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In which I read Martha Wells
Huh, I totally forgot to repost my first review of Martha Wells's fantasy books here back in March, so have two posts in one. First post: Witch King and the first three Raksura books.
I really enjoyed the Murderbot books, so I obtained some of Martha Wells's fantasy to see if they were any good. So far, I have read Witch King, and the first three books of the Raksura series. And I've decided to get all the rest of her fiction.
Witch King takes a rather standard kind of fantasy premise - the struggle of numerous small polities against an empire of murderous necromancers bent on conquering the known world - but it subverts it right away by making the protagonist, Kai, a body-stealing, soul eating demon from the netherworld... who is not evil. This is a "what happened after the end of the story" sort of book - the rebellion against the necromancers is told, briefly, in flashback chapters, while the bulk of the novel focuses on Kai's struggle, eighty years later, to survive after he is kidnapped and entombed by someone seeking to get him out of the way so they can engage in political machinations without his interference - said machinations being deeply embedded in the post-necromancer political order. Another subversion of expectations: despite being extremely powerful and effectively immortal, Kai is not the leader of either the rebellion that overthrew the necromancers in the past, nor is he head of the coalition (of former anti-necromancer allies) that has taken the place of that empire eighty years later.
As with Murderbot, there's no default whiteness here - this is a world with lots of different peoples with varied appearances and skin tones. Also: Kai is originally brought up from the underworld to reanimate the body of a recently dead girl. This is the custom among the grassland nomads who have an arrangement with the underworld: the demons they summon take over the economic role of the dead person whose body they inhabit. For Kai, that includes, once his body finishes growing into adulthood, giving birth to the children of the girl whose place he has taken. Nonetheless, everyone in the community treats him as the male that he is.
So: Witch King. Four stars, no notes. It's good.
As for the first three books of the Raksura series (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and The Siren Depths):
The good: This is a unique fantasy setting. An old world with thousands of different sapient species, where you can't throw a rock without hitting the ruins of yet another long-forgotten civilization, including flying islands with long abandoned cities on them. There are no humans here - the closest equivalent, "groundlings," are human-ish bipeds, but they come in a vast array of skin colours including green and blue. Some have scales, some fur, some skin. Other non-human features are noted.
The viewpoint protagonist, Moon, pretends to be a groundling and lives among them, but he's actually a shapeshifter, and in his other form he's a sort of flying lizard. Moon is an orphan who lost his foster mother as a child. He has no idea what species he belongs to, until he meets another shapeshifting flyer like himself, who tells him that he's a Raksura, and invites him to come join the Indigo Cloud tribe.
The not so good: I spent a large chunk of the first book wanting to slap some sense into Moon. True, he's deeply traumatized by his childhood and long life in hiding, and he suddenly finds himself in a situation where everyone around him expects him to know how to be a Raksura (which he most definitely does not). It's entirely realistic and in character for him to act like an immature fool, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to me when he does so.
Despite frequently putting it down because I was fed up with the protagonist being an ass, I finished the first book. The second had distinctly fewer "Moon being annoying" bits, and I gobbled it up. I'm now starting the third, in which Moon finds himself in danger of losing the place he found among Indigo Cloud (his birth mother, queen of a different colony, wants him to come live with her, and Indigo Cloud, by custom, cannot refuse). He reacts by once again being very annoying. Once I finish book three, I'll probably take a break from the Raksura series before coming back to it.
Overall: Three stars. Has a sometimes annoying protagonist but worthwhile nonetheless.
Final observations: Wells is very good at cluing you in without infodumps. She also writes very friendly series, in which each book is a self-contained story with a satisfactory ending.
The Emilie Adventures, and the rest of the Raksura series:
Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World are a pair of steampunk fantasy YA novels, republished this year in an affordable omnibus edition. But since this is Martha Wells, it's not "19th century England but with airships and magic." The customs, technology, and units of measurement are from 1880-1910 England or America (with some indications that Emilie's world has slightly less sexism than the 19th century), but it's an original fantasy world seemingly without colonialism, a history of race-based slavery, or Christianity. Emilie is a southern Menaen, with brown skin and dark hair. Northern Menaens are pale and blond, they live and work together in the cities we see, and there's no indication that these differences have any meaning to them beyond "where someone's ancestors were from." The world has other lands and peoples but they're barely mentioned.
Emilie and her brothers are orphans living with their stifling aunt and uncle. The first novel opens with relations between Emilie and her adult relatives having already reached the breaking point. She's run away from home with plans to take a steamship to the place where her cousin runs a boarding school for girls. Things go awry on the docks and Emilie ends up on a private steamship which is embarking on a rescue expedition, using aether magic to travel beneath the ocean, through a rift in the sea floor to the hollow interior of the world. Aetheric sorcerer professor Marlende's expedition to the hollow world is in trouble, and his daughter has recruited Lord Engal to take his steamship down there to find them. Complicating this is Lord Ivers, who is willing to murder the other aetheric travellers if that's what it takes to ensure that he will get credit with the philosophical society for the discovery of the hollow world. Further muddling things, on the seas of the hollow world, a fading empire of merpeople are at war with their breakaway outer provinces, and the upper worlders find themselves caught in the middle. Despite all that, the novel is brisk paced and not very long.
The first novel ends with the survivors of the various expeditions back on the surface. Emilie has a new job as assistant to Miss Marlende, and just needs to visit her cousin, and through her, inform her family of what became of her before beginning her duties. Daniel, a member of professor Marlende's crew, needs to visit his mentor in the town where Emilie's cousin lives, so they disembark together.
The second novel begins seconds after the first ends. After visiting Emilie's cousin (and a very minimal recap of the first book for those who haven't read the first volume), they visit Professor Abindon, who has been trying to communicate with the Marlendes for some time about her discovery of a concerning aetheric rift in the sky. Despite an attempt by her uncle to drag her back home, Emilie quickly finds herself on a new adventure, this time on an airship far above the earth.
Throughout both books, Emilie's bravery and stubborn refusal to give up in the face of adversity are quite charming. Definitely recommended.
I have also finished reading all of Wells' Raksura books. After the first three volumes, each of which stands alone, there are two slim short story collections (Stories of the Raksura 1 and 2), then a single novel published in two books (The Edge of Worlds and Harbors of the Sun). They are also good and recommended. I found the protagonist, Moon, annoying in the first and third volumes, but he thankfully matures greatly over the course of those books and no longer acts like an immature fool in the later books.
The setting of the Raksura books is kind of like the Star Wars universe, in that you have a world with all these wildly different species of bipeds living together, except every so often a gigantic predator jumps out of hiding and tries to eat them. Don't ask how the people manage to survive with so many people eating predators lurking about the landscape, just enjoy the scenes in which our heroes battle the predators and kill them before they can eat any of the main characters.
I just wish that Wells had not chosen to make Raksuran society caste-based, make the caste system determined by genetics rather than custom, and finally give them a monarchical system of government. Can fantasy authors please write more stories about democracies, or anarcho-communist polities (possibly with a vestigial monarch as head of state), or really, anything other than yet more monarchies in which one's place in life is determined by genetics? Because we're getting far too much of that bullshit in the real world these days.
I really enjoyed the Murderbot books, so I obtained some of Martha Wells's fantasy to see if they were any good. So far, I have read Witch King, and the first three books of the Raksura series. And I've decided to get all the rest of her fiction.
Witch King takes a rather standard kind of fantasy premise - the struggle of numerous small polities against an empire of murderous necromancers bent on conquering the known world - but it subverts it right away by making the protagonist, Kai, a body-stealing, soul eating demon from the netherworld... who is not evil. This is a "what happened after the end of the story" sort of book - the rebellion against the necromancers is told, briefly, in flashback chapters, while the bulk of the novel focuses on Kai's struggle, eighty years later, to survive after he is kidnapped and entombed by someone seeking to get him out of the way so they can engage in political machinations without his interference - said machinations being deeply embedded in the post-necromancer political order. Another subversion of expectations: despite being extremely powerful and effectively immortal, Kai is not the leader of either the rebellion that overthrew the necromancers in the past, nor is he head of the coalition (of former anti-necromancer allies) that has taken the place of that empire eighty years later.
As with Murderbot, there's no default whiteness here - this is a world with lots of different peoples with varied appearances and skin tones. Also: Kai is originally brought up from the underworld to reanimate the body of a recently dead girl. This is the custom among the grassland nomads who have an arrangement with the underworld: the demons they summon take over the economic role of the dead person whose body they inhabit. For Kai, that includes, once his body finishes growing into adulthood, giving birth to the children of the girl whose place he has taken. Nonetheless, everyone in the community treats him as the male that he is.
So: Witch King. Four stars, no notes. It's good.
As for the first three books of the Raksura series (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and The Siren Depths):
The good: This is a unique fantasy setting. An old world with thousands of different sapient species, where you can't throw a rock without hitting the ruins of yet another long-forgotten civilization, including flying islands with long abandoned cities on them. There are no humans here - the closest equivalent, "groundlings," are human-ish bipeds, but they come in a vast array of skin colours including green and blue. Some have scales, some fur, some skin. Other non-human features are noted.
The viewpoint protagonist, Moon, pretends to be a groundling and lives among them, but he's actually a shapeshifter, and in his other form he's a sort of flying lizard. Moon is an orphan who lost his foster mother as a child. He has no idea what species he belongs to, until he meets another shapeshifting flyer like himself, who tells him that he's a Raksura, and invites him to come join the Indigo Cloud tribe.
The not so good: I spent a large chunk of the first book wanting to slap some sense into Moon. True, he's deeply traumatized by his childhood and long life in hiding, and he suddenly finds himself in a situation where everyone around him expects him to know how to be a Raksura (which he most definitely does not). It's entirely realistic and in character for him to act like an immature fool, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to me when he does so.
Despite frequently putting it down because I was fed up with the protagonist being an ass, I finished the first book. The second had distinctly fewer "Moon being annoying" bits, and I gobbled it up. I'm now starting the third, in which Moon finds himself in danger of losing the place he found among Indigo Cloud (his birth mother, queen of a different colony, wants him to come live with her, and Indigo Cloud, by custom, cannot refuse). He reacts by once again being very annoying. Once I finish book three, I'll probably take a break from the Raksura series before coming back to it.
Overall: Three stars. Has a sometimes annoying protagonist but worthwhile nonetheless.
Final observations: Wells is very good at cluing you in without infodumps. She also writes very friendly series, in which each book is a self-contained story with a satisfactory ending.
The Emilie Adventures, and the rest of the Raksura series:
Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World are a pair of steampunk fantasy YA novels, republished this year in an affordable omnibus edition. But since this is Martha Wells, it's not "19th century England but with airships and magic." The customs, technology, and units of measurement are from 1880-1910 England or America (with some indications that Emilie's world has slightly less sexism than the 19th century), but it's an original fantasy world seemingly without colonialism, a history of race-based slavery, or Christianity. Emilie is a southern Menaen, with brown skin and dark hair. Northern Menaens are pale and blond, they live and work together in the cities we see, and there's no indication that these differences have any meaning to them beyond "where someone's ancestors were from." The world has other lands and peoples but they're barely mentioned.
Emilie and her brothers are orphans living with their stifling aunt and uncle. The first novel opens with relations between Emilie and her adult relatives having already reached the breaking point. She's run away from home with plans to take a steamship to the place where her cousin runs a boarding school for girls. Things go awry on the docks and Emilie ends up on a private steamship which is embarking on a rescue expedition, using aether magic to travel beneath the ocean, through a rift in the sea floor to the hollow interior of the world. Aetheric sorcerer professor Marlende's expedition to the hollow world is in trouble, and his daughter has recruited Lord Engal to take his steamship down there to find them. Complicating this is Lord Ivers, who is willing to murder the other aetheric travellers if that's what it takes to ensure that he will get credit with the philosophical society for the discovery of the hollow world. Further muddling things, on the seas of the hollow world, a fading empire of merpeople are at war with their breakaway outer provinces, and the upper worlders find themselves caught in the middle. Despite all that, the novel is brisk paced and not very long.
The first novel ends with the survivors of the various expeditions back on the surface. Emilie has a new job as assistant to Miss Marlende, and just needs to visit her cousin, and through her, inform her family of what became of her before beginning her duties. Daniel, a member of professor Marlende's crew, needs to visit his mentor in the town where Emilie's cousin lives, so they disembark together.
The second novel begins seconds after the first ends. After visiting Emilie's cousin (and a very minimal recap of the first book for those who haven't read the first volume), they visit Professor Abindon, who has been trying to communicate with the Marlendes for some time about her discovery of a concerning aetheric rift in the sky. Despite an attempt by her uncle to drag her back home, Emilie quickly finds herself on a new adventure, this time on an airship far above the earth.
Throughout both books, Emilie's bravery and stubborn refusal to give up in the face of adversity are quite charming. Definitely recommended.
I have also finished reading all of Wells' Raksura books. After the first three volumes, each of which stands alone, there are two slim short story collections (Stories of the Raksura 1 and 2), then a single novel published in two books (The Edge of Worlds and Harbors of the Sun). They are also good and recommended. I found the protagonist, Moon, annoying in the first and third volumes, but he thankfully matures greatly over the course of those books and no longer acts like an immature fool in the later books.
The setting of the Raksura books is kind of like the Star Wars universe, in that you have a world with all these wildly different species of bipeds living together, except every so often a gigantic predator jumps out of hiding and tries to eat them. Don't ask how the people manage to survive with so many people eating predators lurking about the landscape, just enjoy the scenes in which our heroes battle the predators and kill them before they can eat any of the main characters.
I just wish that Wells had not chosen to make Raksuran society caste-based, make the caste system determined by genetics rather than custom, and finally give them a monarchical system of government. Can fantasy authors please write more stories about democracies, or anarcho-communist polities (possibly with a vestigial monarch as head of state), or really, anything other than yet more monarchies in which one's place in life is determined by genetics? Because we're getting far too much of that bullshit in the real world these days.