The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells)

The Cloud Roads
The Books of the Raksura series, Volume 1
Martha Wells
Night Shade Books
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: For most of his life, Moon has been a man without a home, not even knowing what he is. All he knows is that he can shift shapes, becoming a winged, scaled, and long-tailed hunter... and that the only other shifters he's ever encountered have been the cruel Fell, who destroy whatever they touch. Moon wanders the Three Worlds, always in search of a place to belong among various groups of groundlings, but it never lasts - until at last he encounters Stone, a shifter of his own kind. The stranger tells him he is a Raksura, and offers to bring him back to the Indigo Cloud colony to be among his own race. But his arrival coincides with a dark time in the colony, and none of them trust this strange outsider who doesn't even know how to be a proper Raksura. Worse, the Fell are about; they've already destroyed one nearby colony, yet Pearl, queen of Indigo Cloud, seems open to treat with them. Like it or not, Moon finds himself drawn into the heart of the brewing conflict, one that will reveal an even bigger threat to all the Three Worlds.

REVIEW: The Cloud Roads is a very strange sort of fantasy. It has its roots firmly planted in old-school realms like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar and Barsoom or Fritz Leiber's sorcerous Nehwon, creating a vast and wild and untamed world populated with all manner of strange peoples and peculiar ecosystems and untold wonders, littered with enigmatic remnants of lost cultures even more astonishing than what remains. It beckons, it dazzles... and, unfortunately, it threatens to numb, creating a place where it's almost impossible to work out the rules or parameters. The Raksura race is a bewildering combination of multiple castes and forms, not counting their "groundling" (roughly humanlike) and shifted forms, something like specialized individuals in an ant colony, and their chief enemy, the Fell, also has numerous forms. On top of that, I was supposed to juggle numerous names, associated relations, alliances, and rivalries, plus numerous groundlings (races and individuals), all while following a main character who, frankly, could be less than pleasant to be around. Moon serves as a proxy for the reader in his ignorance of the Raksuran ways, but he leans into his lone wolf habits to the point of irritation. If he can't bring himself to connect with or care about Indigo Cloud, how can I, the reader following him through his story, hope to do so? A little too much weight is placed on breeding and fertility; the story gets going when one of the mates Moon was handed at the latest groundling village he was staying with gets angry that he can't sire a child with her, kicking off events that force him to join up with Stone, and the fact that he's a consort - the only sort of Raksura who can breed with a queen - becomes a major plot point. Among all this, the plot lurches along through various encounters and obstacles, constantly distracted by shiny objects in the Three Worlds and blunted by Moon's pessimistic (if learned) assumption that he'll never fit in anywhere, though the tale finally builds up a decent head of steam by the climax. Still, even by the end, I had trouble connecting with Moon and the Three Worlds, which is unfortunately why I clipped a half-star from the rating. I kept catching glimpses of a spark in this book, the hook that would grab me and drag me deep into its wonders, but by the end I just couldn't reach it.

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