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The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells, Full Review

Kalinara: So it was my turn to pick, and inspired by something @Ragnell said in her Neverending Story review, I decided to go with Cloud Roads, the first book in Martha Wells’s Raksura series.

There’s an interesting conceit about the setting of the Raksura series: namely, there are no humans at all. There are human like races, generally classified as “groundlings”, who are two-legged bipeds, but any one species of groundling might have feathers or scales or some other definitely non-human trait.

It’s interesting because most fantasy stories do include humans, or some almost-human species to act as the baseline. Even if the main characters are elves, dwarves, hobbits, whatever, the humans still pop up as a comparison. Hobbits are small, elves are graceful, and so on.

The world of the Raksura contains groundlings, waterlings or sealings, skylings (all defined by their basic environment) and of course the Fell and the Raksura themselves. No humans though. And I really enjoy that.

The main species in the series is of course the Raksura, and they remind me a little of humanoid-dragons. Or maybe scalier versions of Disney’s Gargoyles. They’re tall, scaly, with spines and spikes, and some have wings. Most of them can shapeshift into a more human looking groundling form (and a nice touch, I think, is that the groundling forms are described with varying skin tones from pale bronze to dark brown. It is pretty clear that they’re not all supposed to look white.) Their society reminds me a bit of ants. Or lions. Or...well, something in that general vicinity.

Ragnell: I kept thinking scaly eagle-bats socially that act like cats and are organized like bees, myself. But yes, Gargoyles came to mind too. For some reason the dragon comparison didn’t hit me until the end of the book, though that’s pretty much the most accurate.

I liked the touch about describing a variety of skin tones and making it clear that the groundling forms of the Raksura aren’t all white. I was really unable to find a clear description of Moon’s groundling form, though. You know what he looks like when it’s dragoned out and you get the impression of dark hair and they say he’s all skin and bones but otherwise I had trouble picking an “actor” for the main character here. The better to envision yourself as a reader, maybe?

K: I think we get a better description of Moon later in the series. It may just be a reflection as to the narrow focus of the third person narrative. Moon doesn’t really get much chance to look at his reflection, and doesn’t really seem like the type. We do know that Chime called him “beautiful” (Chime seems to be a little biased though. :-)) and that he has “lovely conformation”. I think there’s a very brief description in the first chapter with the Cordons, but all we really get is tall, lanky, dark bronze skin.

Anyway, there are two types of Raksura: the winged Aeriat and the wingless Arbora. There are three main types of Aeriat: Queens (fertile females, who are basically in charge), Consorts (fertile males, who are generally sheltered and protected), and Warriors (sterile winged Aeriat of either gender, they fight things.) The Arbora are the artisans, healers, hunters and magic users of the society. The Aeriat are nominally in charge (at least the Queen is), but the Arbora are the backbone of the society. It’s a complex, but functional society.

Of course, Moon, the main character of Cloud Roads, doesn’t know about any of this. All he knows at the start of the story is that he’s being kicked out of yet another groundling settlement because of his mysterious nature. It’s only after he’s rescued by Stone, a “line-grandfather” of the Raksura (basically a very old Consort. If you imagine Jack O’Neill from Stargate SG-1 as a Dowager Empress, you have a reasonably good idea about Stone. And you’re welcome for that mental image) that Moon has any idea that he’s a long lost Raksura consort.

So the crux of the story is Moon, who’s spent most of his life as an exile and orphan, suddenly learning that he’s a prince...well, princess, kind of, given the sheltered role that Consorts generally have in Raksura society. It’s not an easy transition, even before the Fell (a monstrous race that likes to eat people and destroy entire civilizations) show up to complicate matters.

The Indigo Cloud Court has its own trouble. They’ve been plagued by sickness and bad luck for a very long time. The two Queens are feuding. Pearl, the older, more influential and powerful Queen, is angry and bitter, and appears uninterested in taking the steps that the Court needs to survive. Jade, the younger of the Queens, has ideas and backing, but lacks the power to do what needs to be done. Especially since she’s without a Consort. Stone intends that Moon become a solution to that problem.

R: This was a cool thing. Moon’s been completely on his own and has no context for Raksura society and the first group to pick him up is dysfunctional. He gets a really bad introduction to the concept of a Queen and a bad impression of the warrior class that he doesn’t find out until later in the book are symptoms of a failing colony. The scene at Sky Copper put the words “colony collapse” in my head (even though that was an external threat and not what the Sky Copper colony experienced) and it seems to be what Indigo Cloud is undergoing. It got to this state after the other Queens and Consorts died, and even Stone went away for several years. The Court is so dysfunctional without consorts that if Stone hadn’t returned and taken steps to fix things, it may have split up on its own.

K: I like Jade a lot. The relationship between Jade and Moon develops nicely. The story is third person limited, from Moon’s point of view, so we don’t really get to peer inside Jade’s head. And Moon is a bit of an unreliable narrator - having been isolated from his own people for most of his life means that his ability to read a situation isn’t always the best. Jade is practical, amiable, and reasonably patient with Moon’s skittishness and odd quirks. And I enjoy the gender role reversal inherent in the Raksuran societal set-up.

R: Jade’s attitude about Moon seems to be that “Consorts are like that” and a few other characters seem to have that attitude too. I’m pretty amused that a caste that includes Stone, who is a Literal Giant and the Vast Shadow of Death From Above and Moon, who is himself a Terrifying Scaly Murder Machine That Will Get Bigger, is written off as “high maintenance.”

K: An odd touch that I like a bit is that the Queens don’t have a groundling/human like form. They shapeshift, but it’s between a winged Aeriat form and a wingless Arbora form. So we never see them without the scales and spines. It’s not a case of attractive monster woman becomes pretty young human girl. Jade is ALWAYS going to be big, blue and scaly.

R: Always Monster Jade is great. One of the really cool moments was Moon realizing she’s the one who can fly around in either form without being mistaken for Fell. A lot of authors would make that a reason the Queens need to be hidden and protected but Wells doesn’t, this is set in a world where the Queens can be open about their nature as they travel. She’s not only always beautiful in her powerful form, it’s also not a liability she ever needs to hide. It’s just a winged form and an energy-saving walking form.

K: It’s an interesting aspect: where the groundling forms of the other Raksura are generally vulnerable, the Queens never are. They always have their protective scales, claws, and spines. They’re always ready to act. (By the way, if you haven’t, I’d recommend checking out some of the covers of the later books in the series. They’re positively beautiful.)

There are quite a few other Raksura who play fairly important roles in the story: Flower, an Arbora mentor (magic user: mainly healing and clairvoyance), Balm, who is a warrior subordinate and clutchmate or sister of Jade, Root and Song who are annoying young adults, River who is an asshole, and Chime, a Raksura who had a very strange thing happen to him: he had been an Arbora mentor but one day woke up as an Aeriat warrior instead.

Chime’s predicament gives an interesting look at the interaction between Arbora and Aeriat in the Raksura society. A surface glimpse would suggest that the Aeriat have the more desired position: they have wings, they rule the Court, but Chime is dreadfully unhappy with his change.

R: Chime’s my favorite secondary character. If they ever adapted this there’d be a danger of just making him the funny best friend, but man that unique change thing is just so interesting. It reminded me of the gender-swapping plot point in Jurassic Park, some long-buried capability of the species that comes out in bad times. Except it only happened to Chime. And out of that they get a warrior with muted mentor senses

It’s interesting that Moon bonds so quickly with Chime, the guy who LITERALLY crossed social strata between the Arbora and Aeriet. The other male warrior who befriends Moon is Root, who’s an Aeriat warrior born from a clutch of Arbora which isn’t too unusual but does give him a little social crossover too. Moon is outright rejected by the other major male warriors, River and Drift. He’s initially given a little crap from the Arbora too, but they back off quick and he makes most of his friends among the Arbora. Even his warrior friends are kind of Arbora.

K: Ultimately though, it’s Moon’s story. Moon is prickly, defensive, suspicious. He’s spent his entire life trying to hide, being discovered, and getting abandoned all over again. His early attempts to figure out exactly what he was and find his people ended in a horrifying experience. He doesn’t know how to trust any of these people, but he doesn’t really want to lose them either.

One nice touch I really liked is that, despite Moon’s general unfamiliarity with Raksura, he still reacts to them as people. When he first sees Jade (who is, I might remind: scaly, winged, clawed, and blue), he just mentions her as a woman that he’s basically run past. When he meets the fledglings of Indigo Court, he refers to them as children, little girls, little boys, and so on. As strange as the Raksura feel to human eyes, they are completely normal to Moon.

R: It’s one of the core things about Moon, too. He’s spent his whole life rejected for one basic thing, he’s Raksura. He finds a bunch of Raksura, instantly accepts all of them as people but can’t seem to leap that hurdle for himself. Moon gets, like Stone tells him is normal, a mixture of acceptance and rejection in Indigo Cloud. Some people like him, some people don’t. Thing is, there’s a ton of politics behind the people who dislike him. Everyone, even the ones who don’t want him around, see him as a beautiful, desirable person and not a monster. The people who do love him absolutely love him as a person, and accept that he’s just the way he is. But Moon’s been so run-down outside of Raksura society that he can’t fathom that the reason he’s actually disliked in some cases is because he’s so inherently valuable.

K: He does have one legitimate social drawback. He is a “feral solitary” which has a particular stigma attached. However, it’s clearly less of an obstacle than Moon thinks it is. It’s pointed out very early on that Moon doesn’t have whatever traits they expect from a feral solitary (he lived with the groundlings rather than acting as a predator, for example). The characters who are most apt to throw that in his face are also the characters with the clearest ulterior motives. Like Pearl or River. Moon takes the criticism at face value because he lacks the social context to see the underlying dynamics until someone explains it. He thinks, for example, that he’s being ostracized after Pearl humiliates him in the public meeting, but Chime gives us an alternate perspective: they thought he was justifiably angry at them for how he’d been treated. And of course, he’s utterly boggled by the idea that Pearl and Jade’s fight over him wasn’t about whether he should be made to leave, but about which one gets to bang him.

R: Yeah, he’s so clearly not feral to most of the rank and file that it’s pretty obvious River and Pearl are just politicking. I think Moon’s presented as a pretty rare thing, a completely free consort. Stone must’ve thought he struck gold when he saw him and realized he was successfully assimilating into a groundling community. A lone consort that’s social, not feral. Bringing back to that impression I got above, the role of Consort is significant.

Early on you get the impression Stone is the last consort, and wasn’t able to have kids so that’s why he went looking. Then sometime in the latter half of the book they reveal Stone went travelling after his queen died, and while he was gone Rain died and Pearl chased the younger consorts away. So there was not just not a consort to breed, there was no one to fill that particular social role. And Stone clearly has a social role beyond just being the oldest guy there. Moon’s able to talk back to Pearl at the big confrontation, in his shift-voice, and able to resist the queen’s power to an extent they imply the other’s can’t. The consort is at least a balancing force for the queen. He seems to have some role with the arbora, and even with the warriors as her representative and logically, as their representative to her. (Another thing we see Stone trying to do.) And they’ve been without one. So River, who should be First Warrior it looks like, slips kind of into it and it unbalances the warriors because they don’t have a dedicated leader, and he has a lot of the younger male warriors causing trouble with the new consort. It seems to be like with the Queen, where you can’t just have one and expect it all to fall together perfectly, and expect it to be solely about making babies. You need a team enacting this stuff in support of the reigning queen, the bigger the colony the more you need.

When Moon gets there, he gets a little bit of pushback at first but he seems to slip into a role. It’s a little subtle, like with that scene with Root where Jade is clearly thinking something and Moon verbalizes it for her so she doesn’t need to break her diplomacy persona. And it’s pushing back on River and letting the warriors sort themselves out, because after Moon beats him up River definitely seems to lose some status even in his own caste. I look forward to the next book and seeing exactly how that role plays out in a working colony.

K: The villains of the story are the Fell. The Fell are the ancestral enemy of the Raksura, while Moon has also had some past experience with them as well. They’re a force of nature that consumes everything in their path. But they’re not mindless, they’re intelligent and they have their own plans.

R: The Fell are dicks. Basically a dark mirror of the Raksura, which I’m sure will get fully fleshed out in another book somewhere. Though really, since Moon and the rest of the Three Worlds are more familiar with the Fell first it’s like the Raksura are a bright mirror of them. Stone says at some point that he thinks they should be hunting down Fell, which implies to be that Raksura might not just be the ancestral enemy but may be the natural predator and counterbalance for the Fell in this world.

K: We do get to see a few other groundling communities. The Cordans, who are the people who kick Moon out at the beginning of the story, and never quite improve after that (though one of their number manages to acquit herself nicely). The Islanders, who are collectively pretty awesome, especially the old scholar, Delin, who is adorable. But even his prickly xenophobic grandson proves his worth in the end.

R: Another nice touch with the Cordan where it’s the girl presented as unlikable who turns out to be the great help later on. The Islanders are awesome and I hope they pop up again in the future. I’m also pretty fond of those people with the tusks in the city who didn’t blink twice at the barefooted lizard lady.

K: I like the book a lot. I think it’s ambitious: it’s an alien culture, with alien characters and an alien enemy and no human lens with which to view them. Moon is an outsider, but his base culture really isn’t any closer to ours than the Raksurans are. But it’s still a fun and engaging story anyway

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