★★★★☆ Embrace the confusion!

Witch King

Martha Wells

In 1995 I saw the Film Ghost in the Shell. It was a formative experience for me. The film was incredibly confusing -- cyborgs and thermoptic camouflage and international plots and sentient net intelligences and wheels within plots within wheels within plots. When it was over I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. But I was mortally certain of one thing: I LOVED it!

What I didn't know at the time was that This Was How It Was Going To Be From Now On. Since then all major science fiction and most fantasy novels have been like that. I expect when I read a new one not to know what's going on. (Consider recent reads Children of Memory, Myriad, or grand-prize winner, the entirety of Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb Series.) In fact, it is now at the point where, if I understand a new F&SF novel on the first read, I feel cheated.

Martha Wells's Witch King does not disappoint in this regard. Hierarchs and Expositors and Witches and Demons and cantrips and intentions -- what are all these things? And, basic question -- are there Good guys, and Bad guys, and who are they? I sometimes complain when novels contain "infodumps". (See, e.g., my review of The Bone Wars.) But at about 20% of Witch King, I was saying to myself, "An infodump right now would be awfully handy." I didn't get one. But by about 50% it began to make sense, and when I reached the end, I had a not-entirely-incoherent overview of the whole story. It'll need a re-read.

Why is Witch King confusing? Well, there is a complicated and never-explained magic system, and a society with many different types of magical creatures whose powers and political relationships are only retrospectively explained. But that, of course, is all in a day's work for the modern F&SF reader. What makes Witch King really tough is the dual timelines. There are 26 chapters. Sixteen are named Chapter One, ..., Chapter Sixteen. But Chapter Three is not the third chapter -- it is the fourth. The Third chapter is called "The Past: The Beginning". There are ten of these chapters called "The Past: [some title]", and they are scattered throughout the book. The explicitly numbered chapters One through Sixteen are about events in what you can, if you like, call The Present -- a time later than The Past. The Past, of course, provides the background for The Present. When you start reading, you don't know this background. When I reread this I plan to try reading the ten Past chapters first, followed by Chapters One through Sixteen.

The central character of Witch King is the demon Kaiisteron (usually shortened to Kai). Kai is of course a Good Guy, pretty much by definition, since it is from his point of view that we see things. Besides being a total badass, Kai is in the business of helping his friends, for instance, a witch called Ziede. Kai never seems to have a plan -- he just seems to be making things up as he goes along. But Kai is an old and crafty demon -- do not trust that appearance of planless spontaneity.

So, Witch King is a challenging but intriguing story with an appealing hero.

I thank NetGalley and Tor for an advance reader copy of Witch King. This review expresses my honest opinions. To be released 30-May-2023.

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