Before Murderbot: Martha Wells' Awesome Back Catalogue: Unsettling Futures - Issue #7
I really hate it when people pull this hipster move, but – I was into Martha Wells before it was cool.
Not that I want anyone who climbed on board with Murderbot to feel bad! Murderbot is friggin' great! We all love the social-anxiety-ridden snark-factory of a cyborg! They're the character find of the late 2010s, and I am so, so glad that Wells got a big damn hit series a quarter century into her career.
But it was a pretty great career before that. And by "pretty great," I mean "producing fantasy that was accessible to a mass readership while pushing at the boundaries of conventional worldbuilding in a way that was always ahead of her time."
What did she do before Murderbot? WELL I'M GLAD YOU ASKED, STRAP IN, GUYS!
We're going to focus on two series and one standalone novel today: The Ile Rien books, the Books of the Raksura, and the novel City of Bones (no, not that one).
Ile Rien – Detectives and faeries and REVENGE!
Wells kicked off her Ile Rien books with her debut novel, The Element of Fire, in 1993. Already, she was wandering away from the dominant mode of 1980s/90s fantasy – sure, there's swordplay and royalty and court intrigue, but the setting is rooted in parallels to 1500s/1600s courts in England and France, not to mention faeries that owe at least as much to Shakespeare as to Tolkein. (This was three years before another SFF writer would start a series based on the War of the Roses that was also notably short on heroic quests.)
Possibly most refreshing, there's gunpowder. There's a whole "black powder fantasy" sub-genre now, but in 1993, finding a fantasy protagonist wielding a gun was actively disorienting, like finding Gandalf using an iPad.
It's a fine book. I need to re-read it again!
But what I really wanted to talk about was Wells' semi-sequel, 1998's The Death of the Necromancer.
Wells does a number of sneaky things with this book. First, she skipped ahead an indeterminate number of years, so that Ile-Rien is now deep into the equivalent of the Victorian era, with hansom cabs and gas lamps (and fewer faeries – all those iron railroads have scared them off) although magic is still potent.
Second, and I didn't get this at first because I read the books out of order, protagonist Nicholas Valiarde is actually a descendant of one of the villains of The Element of Fire. And he is himself a villain, though not irredeemable. Valiarde is a master criminal, leader of one of those marvellous literary gangs that includes a gaggle of specialists – muscle, beautiful actress/con woman girlfriend, seriously drug-addicted wizard. But he's not doing it simply to be the Napoleon of Crime, he wants to get revenge on a wealthy, powerful man who framed his foster father for necromancy and had him put to death.
Unfortunately, he's derailed from his Count of Monte Cristo-ing by an actual necromancer appearing, threatening the whole city. Valiarde is forced to team up with that annoyingly clever consulting detective (and his doctor sidekick) who've been on his tail on and off for years in order to stop the greater threat.
Death of the Necromancer appeared in 1998 and was justly celebrated for its worldbuilding and characters, and was nominated for a Nebula. It's one of the (often unacknowledged) early precursors to the steampunk/gaslamp fantasy wave that would sweep through both adult and YA fantasy over the next two decades. Watching the first episode of Shadow and Bone the other day, I couldn't help but wonder if it would even exist without Death of the Necromancer.
The Ile Rien series would continue into a linked trilogy that jumped ahead another several decades, with a whole Second World War London-in-the-Blitz vibe, but the Nazis are from another dimension, and there are zeppelins and the next generation of heroes have to zip off to another world and team up with some folks there.
But we're not going to talk about those! We're going to skip back to the book Wells wrote in between The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer.
Magical engines and marsupial people
If Element of Fire and Death of the Necromancer were a bit outside the mainstream of fantasy, 1995's City of Bones was a couple of steps further. The backstory is wild, to start with. A long time ago, the world had oceans and forests, and now there's one last sea, and around it for uncountable miles in every direction, there's the Waste. Some kind of magical apocalypse broke the planet, leaving behind a landscape of lava rock, toxins, sinkholes, dunes, and really nasty poisonous/venomous/bloodsucking critters. The remaining cities are connected by ancient roads traversed by steam-powered trucks, and the enforcers of the city's overlords use both magic (highly unreliable) and air guns.
Non-humans? Sure. Our hero Khat is a krismen, a species that was magically bio-engineered around the time of the near-apocalypse to live in the Waste. He's largely immune to poison and knows his way around the monsters in the wilderness. Oh, and both male and female kris have pouches, and they can pass developing embryos back and forth between a couple so either can bring a baby to term; it also makes a handy emergency storage space for small items if you don't mind the risk of infection. Since the apocalypse wasn't total, humans are pretty suspicious of the krismen, and treat them like crap, of course. Khat, who for personal reasons, lives in the human city of Charisat, has responded to this by being prickly and often sarcastic. (Hmmm, that sounds vaguely familiar.)
The thing about City of Bones is that it's New Weird, five years before Perdido Street Station, before Shriek was a mad gleam in the eye of Jeff VanderMeer. Wells took off and followed her world-building instinct and what she got was decidedly different. For 1995 – a year in which there was plenty of good fantasy published, but about a third of it had a dragon on the cover – it definitely stood out.
And it kind of disappeared without a trace. It's not forgotten by those who read it, but it was considered insignificant enough that by 2007 Cassandra Clare's publisher was perfectly happy to kick of her urban fantasy series with exactly the same title. You don't do that if there's any chance of SEO confusion.
Hiss-bite-mate: The Books of the Raksura
Wells wrapped up her Ile Rien series in the mid-2000s, and since then has written in a variety of modes – a YA duology, a couple of Stargate tie-in novels and a Princess Leia-centered Star Wars book that sounds pretty interesting, but in 2011 she started the longest series of her career, one that would span five novels and a pair of novella collections: the Books of the Raksura.
Take one part anthropological science fiction, one part arranged marriage romance, and a giant pile of D&D Monster Manuals, put them all in a blender, and you get The Cloud Roads, the opening volume of the Books of the Raksura.
That scaly wingy clawy fellow on the cover is Moon, orphaned shapeshifter. Moon looks like a normal humanoid most of the time, but he's been all over the Three Worlds, meeting different kinds of humanoids, some with scales or fur, some with tusks or horns, some with green or blue skin, and the only ones he's met that were kinda like him were the Fell, a nasty species of cannibal monstrosities. He ran away from them and stopped trying to find his people. And then they found him.
Moon is one of the classic fantasy tropes, the lost prince. He's a consort, one of the four main castes of the Raksura. Wells goes deep into Raksuran biology and society, which provides the engine driving the books. Raksuran queens need consorts to breed, and Moon is discovered by a luckless colony that's lost almost all its own consorts. Even desperate, they're not necessarily taking him in with open arms – he's a weird, ignorant outsider, and beyond that there are conflicts between senior queen Pearl and her daughter Jade, between the winged warrior caste and the wingless arbora, between the wise magic users and the queens. And there's Stone, the last remaining consort, an aging but powerful Raksura (fantasy casting: Spencer Tracy circa Bad Day At Black Rock) who is kind of a dick as far as mentors go.
Oh, and the Fell want to kill them all. Or worse.
Wells, as always, balances an accessible and well-paced story and a relatable protagonist with wild and inventive worldbuilding. Moon is thrown into a situation that makes him anxious, snappish, and sometimes sarcastic, finding connections with his new Raksuran kin almost against his will. (OH MY GOD, I THINK IT'S A THEME?!?)
But the worldbuilding… who does this? It's a world without humans, but filled with humanoids. It's an ancient world filled with ruins, with low-level practical magic, natural magic like shapeshifting, and monsters. Not a single animal or plant is recognizably from Earth – everything is sui generis, just like the Raksura themselves.
I love it so much. This is what SFF means to me, writing without preconceived rules of what fantasy is or can do, making up the maps as you go.
The last of the Books of the Raksura came out in 2017, and Wells recently told an interviewer that the series was a gentle upswing from a point in the mid-2000s when her career had almost bottomed out. The Raksura books had their fans – there's some lovely fan art out there – but they weren't massive hits, either.
The last Raksura novel came out in 2017, and a few months later All Systems Red came out. And everybody fell in love with Murderbot, as well they should.
But if you've fallen in love with Murderbot, go back. There's nothing as rich and rewarding as finding a new favourite author with a deep back catalogue, and Wells' is deeper than most. It also, and I will die on this hill, shaped modern fantasy more than we know. Wells' books prefigured the boom in gaslamp fantasy, in New Weird, in non-Euro-dragon-quest settings that would blossom in the 2000s. Her Raksura books… well, I suspect they're sort of like the Velvet Underground. You know what they say about All Tomorrow's Parties? Only a few thousand people bought the album, but all of them formed bands. Wells' has spent more than 25 years seeding fantasy with the idea that you can do more, push farther, just follow an idea and see where it takes you.
I quite enjoy where her books have taken me over the years. Check them out.
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