have conquered much of the Unconquered Country, but not Third Child’s rebel village. She lives a normal life in her village until the age of six. She has a talent for numbers, but only in relation to objects, such as yarrow stalks. The first phase of her cultural unmooring occurs when her teacher forces her to disassociate numbers from their objects and think of them as abstracts.
Third Child’s village is attacked by the Neighbors not long after her sixth birthday. The Neighbors use flying creatures called Sharks to destroy her village and slaughter most of the living houses. Many of her family members die, but Third Child’s mother manages to spirit her away to the city of Saprang Song.
Saprang Song is a dismal shantytown of cheaply made living houses. Specially created scavenger beasts scour the thoroughfares looking for the dead. In the shadows of this nightmarish setting, Third Child ekes out a meager existence selling her womb as an incubator for industrial products. To earn extra money, she incubates weapons that, in a startling scene representative of the book’s uniqueness, gush “suddenly out of her . . . an avalanche of glossy, freckled, dark brown guppies with black, soft eyes and bright rodent smiles full of teeth.”
Despite undergoing these degradations to earn a living, Third Child’s situation becomes so desperate that she must sell body parts. Standing in line to exchange her left eye for money, Third Child is rescued by a soldier named Crow Dung. He wishes to court her in the way of the Unconquered Country, for he is of the Unconquered People. Crow Dung considers himself a soldier for the Unconquered Country even though he is enlisted in the army of the Neighbors, for he keeps alive the customs of the Unconquered Country against the threat of cultural assimilation.
Third Child persistently resists Crow Dung, for fear that if she loves him, he will die, like all those who have loved her before. Only when he is on his deathbed, dying from a wound suffered in the war, does she permit herself to love him. Following the death of Crow Dung, Third Child finds a baby crow and raises it to maturity, believing that it harbors the spirit of her dead suitor. Thus, she gradually enters a world of ghosts and ghostlike memories.
After several years, the rebel remnants of the Unconquered People free Saprang Song from the Neighbors. The rebels, in the process of winning, have become more bloodthirsty than the Neighbors. Third Child’s crow is killed by soldiers, and she is forced by the rebels to leave the city. Third Child begins to see ghosts amid scenes of great carnage. Huddled with refugees on a bridge for three days and nights, Third Child revisits the loved ones of her past and, in their naming, sees her numbers whole again. She then makes the conscious decision to pass over into the spirit world, for everyone she has loved or ever will love is dead. Underlying the devastating sadness of Third Child’s personal tragedy is a deeper sorrow for a way of life vanished forever, meshed with the bitterness and confusion of a people caught up in events that seem as unfathomable as the monsoons.