by Rory Harper

You want to know how you can tell that a story is Really Good? Here's the secret - you read it, and then let the memories simmer and bleach out for a couple of years. Then, when you consider it again, do you remember the plot-line more or the people that you got to know in it? Making good plots isn't easy, but making genuine people is art. If it was the people you remember, the writer did something Really Hard and wrote a Really Good book.

Martha Wells is a Texas writer with a spreading reputation for writing intelligent, inventive, and Really Good fantasy. Her novels seem to travel well, having been published in French, Italian, Russian, German, Bulgarian, Dutch, and Polish. If there's a central similarity distinguishing all her books it is that the extraordinary places they occur in are as important characters as the complex people who inhabit them. They're all intricately plotted and textured, but stylistically transparent. You feel that you're in a real place, watching real things happening.

Her first book, Element of Fire (1993), is set in Ile-Rien, a world much like 17th century France, though in it sorcery, magic, and the world of Faery are quite real. The words 'magic' and 'Faery' instantly evoke all sorts of clichéd images in our heads, but Martha declines to replicate any of those images in the book, instead giving us a treatment much more original - and interesting. Its protagonists, Thomas Boniface, Captain of the Queen's Guard, and Kade Carrion, renegade fairy, are witty, cynical, unpredictable, and deeply human. (Oddly enough, Martha is all of these things, too? Many readers consider Element a classic of its kind. It was a finalist for the 1993 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award, and a runner-up for the 1994 Crawford Award.

Martha followed it with something completely different. City of Bones (1995) isn't like any other book you've ever met. Its main character is Charisat, the vibrant, multi-tiered city that dominates the Great Waste. Charisat's world was largely destroyed a few millennia ago, and life is now hard and dangerous at best. Especially for Khat, savage from the Waste, thief, and dealer in antiquities. He and his partner Sagai are unwillingly drawn into a search for crucial Remnants of the Ancients that may finally save or destroy their world.

The Death of the Necromancer (1998) is set in cosmopolitan Viene, capital of Ile-Rien. We encounter Nicholas Valiarde, driven to make himself the secret master of Ile-Rien's criminal underworld so that he might destroy the men whose false accusations of necromancy ruined his father. Then he finds something so terrifying that he must forgo his plans for revenge. He turns to his friend Arisilde, the opium-addicted, disconnected-from-reality-as-we-know-it wreck who perhaps still is the most powerful wizard who ever lived. The Death of the Necromancer was a 1998 Nebula Nominee, made the Library Journal Best Genre Fiction of 1998 List, and, this year, the French edition was a Nominee for the First Annual Imaginales Award.

Wheel of the Infinite (2000) is an exotic travelog. We accompany Maskelle through the glorious Celestial Empire, which isn't 12^th century Cambodia. Maskelle, dark and subtle and acidic, is still the Voice of the Adversary, even though she's been exiled for more than a decade. Now she must once more return to the intrigues of Duvalpore, the capital, because the Wheel, which must be remade every year to mirror and establish all reality, has gone horrendously wrong. Rian is the misplaced swordsman who accidentally joins her caravan of traveling thespians. And let's not forget the damned demon-possessed puppet.

Martha's currently working on the second novel in a trilogy that begins twenty years after the events in The Death of the Necromancer. Civilization may fall under the onslaught of the mysterious Gardier, whose terrifying airships defy the weapons, sorcerous and otherwise, of Ile-Rien.

The first novel in the series, The Wizard Hunters, will be published next July. I've read it already. It's Really Good. You're going to like Ilias and Giliead, whose hobby is killing homicidal wizards, and, most of all, Tremaine, the suicidal, sharp-edged, and dangerously self-reliant daughter of Nicholas Valiarde, as they struggle to save Ile-Rien (and other worlds) from destruction and enslavement.

Martha lives in College Station with Troyce Wilson, her tidy and endearing husband. More about her and her work can be found at www.charisat.com. She was the chairman of the legendary AggieCon 17, and is still active in multiple fan communities.


© Rory Harper 2002