Wednesday, May 17, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Witch King by Martha Wells

 


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 30, 2023 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Witch King is the latest novel from one of my favorite SciFi/Fantasy authors, Martha Wells, who has recently hit a high mark in reader popularity and critical acclaim for her Murderbot series of SciFi novellas/novels. But, at the risk of sounding like a hipster, I was a fan of Wells even before her Murderbot success, with her Raksura series of fantasy novels featuring a group of incredible characters (Queer polyamorous shapeshifting creatures in a bee-like hierarchal society trying to survive among other fantastical creatures with their own civilizations and societies, some of which prey upon others and look similar to them) being among my faves, and her Ile-Rien series of fantasy/steampunk novels being tremendous fun as well. I've basically read every book of hers that isn't a tie-in novel (and I do want to get to those eventually) so I was super excited to hear about Wells returning to fantasy with her latest novel.

And yet I kind of wanted to love Witch King more than I actually did. The story is centered around Kai, a powerful "Demon" who the story makes clear at first was once part of a group of rebels who helped overthrow the Hierarchs, powerful and terrifying magical invaders somehow, and the story begins with him and one companion awaking to discovery they'd been unknowingly imprisoned by someone for some time, with their close friends/family members missing, and others hunting for Kai and his companion Ziede. The story then takes place over two timelines: first, the main timeline where Kai, Ziede and others they encounter search for answers while avoiding dangerous pursuers and second, a flashback timeline as to Kai's origins, his meeting with Ziede and those others, and how they began their fighting back against the Hierarchs. And while both stories have compelling moments, especially as you get a hang of the setting (which might take a few chapters), there's a substantial gap in time between those stories where relationships have clearly formed, characters have developed, and the world has changed, and as much as I enjoyed the characters here, I felt like I was badly missing that story from this novel, which would've made the developments, betrayals, and reveals more meaningful and given me a bit more to care about.

I'll try to give more specifics after the jump.


----------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------
Kai wakes up one day and knows something is wrong. He's surrounded by water and his feeling of his body feels wrong, and he doesn't know how he got there. Of the friends he is mentally connected to, he can still feel Ziede, but Ziede herself finds that she can't move and that she doesn't know where she is. And when he uses his powers to look at his body, he can tell it's been a year or around there since he was last aware, and that he's only woken up because someone is coming for him.

But Kai is no ordinary being. He is Kaiisteron, the immortal Prince of the Fourth House of the Underearth, known as a demon, the one called "Witch King", who years ago came from unknown origins to help Bashasa Calis and his allies rise in rebellion against the most dangerous and seemingly unstoppable invaders known to the world, the mysterious Hierarchs. Kai was once captured by the Hierarchs himself along with other demons, with his entire people, the Saredi, massacred around him. But when Bashasa rescued Kai, Kai found himself, Ziede, Bashasa, Tahren (a rebellious Immortal Marshall), and Tahren's lesser Blessed brother Dahin, in a desperate attempt at rebellion, one that would change the world entirely, and give him a prominence and power he never could have expected or wanted.

Now, an expositor of the kind who used to work for the Hierarchs is coming for Kai, seeking to obtain Kai's power for his own. But Kai isn't just any demon, he's The Demon. And this fool of an expositor will soon learn to regret waking Kai up from his prison and giving Kai the chance to escape, find out what happened to Tahren, Dahin, and the rest of the world, and to take action to get revenge and freedom from those who put him in this situation......
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I mentioned above the jump, Witch King's narrative is split in two: its normal chapters deal with Kai, Ziede and others they encounter as they try to figure out what happened to them and their friends and what to do about it and then it features chapters titled "The Past", which tell at first Kai's origins and then the origins of the rebellion against the Hierarches and Kai's meeting with the found family he is trying to reunite in the present story. As you might imagine, the story interposes the flashback storyline such that it reveals events just as they become relevant to the main story, and the two storylines do converge as past characters and settings recur in the present. The timelines are each written well, with prose that is very readable and easy to get into, but the epic fantasy terms and aspects of this setting are thrown at the reader pretty much from the jump of this book, and that can be disorienting to a reader who is explaining some handholding or explanations for a while. But by the time you get to the quarter-mark of this book, you should be able to understand things well enough for all intents and purposes (mostly).

The story is centered naturally around Kai, since he's the perspective everything revolves around, and Kai is an excellent character in both story arcs. In the present, Kai is enormously powerful and confident in his own powers, yet he's extremely uncomfortable with his own feelings and the world around him: after all, there was only a small group of friends he trusted, as well as the Prince he once believed in, and someone - quite possibly that Prince's successor - had to have betrayed him to get to this point....and that group of friends is mysteriously separated and AWOL. That's why the biggest concern for him and Ziede is finding Tahren - not only is she Ziede's wife, but Tahren is one of the few people Kai and Ziede can absolutely trust and care about, as opposed to this strange new world which is not quite the world Kai and his friends once wanted to build. And in the Past, Kai is not at all comfortable in his powers, especially as he gains new ones through uncomfortable manners, finds himself losing the family and people who he expected to grow up with when the Hierarchs conquer the Saredi and imprison them and is thrown abruptly into a revolution on behalf of a prince he doesn't know at all. Kai does not want to be a leader in the Past - and honestly doesn't want to be in the Present either, although he's more used to it there - but momentum carries him, a boy whose people were destroyed around him, and whose closest people - the other demons - seemingly come to reject him (for reasons that become revealed in the past). And Wells writes Kai's and other character's dialogue and actions really well, so its easy to care for him in particular and to get some of the feelings the characters are experiencing.

And yet, while I enjoyed the plot and Kai as a character, I just felt for much of the book like I was missing something, and I realized near the end what it was: that there was a whole ton of things in the setting and in development of the characters and their relationships that the book omits, and it made it hard to really care as much as I wanted to about a lot of it. There's a fifty year time gap between the past storyline and the present storyline, during which a ton of things happen in the setting that really matter to the present plot: Kai and the others finished overthrowing the Hierarchs and set up a new world order of some sort, which some call a new Empire (to Kai's distaste), but . The Prince who united Kai and everyone else has died and his successor might be the one who betrayed Kai...but we never really get to know that successor or even the world order to really care about the global politics or the betrayal for it to really make much of an impact.

And even more importantly, there's a lot of character development that happens in between the two plots, that the book relies upon despite never showing it. So Ziede and Tahren get married, and while there's glimpses of their attraction in the past, we never get their romance or Kai's growing friendship with them; Dahin has a traumatic experience that results in him breaking off from the group that is only explained briefly but has an impact, and Kai and Prince Bashasa have some kind of relationship before the Prince's death, which is alluded to and has impact but we never really get to see it.

I don't mean to sound too down on this book, since Wells does make it work. But I'd honestly rather have read the story of those 50 years and how it all came together, than the present-time storyline we get here, since those character developments are really interesting, but we only see the end results here. Without those developments on page, it just feels like we're supposed to take the characters' words about their emotions for it without us really being able to understand them, which just weakens things a bunch. Witch King is still a solid book, but I just feel like there was more in this world that I would rather have read, which is an unusual feeling for a book by Wells.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)