The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
278 pages
Published 2011
Read from February 26 to March 6
Rating: ★ out of 5
I'll
be honest, I thought this book was going to be something else entirely,
and this time it's my fault. My eye was drawn to the cute little
airship on the back cover, and I somehow didn't entirely register the
goofy-as-fuck winged gargoyle demon dude smack dab on the front. (Maybe
it was so goofy looking that my eyes refused to acknowledge it.) Based
on the ship, I figured this would be a fun little steampunk-magic yarn,
instead of a tedious creature fantasy. I almost abandoned the book after
the first chapter. But I figured I should try to put aside my
prejudices and give it a shot.
This is some hardcore fantasy nerd
shit right here, all talking about "turns" instead of years, "second
day-meal" instead of lunch, "draughtbeasts" and "herdbeasts" and
"riverbeasts" and "skylings" and "treelings" instead of shit anyone
would actually say, populated by innumerable dumb races that never get
developed or explored to any degree. The main character is the
goofy-as-fuck winged gargoyle demon dude from the cover, only he's also a
totally bad-ass loner who can shapeshift and has a totally sad and
compelling backstory, yo. And also he's like totally a prince who didn't
know he was of royal blood. (Okay, so technically he's just a fertile
male in a dumb pseudo-colonial, hierarchical species, but that's more or
less the same idea -- that he's marked out and special and totally gets
the princess in the end.) The only way you could get more fantasy nerd
is to throw together some elves and dragons and bearded wizards in
stars-and-moons robes. Honestly I'd probably be happier reading
something like that rather than this. It would be less embarrassing to
read in public, for sure.
The cover blurb, from Fantasy & Science Fiction,
no less, claims that Wells is "One of the more graceful wordsmiths
currently writing fantasy." Maybe that applies to her short stories or
her other books (I wouldn't know). It sure isn't evident here. The
writing isn't bad, exactly, but it's anything but "graceful." It has a
smack of amateurishness to it, a certain over-confident swagger that the
quality doesn't justify. The dialogue, on the other hand, is execrable.
The characters dish out attitude in every verbal exchange.
Huddling together for warmth, one character smirks to another, "I'll try
not to molest you in my sleep." Seriously, every single character is sarcastic and belligerent toward everyone else. The characters are hazily defined at best; their actions and dialogue do nothing
to distinguish them, because they all act like adolescents who think
they're the coolest fucking thing in the room. You expect all of them to
pop onto skateboards and flip you the bird after every sarcastic
remark, even the ancient elders of the colony. It reads like something I
would have written at 15.
If you strip away the stupid parts,
there's a serviceable (if rote) adventure novel in here somewhere, but
yeah. It's almost all stupid parts. As you can see, it took me forever
to read the damn thing. After a certain point I kept reading only out of
a perverse sense that it would be fun to write a rant for a review.
Even that thought ceased to be entertaining by the halfway mark, and it
became an uninterrupted slog. I only finished it under the influence of
sunk cost fallacy.
This kind of story needs an interesting or at least companionable narrative voice. Linda Nagata's Memory,
whatever its other flaws, at least had a narrator who seemed worth
spending time around, at least at first. It was the same even with Nnedi
Okorafor's Who Fears Death?, which was a terribly written
disappointment to me. The main character here, Moon, starts out as a
slow-witted and suspicious teenager-equivalent, and ends up as a smug
but moodily aloof nerd empowerment fantasy who leads from the front;
queens fight over him, but naturally he gets the younger, hotter one,
and the only people who don't like him are idiots and jerks. That
doesn't make for pleasant reading. This type of story also benefits
immensely from compelling villains, and even there, The Cloud Roads
fails utterly. It's never a good idea to turn your unstoppable evil
race (named "the Fell," for fuck's sake) into mere cannon fodder by
chapter three. Why spend two chapters building them up as this
inexorable threat overrunning all the peaceful goofy-as-fuck races on
land and in the air, only to have your totally bad-ass shapeshifter
princeling moody hero dispatch like five of them just to work up an
appetite? In fact, none of the numerous battle scenes carry any sense of
stakes or danger; Moon and his cohorts slice through Fell after Fell
with the ease of velociraptors at a Juggalo wedding.
It was
pretty blatant by the end of the second chapter that Moon's people share
a secret kinship with the dastardly Fell; by the fourth chapter it was
obvious that interbreeding of these two kinds of goofy-as-fuck winged
gargoyle demon creatures was going to be a major plot point. It's no
good to have the general course of the entire novel sussed out by page
50. I like to be kept guessing about some things, you know? Not that I even gave a shit by that point, but I'm talking general principles here.
Maybe my eyes were glazed over when the title was explained, but I have no idea if we ever find out what "the cloud roads" are.
This -- this
is the kind of book that gives SF its old reputation as worthless
escapist dreck. I did it to myself, but I kind of really want the last
nine days of my life back.
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