Martha Wells. Skyhorse/Night Shade, $15.99 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-59780-535-3
Two novellas and two short stories expand the setting of Wells’s dreamlike fantasy novels. In “The Falling World,” a vanished envoy triggers a diplomatic crisis between two courts, and investigation reveals a long-forgotten tragedy. “The Tale of...
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Martha Wells. Tor.com, $17.99 (160p) ISBN 978-1-2501-9178-6
Three books into the far-future Murderbot Diaries, the shakier pillars of Wells’s worldbuilding are showing cracks. Equipped with knowledge of its past—but lacking armor—the sentient Murderbot, calling itself Rin, turns its focus on GrayCris, the...
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Martha Wells. Tor.com, $16.99 (160p) ISBN 978-1-250-18692-8
Wells follows the classically tight adventure pacing of All Systems Red with a slightly disorienting shift to self-exploration, making intense moments out of data dumps and matter-of-fact narrative out of fights to the death. Murderbot, a sentient...
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Martha Wells. Night Shade, $24.99 (416p) ISBN 978-1-59780-891-0
The beautiful fifth Raksura fantasy begins immediately after the events of The Edge of Worlds, tracing the various journeys of Moon, Jade, and the rest of the now-scattered Raksuran archaeological expedition as they seek to regroup, recover a lost...
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Martha Wells. Tor.com, $9.60 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-7653-9753-9
SecUnit, aka Murderbot, is a semiorganic corporate profit center, genderless and constructed of cheap parts to perform contract bodyguard services for clients who mostly don’t want them. SecUnit can choose its attitude because it has hacked its...
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Martha Wells. Night Shade, $24.99 (400p) ISBN 978-1-59780-843-9
In the beginning of this new full-length entry in Wells’s Raksura series (following 2012’s The Siren Depths), the entire community of Indigo Cloud, home to a shape-shifting race called the Raksura, has a nightmare of their world being destroyed by...
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Martha Wells. Night Shade, $14.99 trade paper (320 p) ISBN 978-1-59780-440-0
Wells’s third Books of the Raksura fantasy is rich in SF world-building and fascinating, character-driven drama. Moon is married to Jade, one of the matriarchs of the Indigo Cloud Colony, but he doesn’t quite fit in. Orphaned young and forced to...
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Martha Wells. Skyhorse/Night Shade, $15.99 trade paper (226p) ISBN 978-1-59780-537-7
Wells (The Serpent Sea) fleshes out her Books of the Raksura series in this strong short story collection. As readers follow a shape-shifting Raksura called Moon through a series of encounters, plenty of vivid descriptions help newcomers get up to...
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Martha Wells, Author . Eos $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-380-97788-8
"It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door." So begins Nebula-nominee Wells's entrancing return to...
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Martha Wells. Night Shade (Diamond, dist.), $14.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-59780-332-8
Once a clanless vagabond, Moon is now the consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud colony, but the job isn't as easy as it sounds. Fleeing the conquering Fell, the colony has returned to their ancestral forest, only to find it deserted and...
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Martha Wells, Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $15 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-59780-216-1
Moon's world is populated by many different intelligent species (none of them human), and he has never known which one he belongs to. Orphaned at a young age, he's wandered from tribe to tribe, hiding a dangerous secret. Like the universally hated...
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Martha Wells, Author Tor Books $22.95 (383p) ISBN 978-0-312-85686-1
Wells's second novel (after The Element of Fire) is a delight: an SF adventure with complex characters, archeological puzzles, a dash of mental magic and a lot of fast-paced action. Khat and his partner, Sagai, make their living finding relics that...
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Martha Wells, Author Tor Books $23.95 (413p) ISBN 978-0-312-85374-7
In this rich fantasy debut, the medieval-like country of Ile-Rien is threatened by internal turmoil and invasion by the forces of the Fayre. Ile-Rien, ruled in name by weak young King Roland but in fact by the Dowager Queen Ravenna, becomes the...
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Martha Wells, Author Eos $24 (368p) ISBN 978-0-380-97335-4
Maskelle, the Voice of the Adversary, speaks for the power the Ancestors created to destroy evil. Since a false vision years ago, she has wandered in exile, but now the Celestial One, head of the Koshan Order of priests, has called her back to the...
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Martha Wells, Author Eos $6.99 (544p) ISBN 978-0-380-78814-9
The London theater scene serves as the backdrop for Kleypas's (Somewhere I'll Find You) delightful romance set in 1833. Forced into an engagement with the repugnant Lord Clifton, Madeline knows she can gain her freedom only if she deliberately...
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Martha Wells, Author . Eos $24.95 (409p) ISBN 978-0-380-97790-1
At the start of the final volume in Wells's imaginative and complex Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy (after 2004's The Ships of Air
), her resourceful and witty heroine, Tremaine Valiarde, and a ragtag band of followers have the magic of the Viller...
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Martha Wells, Author . Eos $24.95 (408p) ISBN 978-0-380-97789-5
In Wells's fine follow-up to 2003's The Wizard Hunters
, Tremaine Valiarde emerges as one of the fantasy genre's more distinctive heroines—intelligent, wry, bitingly funny and impossible not to like. With Ile-Rien overrun by the...
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Edited by Aaron J. French. JournalStone, $24.95 trade paper (450p) ISBN 978-1-942712-56-5
French’s concept—12 stories, each focusing on a different horrific god—is an original one, but there isn’t much here to justify yet another anthology of cosmic horror inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction. Despite an impressive roster of contributors,...
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Martha Wells, Author, M. Wells, Author Eos $23 (368p) ISBN 978-0-380-97334-7
Nicholas Valiarde is a man of several parts, or roles. One is that of disenfranchised nobleman, bent on revenge for the execution of his godfather, Edouard Viller, who was falsely accused of the capital offense of necromancy by the scheming Count...
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Martha Wells. Tor.com, $26.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-250-22986-1
Hugo- and Nebula-winner Wells’s excellent first full-length Murderbot Diaries novel (after the novella Exit Strategy) sees her hilariously humanlike Artificial Intelligence Security Unit recount a routine space mission gone horribly awry. SecUnit...
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Martha Wells. Tor.com, $19.99 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-250-76537-6
Hugo and Nebula Award–winner Wells brings her solitude-craving, media-loving killer robot protagonist another step closer to independence in the entertaining sixth entry in the Murderbot Diaries series (after Network Effect). A dead body found in...
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Martha Wells. Tordotcom, $28.99 (432p) ISBN 978-1-250-82679-4
Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winner Wells takes a break from her sci-fi Murderbot series to delve into a complex secondary world fantasy exploring the past and present of Kaiisteron the Witch King, a demon in human form. The past story line follows
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Martha Wells. Tordotcom, $21.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-250-82697-8
By this point, seven books into bestselling Hugo Award winner Wells’s Murderbot series (after Fugitive Telemetry), readers come mostly for more snark from Murderbot, the killer robot with a heart of gold who narrates. So, though the mission the...
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