Witch King (Rising World)

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MW: Well, I really like writing nonhuman characters, and that's just a viewpoint that I started doing in the Books of the Raksura, and it just still really engages me, as trying to see things from the point of view of someone who has just a completely different physicality and different abilities and is really kind of separate from humanity in some ways. With Kai, what I wanted to do is, you know, the idea of the evil demon possessing bodies is really what people expect. And so the Saredi having it basically be a religious experience, a way of honoring people who die before their time, kind of came together. So, it's really much more of a consensual process. The person knows it's going to happen and it's something for the family to basically retain some of that person who was taken early. Kai, the eponymous Witch King, is a powerful demon with a necromancy-type magic enabling him to occupy the bodies of deceased mortals. As the novel opens, Kai slowly regains consciousness to find that his mortal body has been murdered and his spirit is imprisoned in some sort of water cage: MW: I think it's really important now because, again, that was something growing up in the '70s, those binary gender norms were very much enforced. And even the sort of mildest—especially when you were a kid—even the sort of mildest step outside that just really set you apart. So I really love the fact now that people are more accepting of the fact that gender isn't binary. It's a spectrum, just like sexuality is a spectrum. I want to explore it in a way I didn't get to explore it when I was younger. And doing that through different characters is just really helpful for me. Thankfully, Wells is a master at her craft, and that trust is well deserved. While it took me a couple of chapters to really get adjusted to the vastness and strangeness of Witch King’s world, it ultimately ended up adding to the sense of immersion. There’s always a strong feeling of intention behind the specific choices Wells makes in telling the story; the magic, cultures, and various creatures and bits of lore are expertly drawn. The characters are vivid and lovable, especially Ziede, who is a consistent scene-stealer. Witch Kingis simply a well-wrought fantasy book in pretty much every respect. So, you mentioned nonhuman characters. Between this novel and your past work, there is sort of a running theme of main characters, often nonhuman, who are being othered. Murderbot struggles with relating to humans, while Kai develops the strong connection to mortals, particularly the Saredi people. What draws you to this theme?

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai's magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well. Dahin hesitated, regarding him with wary skepticism. “If you’re really Kai, tell me something only you know.” Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.SD: Great. I was hoping to hear that. Because there's just so much in this novel that I think you could delve into even further. There are moments throughout where I was like, "Ooh, I want to laser in on that a little bit." And like you said, I think it stands alone as a great fantasy story, but there's definitely plenty more to be explored. Witch King alternates between two timelines. In the present day, Kai tries to piece together the puzzle of who betrayed him. The present-day timeline is interspersed with chapters from the past, showing a more powerful Kai imposing his will on the world. Clues from the past timeline help to inform the reader about the present-day narrative.

As it was, I was able to figure out who we are fighting and who we aren’t in any given scene, and that was enough to get me through the book, which is basically one long action scene with periodic pauses in which the characters read maps and argue about politics before being flung headlong into another action scene. There’s so much drama that even the quiet scenes feel like action scenes. My favorite moment in the book involved someone finally falling asleep and everyone whispering so as not to wake him up. I think I'll just pin it on terrible pacing. I am so disinterested that the bit of humor and banter didn't even make me smile once. I almost want to do like an epic fantasy series, the good parts version, where you feel all these things have happened, but you're really only seeing a slice of it." SD: Right. So, you mentioned world-building. One thing I admire about your world-building is how you allow the listener or reader to discover it sort of organically, via the characters. Tell me a little bit about how you approach world-building in your writing practice. Are you one of those people who lays it all out before you start, or does the evolution kind of happen as you go?

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MW: Yeah, I think everybody's been in situations where things were so bad you just had to laugh because there was nothing else to do except panic.

From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes a remarkable story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose. Martha Wells’s writing is solid, but Witch King suffers from slow pacing and a dense, disengaging style that makes the book a struggle to read. As a result, I never felt fully invested in the story or characters. I am just not getting into the story. It feels like an endless and stale list of things the protagonist says and does.Narrator Eric Mok makes this wonderfully inventive and diverse fantasy eminently accessible... Mok's Kai is appealing and relatableâ??he sounds simultaneously young and resigned, weary of death and pain and betrayal and yet still hopeful for something better. Listeners will hope we get more of this fascinating world."- AudioFile This is fine writing and world building. It’s easy to fall in step with Kai and Ziede and the characters who share their quest for a time. Indeed, although it is billed as a standalone novel, I think you will, as I do, hope that Kai and Ziede’s story continues in some form in the future. MW: It's a big influence. Just learning how cultures work and fit together and all the different elements that you have to take into account has really helped me in world-building. How much material culture, the things people use every day and their tools and that kind of thing, really can inform the reader of what the world is like. That's just all been really helpful. So, yeah, it's always just been me and books, basically. Books were my friend. So I think I've always been interested in characters who were in the same situation of being involuntarily isolated in a lot of different ways. And so when they do form friendships or bonds, it's very strong because they need that connection. And I think a lot of the best science fiction I've read revolves around characters like that, the best science fiction and fantasy.

MW: Oh, thank you for inviting me and I really enjoyed it. It was interesting to talk about the book. I wrote it two years ago basically, in 2020 and 2021. I've been really waiting for a long time for people to read it and talk about it and everything. WITCH KING is Martha Wells's first new fantasy in over a decade, drawing together her signature ability to create characters we adore and identify with, alongside breathtaking action and adventure, and the wit and charm we've come to expect from one of the leading writers of her generation. Kai is a fascinating character who exhibits a wry sense of humor, making Witch King fun to read in places, such as in the following exchange: And kind of the inspiration of this book was looking at a map of the world and seeing how much colonization there had been and just trying to think about the ancient world before that and what our world would look like now if the colonization hadn't happened. And thinking about how terrifying that would be, to have these people come out of nowhere and these things to happen and just this invasion for no reason out of nowhere by people you'd never heard of before. That was really the inspiration for it. And also looking at how different countries have been taken over by others and what that process was like. Because in the book, the Ariki are basically infiltrated first. They were a fairly powerful culture and they were infiltrated first, where others that were not as well armed, not as well organized, were just swept over and destroyed. So yeah, just looking at all that stuff and just thinking about how that would affect the world I wanted to create.

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I am having trouble putting my finger on what precisely the problem with this one is but it just drags horribly. The book begins with Kai, the Witch King, awakening in a watery prison. He has to escape, find his friends, and figure out how he ended up there. The story alternates chapters set in the past and chapters set in the present. The reader is dropped into the middle of events, and information about the history and context is spread out throughout the book.