Donald Maass Literary Agency

Locus: Witch King and now Queen Demon are the mature, accomplished work of a writer at the peak of their powers, one whose interest in consequences, power, responsibility, and rebuilding in the wake of destruction – personal, social, societal, epochal – is here both given breadth and depth and sharpened to a series of exquisite points.

This is a fantastic novel, set in a fascinating world with truly compelling characters. It is shot through with grief, with the reverberations of destruction and the aftermaths of trauma: While the past timeline gives us emotional focus on the characters’ griefs, immediate traumas, and desperate choices, the present makes plain the extent of the Hierarchs’ destruction of the rest of the world, the scars in the landscape, in societies, in the vanishing of entire cultures.

But while Wells explores grief, survival, and persistence after mass destruction, she’s also using, in part, the classic structure and furniture of epic fantasy: the quest, the object of power, the threat to the whole of the world. Yet her argument is not, unlike many epic fantasies, that evil is a force that is extrinsic to people, a  corruption that arises separate from their choices. The destructive selfishness that makes other people pay the price for your power, that produces an ideology of supremacy and enacts it in violence, is not a single choice but a whole series of choices, personal choices but also social choices of what to build and what to tear down, what to support, and when. A critical orientation towards the genre’s furniture is present throughout: Before anything else, this is a novel, and Wells is an author, engaged in thinking deeply about the world we live in, and the world she’s made.

Queen Demon is a powerful work of art. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.

— Liz Bourke

Reactor: Holy shit, what a book.

I’ve been waiting with unalloyed anticipation for Elizabeth Bear’s next White Space novel since 2020’s Machine. That novel is The Folded Sky. Part thriller, part murder mystery, and part Big Ideas Space Opera Adventure, it’s entirely worth the wait.

If there’s a single through-line that unites the White Space books, it’s that they’re about competent people who are good at their jobs, who encounter serious problems in the course of their professional lives. Those problems have significant consequences and ramifications, personal and otherwise, and compassion, co-operation, and thoughtfulness are usually as key to solving them as quick reflexes, daring, and resolve. They’re fundamentally adult books, inhabiting and inhabited by all the complexities of adult life, that display—and, indeed, argue for—a moral view of the world that I can best describe as a kind of pragmatic hopefulness.

(Also the protagonists to date have all been queer women who can kick professional ass and take names.)

The Folded Sky is part mystery novel and part action thriller. (Some of its mysteries are worldbuilding mysteries. The Baomind is a fantastic piece of worldbuilding/character.) The mysteries are peeled back in layers as the action mounts with ever-increasing tension. Explosive peril gives rise to some truly excellent action sequences, as matters mount from crisis to… worse. Sunya doesn’t believe that she’s brave. But when push comes to shove, she’ll leap into the terrifying void to save her loved ones—and even people she doesn’t love, for that matter.

The Folded Sky is a novel I love and admire in about equal proportion. Once I started reading it, I found it the next best thing to impossible to put down. I’m so happy that it exists. I really hope that Bear writes more.