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One of my favourite authors is going through some house-related financial issues, so I thought I would take a chance and do a little story pimping! She has a lot of her older works self-published as e-books, and they're all a: good books! and b: cheap!
Martha Wells has a quite diverse array of works published, from victorian-ish fantasy adventures to secondary-world science-fantasy, TV franchise tie-in books, and non-fiction essays about various popular nerd shows. The first book of hers I ever read was City of Bones, which I bought through the Science Fiction Book Club. It may have even been one of those books I wound up with because I forgot to tell them not to send it, but I was really glad, in the end! I still have that copy (signed now!), though I made sure to lend it to other friends, and it spend a lot of my highschool years in the hands of others. I knew she had another book out, but was never able to track it down (this was before Amazon.com was a Thing!). The story was based around archaeology and the antiquities trade in a post-apocalyptic desert fantasy worlds, and involved some really interesting world and fantasy building, with genetic engineering and magic and class conflict and really all sorts of interesting nuggets all tied up in a captivating stand-alone plot. I loved the hell out of it!
Flashforward a few years to one of the friends I'd made read the book waving a copy of The Death of the Necromancer in my face gleefully! Another book! A wonderful book! This is the Victorian Gaslight Fantasy one - the first of the Ile-Rien novels that I came across, though The Element of Fire is both set earlier and was published first. Once again we have really engaging characters, including an actress/spy with faerie heritage, a Moriarty-like super-criminal and an opium-addled sorcerer...as our protagonists! This story is full of magic and intrigue and plotting and revenge. Although it is more close to our historical modern world in some ways, Ile-Rien, in all the books, has a really rich feeling to it.
The Fall of Ile-Rien series is set about 20-25 years after this, and is centered on the child of the two main characters from DotN. That said, you don't need to have read DotN to get in to it - I know plenty of people who have read it but not the earlier books, and gotten through just fine! The series is a proper trilogy, with three books: The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of Gods. The book is set partly in Ile-Rien, and partly in another world - in fact it deals with interdimensional warfare, and has lots of cool world building and a lot more steampunk-y elements. Steampunk meets Sword and Sorcery, even, with all the fun culture clashes you can imagine out of that! Although I love Ile-Rien, I really love the culture and world building she does for the other places - especially Cinneth, a coastal, matriarchal culture with a living god whose champion goes about ridding the world of evil sorcerers... I'm really not doing a very good job at describing these, I think. But they were a ton of fun, with lots of great characters from all the worlds, and lots of good action and adventure and intrigue, and a great mix of magic and technology to read about, including the interactions between the two.
I have really really enjoyed her latest series, The Books of the Raksura, as well. This is more secondary world stuff - not a human in sight, but lots of different neat species! The main one we read about is of course the Raksura, who are dragon-like shape-shifters. The world and culture building here is really, well.. fantastic! The books are all self-contained adventures, but the social and character plots, as well as some overarching world-related issues, span all three novels in the series. The first book, The Cloud Roads introduces us to the Raksura though Moon, the protagonist and point of view character of all three books. Moon doesn't know much about the Raksura, and his own life experiences, before he finds his own people, give him a very unique perspective on things - and he isn't always correct about his assumptions, which make him an interesting narrator to follow along with. In the following books, The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths, Moon continues to learn to live with them, and deal with various threats to his new community as they search for and settled into a new home for the colony. I love the Raksura, and the complex social world they live in - even if Moon doesn't always seem to care for it himself :D There are a lot of really great support characters here, including especially Jade, the colony's daughter queen and Moon's main love interest, Chime, another Raksura who doesn't quite fit in, and Stone, the elder Raksura who finds Moon and acts like a curmudgeonly father figure and mentor.
There are more books linked from her site, as well - these are just my favourites! Most of them are out of print in paper, but they are pretty much all available as e-books and also audio books! really each of these books and series could stand to have a rambling long post of their own, but as I should be working on other things, so I will leave it at that! Hopefully someone else out there will be intrigued by some of this anyway, and want to pick something up :)
Martha Wells has a quite diverse array of works published, from victorian-ish fantasy adventures to secondary-world science-fantasy, TV franchise tie-in books, and non-fiction essays about various popular nerd shows. The first book of hers I ever read was City of Bones, which I bought through the Science Fiction Book Club. It may have even been one of those books I wound up with because I forgot to tell them not to send it, but I was really glad, in the end! I still have that copy (signed now!), though I made sure to lend it to other friends, and it spend a lot of my highschool years in the hands of others. I knew she had another book out, but was never able to track it down (this was before Amazon.com was a Thing!). The story was based around archaeology and the antiquities trade in a post-apocalyptic desert fantasy worlds, and involved some really interesting world and fantasy building, with genetic engineering and magic and class conflict and really all sorts of interesting nuggets all tied up in a captivating stand-alone plot. I loved the hell out of it!
Flashforward a few years to one of the friends I'd made read the book waving a copy of The Death of the Necromancer in my face gleefully! Another book! A wonderful book! This is the Victorian Gaslight Fantasy one - the first of the Ile-Rien novels that I came across, though The Element of Fire is both set earlier and was published first. Once again we have really engaging characters, including an actress/spy with faerie heritage, a Moriarty-like super-criminal and an opium-addled sorcerer...as our protagonists! This story is full of magic and intrigue and plotting and revenge. Although it is more close to our historical modern world in some ways, Ile-Rien, in all the books, has a really rich feeling to it.
The Fall of Ile-Rien series is set about 20-25 years after this, and is centered on the child of the two main characters from DotN. That said, you don't need to have read DotN to get in to it - I know plenty of people who have read it but not the earlier books, and gotten through just fine! The series is a proper trilogy, with three books: The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, and The Gate of Gods. The book is set partly in Ile-Rien, and partly in another world - in fact it deals with interdimensional warfare, and has lots of cool world building and a lot more steampunk-y elements. Steampunk meets Sword and Sorcery, even, with all the fun culture clashes you can imagine out of that! Although I love Ile-Rien, I really love the culture and world building she does for the other places - especially Cinneth, a coastal, matriarchal culture with a living god whose champion goes about ridding the world of evil sorcerers... I'm really not doing a very good job at describing these, I think. But they were a ton of fun, with lots of great characters from all the worlds, and lots of good action and adventure and intrigue, and a great mix of magic and technology to read about, including the interactions between the two.
I have really really enjoyed her latest series, The Books of the Raksura, as well. This is more secondary world stuff - not a human in sight, but lots of different neat species! The main one we read about is of course the Raksura, who are dragon-like shape-shifters. The world and culture building here is really, well.. fantastic! The books are all self-contained adventures, but the social and character plots, as well as some overarching world-related issues, span all three novels in the series. The first book, The Cloud Roads introduces us to the Raksura though Moon, the protagonist and point of view character of all three books. Moon doesn't know much about the Raksura, and his own life experiences, before he finds his own people, give him a very unique perspective on things - and he isn't always correct about his assumptions, which make him an interesting narrator to follow along with. In the following books, The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths, Moon continues to learn to live with them, and deal with various threats to his new community as they search for and settled into a new home for the colony. I love the Raksura, and the complex social world they live in - even if Moon doesn't always seem to care for it himself :D There are a lot of really great support characters here, including especially Jade, the colony's daughter queen and Moon's main love interest, Chime, another Raksura who doesn't quite fit in, and Stone, the elder Raksura who finds Moon and acts like a curmudgeonly father figure and mentor.
There are more books linked from her site, as well - these are just my favourites! Most of them are out of print in paper, but they are pretty much all available as e-books and also audio books! really each of these books and series could stand to have a rambling long post of their own, but as I should be working on other things, so I will leave it at that! Hopefully someone else out there will be intrigued by some of this anyway, and want to pick something up :)
lazy