Martha Wells, City of Bones and Witch King

[beccaelizabeth]

These books didn't click with me. I like Murderbot but the fantasy worlds are doing different things. Things with gender complexities and queer people and a baseline assumption brown people exist, but, they did not click with me.

Also one of the ways they're the same is something I've read a lot of in a row lately: figure out who the bad guys are by, like, surviving them. Just the basic Captain America with his shield out detection method. Although usually there's more than one set of people trying to kill the protagonist, which keeps it lively.

I finished City of Bones against my better judgement, because the thing I thought was probably going to suck all the way through indeed did. And it is an older book, but. There's this guy they meet. And the protag takes one look in their eyes. One. And 'sees' they are 'mad'.

I kept waiting the whole rest of the book for someone to interrogate what mad even flipping means in the context, but they do not. There are magic users that can go mad. Oh look a mad one. That's... not great.

Like he wasn't exactly evil, probably, in a setting with this much murder in anyway, but it was reaffirmed repeatedly that he was mad, and I do not see how it showed that.

Can we get some symptoms up in here? Discuss categories? Have a chat about why, exactly, this society has one catch all category word and usually uses it for people they're planning to kill?

Because the only symptom ever mentioned was sometimes the mad just kill people. But in this story so does everybody else. You'd think the killing is the problem, but no, not elsewhere, it's just, look at him.

Mad.

So, not really tempted to reread this one.

It has other stuff going on, world building, non human characters, things forgotten or lost in translation with Consequences, interesting bits.
And if it's trying to say some characters stop listening when the label mad is applied, A+ achieved.
I just felt like I'd tripped over a giant stone in the middle of the story and it never picked it up.


Witch King was a bit more interesting. In a magic system literally powered by pain and death the main character decides the moral line is not using other people's pain. (Demon Prince who hops bodies of assorted configurations, gets mistaken for and dressed as a woman sometimes but the gender markers are so varied between cultures the level of does not grok is actually interesting.) Except then he'll happily eat the life force of people who were trying to kill him, or just jump into their body if he has to. And people, including 'demons' with powers potentially like him, do in fact object to this particular set of lines in the sand. But he is busy. So. Action ensues.

It has a lot of interesting, uses of magic where the show not tell on why we're not doing that is working pretty well, flashbacks to context that is only just out of most people's living memory yet fading fast, and the interaction between history and myth making is interesting.
But when I stopped reading it I stopped thinking about it until I was writing this just now.

Just didn't click for me.



I think part of the problem is whenever I like I can go back to listening new Doctor Who with the same characters I've been listening since... my whole life, come to think. It doesn't have to be a particularly deep individual story to still feel richer and more engaging with that all going on.

So take my reviews of not Doctor Who with a pinch of salt.

Comments

[senmut]

I am seeing, among my discord friends, that people either like the fantasy, or they like the Murderbot, and rarely both.