The Cloud Roads -and- The Serpent Sea (Three Worlds vols. 1 & 2) (Martha Wells)

[chomiji]

Moon lives on a planet peopled with a number of intelligent races, and as far as he knows, he doesn't belong to any of them. He is a shapeshifter, with one form that allows him to blend in with the various "groundlings" (terrestrial humanoid races) and another shape, winged, that bears an unfortunate resemblance to one of the variants of the rapacious, predatory beings known as the Fell. As the first book opens, Moon's latest refuge fails him (he never really expected anything else), but he is rescued from likely death by what turns out to be an elder of his own true race.

Our hero discovers that he is a Raksura, a member of a reptilian species with two major subspecies and a complicated social system. The Raksura colony to which Moon's rescuer belongs, the Court of Indigo Cloud, is on the brink of disaster, and Moon turns out to have more than one special role to play in its salvation. The first book closes with a horrifying conflict with the Fell and the decision to move the entire colony to the ancestral home only remembered by Moon's aged rescuer.

The second volume picks up exactly where the first ended. The Raksura of Indigo Cloud arrive at their new (to them) ancient home, a mountain-sized tree, and start to settle in, only to discover that the tree is dying because someone has stolen a crucial component of it. The rest of the book is taken up with a quest by Moon and a small band of the Indigo Cloud Raksura to find the missing part and restore it. The journey takes them to other Raksura courts, where they have to deal with extravagant manners and dirty politics, and to a wonderfully fantastic multi-racial city, where they must engage in espionage, combat, and sabotage so that they may take back what is rightfully theirs.

The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea (review)

Moon is a wonderfully prickly protagonist. Most of the other Raksura assume that he is a "feral solitary," an outcast who has earned banishment from his home court. He desperately wants to belong, but his experiences with other societies have always ended badly, and so he does his best to be cynical. There's some very tasty sex role reversal in what is expected of Moon and where he is meant to fit into Indigo Cloud, and the Raksura females have a wonderful level of badassery. All in all, I really enjoyed the descriptions of the Raksura society, and the exploration of the huge tree city in the second book delighted me.

The series could be described as "science fantasy." Magical powers exist, but they are handled in a very downright, non-fantastical fashion. Wells certainly knows how to move a story along. Both books swept me up and kept me reading steadily, longing to know what happened next. I'm extremely relieved to hear that a third volume is set to come out early next year, but it's going to be hard to wait!

 

Comments

[mixofsun]

Thanks for the lovely review! :) This series sounds intriguing, and I'll definitely have to check it out when I have a chance. :)

[chomiji]

They're really good! Wells doesn't get the attention she deserves, IMO.

[tessercat]

I just finished The Serpent Sea this weekend, and thoroughly enjoyed both books. I love that Raksura come in all ages, too, and that Wells doesn't shy away from dealing with aging and death. (And the fledglings! eee....)

Further comments would be spoilers, so I'll just say I'm still guarded about her handling of LGBTQ characters (mostly they're implied, except for that one...) but otherwise, I am most happily devouring these books.

Oh, and there are short stories from the same world on her website! Yay!

[chomiji]

I don't know whether you've read her other stuff. She has a positive gay character in Death of the Necromancer who continues into the "Fall of Ile Rien" trilogy.

Also, the prequel story about Chime and how he became a warrior implies that he's gay or bi, right in the very first scene when he is exasperated that Braid (male) has stumbled into his bed apparently because Braid thought it was someone else's: "That was annoying. If someone was going to invade Chime's bower, it could at least be for sex with him."

(Yes, I've read the stories on her Website! And I love her air spotter's guide to telling Raksura from Fell ... .)

[tessercat]

I haven't read any of her other stuff, although I've been poking it at since I have to wait until next January for more Raksura. *poke*

It's good to hear that she does have +ve characters, but I remain squidgy about that one in the Cloud Roads. I mean, I get all the logistics of why it had to be that way plot-wise, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not surprised about Chime. :) It's pretty obvious that he and Moon have a ... bromance (for lack of a better sum-up term). I just wish there was something more obvious in the book to counter that one plot-driving bad example.

I, uh, actually haven't read the stories yet. ^^; I need to get them onto my Kobo.

[chomiji]

Note sure if I can do this spoiler-free, but let's try. There was a rapacious opposite-sex situation too, near the end of the first book. That character just didn't have time/circumstances to get as far, but that was the intent. I agree that the scene with the first aggressor had very unfortunate implications, but I took it as part of the characterization of that group of characters: that they were exploitative and destructive on every level.