That’s all pretty cool already, but Wells also uses the islands to give her world a sense of history, as many of them bear ancient ruins from the distant past. Plus, the islands have their own animal life, which can include anything from adorable furballs to scary monsters. The islands give our heroes the chance to explore new biomes without weeks of travel time, since the exploration comes to them instead! The local area might be temperate woodlands, but the islands can be rain forest, snowy tundra, or even desert. Most of the important characters in The Cloud Roads have wings, so Wells goes for the second option, but it would have worked either way. For characters who can’t fly, the islands are pure mystery: What’s up there, and could it be dangerous? For characters who can fly, they’re a great opportunity to explore. * Second: wow, these flying islands are cool!ĭrifting through the sky are big chunks of rock and soil, most of them large enough to support their own ecosystems, and they add a lot to the story in very little time. First: this protagonist is clearly a test run for Murderbot, complete with the dry observations and being surrounded by less-capable people who mistreat him. Two things immediately strike you from the first page of The Cloud Roads. She just doesn’t do that very often in this book. The Goodīut wait – it’s not all bad, I promise! Wells is a skilled writer, and she’s more than capable of creating a well-built world for us to explore.

While Murderbot’s worldbuilding is fairly minimal and relies heavily on established space-opera tropes, Cloud Roads is a high-fantasy story that boldly strikes out on its own, crafting a world of fresh and unique ideas! Unfortunately, most of those ideas are very bad, and a few of them are straight-up toxic.Ĭontent Notice: Discussion of racism, sexism, and sexual violence in fiction.

We’ve gushed about Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries a few times here on ye olde Mythcreants, but did you know she’s written other books as well? One such book is The Cloud Roads, the first novel of the Raksura series.

The cloud roads by martha wells