“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”)a is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
REVIEW
Gregory Kontaxis’s The Knight of the Moon is a dark fantasy set in an epic, secondary world, and is a companion novella to his The Dance of Light Series. It also contains romantic elements, and the growing relationship between protagonist John the Long Arm and his love interest, Nemesis, is a major focus. Despite the epic scale of background events, the story has a tight narrative focus, which is to the novella’s credit, and means newcomers to the series will have no trouble following along. This is a complete story that can absolutely be read on its own. Unfortunately, though very likely unintentionally, in Knight‘s effort to tackle themes related to misogyny and sexual assault, it reproduces the misogyny it purports to critique, featuring many of the regressive archetypes and storylines that became the subject of push back in the early 2000s. For that reason, I recommend it largely to readers who are already fans of Kontaxis’s work, or who are unbothered by the plot and character elements described in the rest of the review. This review will contain (marked) spoilers, though the spoilers it deals with are 
fairly guessable from around Chapter Two onwards.
At its core, the central plot has the perfect level of complexity for a novella-length story, suggesting plenty of room to develop character and introduce readers to its mercenary protagonist’s world. Setting aside the fantasy trappings for a moment, Knight is essentially the story of two people from opposite sides of the track, forced to work together on a job to track down a missing person, all while dealing with their own growing emotional bond. It’s a popular storyline, giving lots of room for banter and flirtation, and where individual variations shine is typically in their character work and unique settings. Knight sets up a compelling moral dimension to the basic plot–the target of the search is a noble knight named Gareth who’s fled his post in order to elope with the woman (Alys) he loves rather than continue fighting for a corrupt usurper. The protagonists have been hired to kill Gareth.
The prose is fairly bare-bones and there were a few too many exclamation points for me to be able to take certain scenes or pieces of dialogue seriously, but all in all Knight is a very readable, clear book. It’s obvious that care has gone into the editing, and in a plot-focused, fast-paced fantasy like this one, it’s important that the text not be bogged-down by too much description. I appreciated that Kontaxis knew where to place the focus, and that he kept everything concise and snappy. This is a book that, despite being on the longer side for a novella, is easy to just sit down and read.
“A sudden slamming of a door forced him to turn his head. A dozen armed soldiers wearing red cloaks had stormed into the inn.”
When we meet mercenary John the Long Arm, he’s relaxing in a tavern with a number of prostitutes.* John’s attitude toward the women is callous, instrumental, and judgemental, even as he ogles them. Set up as an unlikable protagonist, John is someone whose narrative arc could’ve gone several ways, and although there’s a degree of “breasting boobily” about the first few pages, I had some hope this might be the story of a man learning to respect the women he continuously demeans for their occupation and life circumstances. Even if awkwardly done, I gave Kontaxis the benefit of the doubt, assuming it was a matter of the text being firmly rooted in John’s POV. There’s certainly nothing wrong with depicting misogynistic or otherwise unlikable characters, and there can be value in showing the power of people to change once they’re exposed to different viewpoints (as well as the fact that some people simply don’t change, despite what we would wish for them). The issue with John’s story, as it develops, is that the text itself seems unaware that John himself is a misogynist.
When Nemesis, a physically imposing female knight, joins John alongside companions Alan and Edric, John is shown to respect her for her fortitude and prowess. Later, when we learn from Nemesis that her assignment to hunt down Gareth is a punishment for maiming her would-be rapist (a fellow soldier), John is impressed by her willingness to violently resist her assault. Although Nemesis has her own perspective chapters, these are oriented primarily around using her to convince the audience that John is a good, intelligent person who respects women. We’re told rather than shown that this is a change in Nemesis’s assessment of John, while in reality she begins to doubt her initial assumptions about him almost immediately. John is depicted, via Nemesis, as “not like other men.” The fact that he respects women who demonstrate themselves to be honourable, that he believes women shouldn’t be raped, and that he’s attracted to a physically strong woman, are put forward as proof of this. It becomes clear quite early that John’s narrative journey is not one in which he reckons with his misogyny, but a process of self-discovery during which both he and Nemesis come to value John for the fact that he’s worth more than the “whores” he’s previously limited himself to. The fact that Nemesis–a woman who is not a whore and who sees John as a good person–likes him, means we ought to like him too, and more than that, suggests to John himself that he can do “better” for himself.
The following section will spoil the ending:
I will be direct: John doesn’t respect whores, which means he doesn’t respect women. Positioned as feminist, Knight trades in a number of tired tropes and cultural assumptions about the place of women, particularly as it relates to sexuality and sexual assault. Nemesis is not only used primarily as a means of whitewashing John, she’s also predictably fridged (that is, killed to further John’s emotional arc and provide backstory) at the novella’s conclusion. After the central bad guy repeatedly threatens John with the promise that he and his men will sexually assault Nemesis, Nemesis and Gareth sacrifice themselves to defeat the villain as John looks on and blames himself for his inaction. Rather than be raped, Alys and all of the women who accompany her, suicide by throwing themselves from a cliff. Throughout Knight, women as a class are marked by their capacity and propensity to be raped or sexually assaulted. Because all of the women who are threatened by rape either kill themselves or commit violence to escape rape, there’s a pervasive sense that it is better to die than to be raped. The reality, that most victims of sexual assault are not in a position to resist, and that during warfare, men are also at risk of sexual violence, is left unaddressed. Rape is, in the text, a threat made at the expense of women to further the stakes for male characters.
I want to be emphatic in my assertion that the inclusion of rape, sexual assault, suicide, and violence against women in a story does not make a text inherently misogynistic. An author myself, I’ve included sexual assault or rape in nearly all of my long-form works, and writing about these issues is incredibly important, especially when those depictions are written by survivors. I do also get the impression, based on Kontaxis’s depiction of the idyllic village where Gareth and Alys are hiding, as well as his description of Nemesis’s would-be rapist as abhorrent, that his heart is in the right place. I don’t believe this is a case of rape as fantasy.** There is, however, a complete lack of awareness of the sum total of the ways in which Knight‘s execution reinforces harmful stereotypes about women, sexual assault, sex workers, and “nice guys.”
While I don’t recommend Knight in a general sense, its semi-finalist placement and high scores in the previous round make it clear it has its audience, and I don’t mean this to sway readers away from Kontaxis’s other writing, which may not have these same issues. I also commend Kontaxis for what seems to be an attempt to write a feminist story. I would, with all sincerity, however, recommend that if it’s a theme he wants to approach again, that he read more work by survivors–especially female survivors–of sexual assault, scholarly treatments of sexual assault (its history and contemporary statistics), as well as work by and about sex workers, and fantasies written by female authors. Although it’s clear that Nemesis is an attempt at a strong female character, she herself only serves to prop up a number of gender stereotypes, as well as to develop John as a protagonist.
*”prostitute” and “whore” are the terms used in-text, and so I use them here. Since the women John encounters and thinks about occupy the archetypal position of the whore in fiction and culture, this feels appropriate.
**there’s nothing wrong with consensual non-consent in a kink setting, including through fiction, but there is a history of using fantasy literature to thinly veil fantasies of sexual violence under the guise of having such assaults be perpetrated by villainous characters. Kontaxis does not do this, and although rape and sexual assault are frequently mentioned as threats in the text, he does not depict on-page sexual assault. The one on-page sex scene is explicitly consensual and very tame.
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