Witch King (Rising World)

Product Information

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. 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 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. As with Murderbot, Witch Kingfeatures a protagonist who isn’t human but still derives some meaning from the human experience, which is a sort of character Wells really excels at writing. Kai is a non-human character who thinks and behaves in a way that feels non-human. Demons have their own culture in this story, and Kai never reads like a caricature. 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.

Popular covers

MW: You want to try to make it feel for the reader as complex as the real world is, without overwhelming them. And that's kind of the balance you have to strike. 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. 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. Witch King is the new standalone dark fantasy from acclaimed Murderbot author Martha Wells. Witch King marks her much-anticipated return to fantasy after completing her Books of the Raksura series. 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.

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. It's a decent history textbook. Not one of the really bad ones, but even good exposition is just not good enough to engage me as I expect from a fiction story. 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: 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. I am just not getting into the story. It feels like an endless and stale list of things the protagonist says and does.

Current Discussions

The scenery, the characters’ personalities and the found-family dynamics are all very Martha Wells-ish. It’s not my favourite, which is to say I’m not as invested in Kai as in some of Wells’ other protagonists, but I thought it was excellent storytelling. 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. SD: Yeah, I can see how being in Murderbot's head a bit during the pandemic could be a little anxiety-provoking. And that opening scene, of course, is so iconic. Diving right into your main character, his name is Kaiisteron, a.k.a., Kai, a.k.a., the titular Witch King. He is a demon who possesses mortal bodies, but not quite in the way that you might immediately imagine. He actually has quite a significant attachment to his first mortal body, that of a young woman named Enna. I'm so curious, what was the inspiration for this character? Why write a demon? Where did that come from? Dahin hesitated, regarding him with wary skepticism. “If you’re really Kai, tell me something only you know.” SD: Yeah, and I think a lot of sci-fi and fantasy listeners can really relate to that feeling. These worlds kind of provide us with very interesting angles to approach that theme. I appreciated that in this novel in particular. Your characters defy gender norms as well. Kai inhabits bodies irrespective of their assigned sex or gender identity during life. We also see a lot of gender norms kind of turned on their head in Witch King. A lot of nonbinary characters in your work as well. Why is that kind of representation important to you?

SD: Well, thank you so much again for your time, Martha. I can't wait to hear what our listeners think of this new adventure, of Eric Mok, of everything that you've set up here. Thank you so much for being with me today. 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: Part of my thing for it is 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.Kai is an intriguing being, as an under earth demon inhabiting a mortal host. Of course his history has lent him special traits that aren’t typically associated with demons in this world. Ziede is equally fascinating as her powers are more elemental (she controls wind spirits or devils). And Tahren, whom we travel far to meet is of another kind altogether being one of the immortal blessed. 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. SD: I'm sure. And I think he does a great job not only with the characterizations but kind of those more action-oriented scenes, really bringing up the intensity and the excitement and the anticipation during those scenes. I really enjoyed listening to him. I hope he does a lot more. Always great when you find that perfect fit, especially if you're going to have an ongoing series and ongoing characters. And I know our listeners appreciate that continuity.