I’ve not read everything that sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold has written, but from what I have read, she sure loves to set a fantasy world in a key site of the emergence of the modern racial structures whilst trying to imagine what it might have been like if they’d been good, actually. Her Chalion/World of the Five Gods novels are set in a fantasy version of Reconquista Spain, where the conflict between Catholics and Muslims has become a conflict between those who worship a fivefold God (Father, Son, Mother, Daughter, Bastard) and the Ragnari, an invading and enslaving people who insist on divine fourness, refusing to recognise the divinity of the fifth person of the Quintarian divinity. While the Ragnari exist as a vague threat in the background of some of the Chalion stories, the real threat is the conflict within and between the Quintarians, who must learn to trust in providence, find the good in demons, and accept their mortality.
Bujold’s Sharing Knife novels have, as far as I can tell, come in for a fair amount of online criticism due to the problematic age gap between the novels’ protagonists, 18 year old farmer-girl Fawn and 55 year old Lakewalker Dag. The world of the Sharing Knife books is more or less the American frontier of the 19th century North America, with the farmers — gradually spreading out into the new-to-them-world — standing in for European settlers and the Lakewalkers — ancient nomadic inhabitants of the land in possession of magical powers — for Native Americans. Here the age gap, as well as being a romance genre trope, stands in for the different relationships of the two peoples to the land. Despite their great differences in age, Fawn and Dag are meant for one another: she, while lacking his magical powers, and threatening to dilute the purity of his bloodline, brings a youthful energy and a home-making capacity which Dag, old and tired, and a little weary of his life of tents and travelling, very badly needs. The two must overcome not only others’ qualms about their gap, but also the longstanding hostility between farmers and Lakewalkers. Their union becomes, both symbolically and in real terms, the beginning of a reconciliation between the two peoples, as they unite to face their common enemy: the malices or blight bogles which are found scattered around the land.
The malices are a pure evil of unknown origin, lacking any ‘ground’ of their own and so parasitic of the ‘ground’ of others, Ground here is something like life force, form, or being. The malices begin as shapeless entities which, as they suck the life from the world around them, gradually begin to take form and intelligence from the beings whose life they consume, beginning with small animals and usually working their way up to roughly humanoid forms. Eventually they begin to capture real human beings, here always farmers rather than Lakewalkers, ‘enslaving’ them so that they lumber around, lacking much in the way of intelligence but able nonetheless to do a lot of damage. If the malice is destroyed in time, it’s possible to free these hapless and subjugated souls, but the malice ‘can’t make life at all, really. Only death.’ The malices, that is to say, are a figure for blackness: located, like maroon communities, in the swamps and at the frontiers of North America during colonisation; threatening always to undermine the coherence of the social order, to suck the life from both indigenous people and settlers, who must therefore band together to defeat them; neither human nor non-human animal but something even more uncanny; figures of as Jared Sexton has it, ‘the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous … the unimaginable loss of that all too imaginable loss itself (nothing for no one)’; not the magical and intuitive Lakewalker connection to the land but ‘the slave’s inhabitation of the earth’ which ‘precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land … no ground for identity, no ground to stand on … the landless inhabitation of selfless existence.’
There is only one way to kill a malice, and that is to strike into it a knife which has been infused with the power of a Lakewalker’s death. As a Lakewalker is dying, either they or someone else must take a bone knife (cut from the thigh bone of a dead Lakewalker) and plunge it into their chest before they breathe their last. They must share their death with the knife, that is, in order to share their death with the malice. A malice, for all that it lacks being and substance, is nonetheless unable to die because it does not know how to do so, and must be taught. Only the Lakewalkers can do this, because of their mystical connection to being. Where the farmers’ existence is justified simply by the fact of their existence, by their wholesome and comfortable way of life, which seeks nothing more than to carry on making babies and planting crops, the Lakewalkers’ existence, dangerous and lacking in creature comforts, must adapt itself to the ever-changing threat of the malice’s. Here the Sharing Knife novels repeat what Shari M Huhndorf describes as the ‘primary cultural work’ of narratives of ‘going Native: ‘the regeneration of racial whiteness’; ensuring that ‘European Americans’, as figured by Fawn, ‘are the proper heirs of “Indianness” as well as of the land and resources of the conquered natives’: here conquered not (as in reality) by the brutality of mass slaughter, broken promises, and the violent separation of children from their parents, but by that most deadly of Christian fantasies: by love.
An und für sich 
