Hugos 2024: Witch King by Martha Wells

Witch King by Martha Wells

People sometimes ask me if I like fantasy as much as I like science fiction. My usual answer is that I like both—but if you had two stories, one sf and one fantasy, and all else was equal between the two of them, I am more likely to enjoy the sf one than the fantasy one. I think what this comes back to is the definition of science fiction by China Miéville that I am always citing around here: "rationalized alienation." Science fiction worlds are different from our world, but on rational lines. (Darko Suvin calls this "cognitive estrangement.") Part of the pleasure of reading is figuring out the world; as Jo Walton has said, "SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting."

Originally published: 2023
Acquired and read: July 2024

But a murder mystery needs to provide logical clues in order to be pleasurable, otherwise the reader has no chance of figuring out the solution. The same is true, I would argue, of sf&f. Thus, I can often (though not always) struggle with fantasy fiction; if the alienation is not rationalized, if the estrangement is not cognitive, then what chance do I have to understand the world? In fantasy, which is based on magic, anything can go—and what fun is a mystery where anything can go? Now, you might argue this is all in my head: certainly fantasy stories follow their own internal logic (sometimes too much), and most science fiction (as Miéville also admits) isn't really based on science. But my head is where the experience of reading takes place, so if it's all in my head, it's still going to affect my reading.

All of this is to say that Witch King embodies everything that makes me bounce off (some) fantasy novels. Lots of weird names, lots of backstories, lots of characters, lots of relationships, lots of places, lots of powers and gods and magic and stuff. Now, if this was science fiction, I might have felt like I had a chance of figuring it all out, of working out the mystery that makes the world operate. But since it's fantasy, it just felt like an onslaught of obscurity. I was never able to figure out who most of these people were, or what they were doing, or why I should care. It has two parallel narratives, one of which fills in relevant history for the other, but I found this obscured rather than clarified; it has a chart of characters in the front, but this made me struggle even more to remember who everyone was as it overwhelmed me with details.

It's possible this is a good novel. Certainly, some people think it's a great novel; I did, after all, read it because it received enough nominations to make it onto the Hugo ballot. It is, however, the very specific kind of novel that I find it difficult to engage with. Be this Martha Wells's fault or not, I got nothing out of this novel at all.