Martha Wells, WITCH KING

It's pretty unusual for me to do a write-up like this and I'm not much
of a critic, so please bear with me.

Martha Wells is a seasoned writer with a long career in both adult and
YA SFF, but I had never heard of her until the Murderbot novellas
started coming out about five years ago.  I read the first one of
those and decided that, while entertaining, the setting did not
particularly interest me, and I did not bother with the subsequent
books in that series -- which obviously did not stop Wells from
winning All The Awards and getting a big streaming deal for it.

Some time in early 2023, though, I started seeing critical buzz about
a new book from Wells that *wasn't* set in the Murderbot universe.  I
am not sure whose advance review in particular prodded me -- I have no
recollection of what the reviewer might have said, but it was probably
Jo Walton or Amal El-Mohtar -- but I pre-ordered the new book, WITCH
KING.  In due time, it arrived, in an attractive first edition trade
hardcover from tordotcom, but I did not read it.  It was then
nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I got the electronic
version in the Hugo voter's packet but still did not read it.  In
fact, WITCH KING was nominated for pretty much all the awards,
although it didn't win the Hugo.

So here I was with 463, mostly unread, .epub files on my tablet, and I
really didn't want to start yet another read-through of something I
already knew by heart, and so I just went fishing through old Hugo
voter's packets and hit upon WITCH KING.  I *knew* I had bought the
book in hardcover not that long ego (recently enough that it was still
sitting in a pile on the floor rather than being properly shelved), so
it seemed as good a book as any to dig in to.

The book starts with a Map and a Dramatis Personae, neither of which
were particularly helpful or even all that intelligible without having
gotten into the main text.  That text, though, I found particularly
hard to get into until I cottoned on to the narrative structure --
Wells alternates chapters between the narrative present and a past
some unknown time ago (but within the lifetime of the characters) in
which those characters are the pricipal actors in an imperial
rebellion.  Often enough, some concept or individual is introduced
casually in the "present" without explanation, and this thread is left
hanging until the next historical chapter.  Even by the very end of
the book I still was left wondering whether the various peoples
introduced in the text are all supposed to be different races of
human, or something else.

Anyway, the action of WITCH KING follows the main character,
Kaiisteron, who is a demon, as he tries to unravel three interlocking
conspiracies that led to him and his close associate the witch Ziede
being poisoned and kept in stasis in an underwater prison.  Kai and
Ziede think they have been betrayed by someone high up in the Rising
Worlds aristocracy, someone they thought was a friend (or at least not
an enemy), but more urgently, Ziede's wife Tahren has gone missing.
Tahren is an Immortal Marshall, albeit one viewed as "fallen" by her
fellow immortals for willingly making common cause with mortals, and
her disappearance -- during the lead-up to an important
alliance-renewal ceremony that requires her presence -- suggests the
involvement of some of the other immortals in her disappearance.

I will admit to having been put off at the very opening of the story,
which begins as Kai is waking up in the underwater prison as an
inexpert mage is trying to take control of him: finding his present
body dead, he drains the life out of the mage and takes over the body
of one of the mage's servants.  This is apparently a thing that demons
do, or can do, but we are not introduced to Kai's demonic nature until
a bit later in the story and I could have used a bit more introduction
before the violence.

This is, to be fair, a fairly violent book.  There's no sex in it --
with a different editor but fairly little in the way of textual change
it could have been sold on the YA market -- but an awful lot of people
are getting killed, and the one character who can't be killed is
shrugging off a lot of what would be mortal wounds for a character who
was mortal.  (This appears to be one of those fantasy settings in
which immortals can in fact be killed, at least with the right weapon;
they just don't senesce.)  When reading an unfamiliar novel, I find
that I often have to stop reading for a while (sometimes days) before
I can work though an action scene, and I still find that I often miss
things as my eyes skim over the more uncomfortable details along with
sometimes necessary narration.  I didn't make a note of when I started
reading, but I have a vague idea that it took me about a month,
reading at most a few minutes a night for the first 200 or so virtual
pages.  (The hardcover is 414 pages; in my reader app, the .epub file
paginates to about 350.)

There's a lot about this setting that is only barely penciled in,
leaving Wells plenty of scope for additional storytelling.  She has a
sequel planned, QUEEN DEMON, to be released this October, which
according to the publisher's description, features these same
characters.

I liked these characters, somewhat to my surprise.  I'll be
pre-ordering the sequel.  (But it might take me a year or two to get
around to reading it!)

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)