starshotediting | Starshot Editing Services

Like many people, I was introduced to Martha Wells’s work through Murderbot, but that is a review for another time. Yet in some ways I was very much reminded of Murderbot while reading Witch King, because Wells is a master at writing prickly protagonists—and no protagonist is more prickly than Kaiisteron, demon and Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth.

Witch King opens with Kai and his companion Ziede’s murders and the discovery that Ziede’s wife Tahren is missing. And Tahren played a key role in facilitating the ascension of the Rising World Coalition, an alliance of neighboring nations, after the overthrow of the conquering Hierarchs from the south. But the Coalition is at risk of failing without Tahren’s—and Kai and Ziede’s—support. Sure that both the attempts on their lives and Tahren’s disappearance are linked to someone who wants the Coalition to fail, Kai and Ziede set off to find Tahren.

Their journey takes them from the islands where they were killed to somewhere Kai never wanted to see again: the fortress where he was held captive by the Hierarchs, where he was tortured, and where he nearly died, 60 years ago. Where everything in the present began.

Witch King’s chapters alternate between the present’s quest for Tahren, and Kai’s past, from when he first came to the upper earth through his capture and emancipation at the fortress. This technique may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the novel would be poorer without it, for the journey in the present retreads the journey in the past, and provides much of the insight into Kai’s motivations and behavior. The trauma of the past lingers in the present.

This book is much more a character study than it is driven by plot, but I appreciated that—as I said, Wells is a master at writing prickly protagonists. Kai has had a rough life, and that is evident in his attitude and his mannerisms—but we also get to see the influence of the Saredi, with whom Kai lived before the Hierarchs’ invasion, and later, that of Bashasa, whom Kai meant during his captivity.

Kai doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but the influence of Bashasa cannot be overstated. While the trauma of the past might linger in the present, so too does hope for a better future.

You can read an extended excerpt on Reactor.

When Reactor first announced Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying with much fanfare—you can read the first two chapters online—I was resistant. I do not, as a rule, like the mecha subgenre of science fiction. But then my local library put it out on display for Disability Pride Month; it seemed a message from the universe. Somewhat resigned, I checked it out, and read it, and reread it. I returned the library its copy and bought my own. It burrowed into my brain and I have been thinking about it ever since.

Why? Because it’s a book about minds and bodies and what it means to inhabit them. It’s about love and hate and how easily one can become the other. It’s about how the damage of the past continues to be felt in the present.

In something like a prologue, but not quite, The Archive Undying opens with the disconcerting death of its protagonist, Sunai, during which someone else narrates, addressing Sunai in second person.

But Sunai doesn’t stay dead, and that opening chapter sets the stage for everything that comes after. Seventeen years later, Sunai sleeps with the wrong person and finds himself semi-kidnapped into a job he really shouldn’t have anything to do with, and which eventually prods him into going to the very last place he wants to go.

Because this job, headed by Dr. Veyadi Lut and financed by Wei Jin, is intimately tied to the origins of autonomous intelligence corruption, the means by which the world’s god-like AIs fell to ruin—and wrecked destruction upon all those who relied on them, Sunai included. Because, once, Sunai was archivist to the AI Iterate Fractal.

Now, by way of this job, Sunai has gained a passenger in his head, an unknown agent with an unknown agenda. It shares its thoughts in his mind, and, by extension, with his body. And it’s not the only consciousness Sunai communes with before the story is over.

Veyadi, too, has mind/body issues. He wears a visor constructed to modulate the stimulus he receives, to make the world bearable. And when Jin is injured—an injury they will not recover from—during a risky plan gone wrong, they too experience mind/body issues. The word disabled is never applied to any of these characters, but it is depicted with a practicality and matter-of-factness that accepts that bodies don’t hold up under violence. Perhaps more importantly, none of the characters are pitied for their limitations.

Candon’s greatest achievement with The Archive Undying, however, is the lyrical use of language to shift character perspectives, from second-person to third and back again. Though Sunai is the main character, his inner dialogue is never given to the reader in first-person; for the most part, the reader is left to parse his feelings by his actions and by what the narrator—who often changes—shares, making the slippery questions What is a mind? What is a body? all the more challenging.

While The Archive Undying is not an easy read, it is a rewarding one.