Books Martha Wells Book Club Martha Wells Book Club: Wheel of the Infinite A traitor and a swordsman join forces to save the world… By Alex Brown | Published on May 20, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Well. Wheel of the Infinite was, if nothing else, a book. Huh. Okay, it wasn’t a bad book. It just wasn’t what I wanted from a Martha Wells joint. Before we get too far into it, I should note that judging by the reviews, both contemporary to its original release and the ones from the 2024 revised and updated edition (the version I read), I’m clearly in the minority in disliking this book. Grain of salt, and all that. Like City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite is a faux Medieval fantasy set in a non-Western region, this time with a vaguely Southeast Asian feel. Lots of jungle, heat, rain, stone buildings, and monk-like figures doing meditation-like magic. However, I wouldn’t explicitly call it Asian Fantasy; the vibes are too loose for that. And like City of Bones, our main characters are a man on the run from his home in a distant land (Rian) and a woman learning to see her hometown and the people who run it in a new light (Maskelle). Unfortunately, also like City of Bones, Wells goes in on cisalloheteronormativity and late 90s/early 00s fantasy tropes, even harder this time, and in ways I found even more tiresome.  Maskelle and Rian meet on the road to Duvalpore. Maskelle is travelling with a troupe of performers, and her curse has made their journey extra difficult. We don’t learn this for a while, but after she basically attempted to overthrow the Celestial Empire and kill her only living family, she fled Duvalpore in shame. She is supposed to be the Voice of the Adversary, a god-like being and an Ancestor of the denizens of the Celestial Empire, but the Adversary hasn’t spoken to her since her betrayal. After all this time, the Celestial One, the head cleric of the Koshan religion, has summoned her home, for what she doesn’t yet know, but she’s sure it’s connected to the upcoming Hundred Year Rite. Over the course of several days, as the citizenry party, the high-ranking Koshan clerics redraw the Wheel—a map of the Celestial Empire made of colored sand—thus ensuring the world’s continued existence. Any interruption, deviation, or alteration to the map will have life-altering consequences. She’s also dealing with a spirit-possessed puppet, Gisar, who keeps threatening to kill everyone. When a river spirit harasses the troupe at a waystation, Rian appears. Again, we learn all this much later, but he’s a disgraced kjardin, or personal guard to a Holder Lord in the land of Sintane, on the run from people who intend to kill him. Rian’s handsome face is as much of a boon to Maskelle as his fighting skills, and she takes him to bed. As dull as I found their relationship, Martha Wells was, as usual, refreshingly mature and pragmatic about sex and romance. We don’t know their exact ages, but she was in her 40s and he was at least a few years younger. Both had children in their past lives, one of whom is now an adult himself. These aren’t hot-headed teenagers or twentysomethings acting on impulse and hormones but adults pushing middle age with a lifetime’s worth of guilt and regrets to work through. Neither were pining after one another or moping in their time apart. They trusted each other to have enough sense to get themselves out of whatever mess they were entangled in and respected each other enough to do what they needed to do even if it wasn’t what they wanted them to do. All that said, it also felt like the only reason the two of them were together is because they were each other’s only option. Everyone else was beneath them, too old, too young, partnered up, or an antagonist. In the entire city of Duvalpore and surrounding countryside, there were apparently no other available people. This is a common issue I have with fantasy. Wells largely avoids this issue in the other books of hers I’ve read, so it was disappointing to get it here and with City of Bones. It felt like a relationship of convenience rather than one of potential long-term stability or interest. They’re fairly interesting individual characters that became, in my mind, vastly less interesting as a couple.  Once in Duvalpore, the main plot gets going, albeit very slowly. Someone or something is messing with the Wheel. Dark spots keep reappearing no matter how many times they’re cut out. One priest is dead, another incapacitated, and both Maskelle and Rian suspect foul play. Gisar turns out to be more than just a possessed puppet. A stranger, Marada, has arrived in town and insinuated herself amongst the imperial elite. Other imperials are scheming and making political deals behind everyone’s backs. Magic in this world spawns from the Infinite, and at the Wheel, the Infinite and the real world intersect in messy ways. When Rian, Maskelle, and several others are pulled into a new world that has written itself over theirs, Maskelle taps into the Infinite and calls on the Adversary to try and stop it. If she fails, the old world will be no more. I hate to keep going back to City of Bones, but another commonality between that and this is the pacing. Although the opening salvo was action-packed, the pacing dragged once they got to Duvalpore. For me, it was a real slog to get through. As with the other book, it wasn’t until the last 100 or so pages that I started to care about what was happening to these people. It took the characters a ludicrously long time to figure out some pretty basic plot devices, and once they did they were already behind the curve. I don’t think the pacing is wrong for the story or structurally unsound, it just didn’t work for me. The middle section involved an awful lot of place setting and conversations where plot points and discussion topics were repeated in slightly different ways. By the time we got to the grand finale, Wells raced through it, wrapping everything up a little too quickly for my taste.  At least the slower pace of the rest of the novel gave Wells room to delve into the world of the Celestial Empire. Unlike City of Bones, I had a much better sense of this world and the various cultures that inhabit it. Each group felt distinct and original, and each seemed to be a natural outgrowth of the world, as if Wells built the world first and then thought deeply about the kinds of people who would live there and how they might behave. Wells always does a fantastic job describing her worlds, and this one felt just as detailed and ancient as her other books.  The way Wells dribbled out backstory for Maskelle in particular didn’t work for me, either. Usually I love the way she tells us bits and pieces so we don’t know everything about a character until the end of the book. I’m not sure why Maskelle’s reveals didn’t jive with me. Maybe it’s because I figured out the reveals very early on (they’re pretty trope-y), or maybe it’s because I just couldn’t understand why Rian would be attracted to her when he didn’t know anything about her and she intentionally kept very important parts of her life from him (but that may be my ace/aroness talking). By the time we got her last reveal near the end, there was no momentum for me because I was mostly just impatient for them to finally get on with it.  The biggest misses for me were the relative absence of larger social commentary. This I can’t blame Wells for, given what the trends were for popular fantasy fiction in the early 2000s. However, with Rian in particular, not exploring that misses a big part of his character development. He comes from a land that operates on a strict class system (possibly even caste system) and he must confront the toxic warrior mentality he spent his entire life in in order to be worthy of Maskelle. Except we don’t see any of that personal work. Maskelle makes a few comments about the Sintanese being backwards thinking people, but there’s no deeper analysis or emotional excavation. On the other hand, Wells also pushes back against early Aughts fantasy tropes by making the majority of the population brown-skinned—not that you’d know it by either the original or new book covers. Rian is white, but Maskelle and most of the people we meet in the Celestial Empire are brown. Wells often does this in her books, and I’m glad to see it here as well.  After writing all this, I think I appreciate the book a little more, even though I still mostly didn’t enjoy the experience of reading it. Really glad I decided not to start with this and City of Bones for my first two book club picks like I initially planned. I might not have continued with the project if these were my entry points. They definitely aren’t poorly written books, they just weren’t to my preferences. Thrilled that so many people enjoyed them, and equally as thrilled I don’t have to reread them.  I need a palate cleanser after Wheel of the Infinite, and young adult fiction always does the trick for me. So next month I’m going to read the Emilie duology, Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World. They are being republished in May as a set by Tordotcom; perfect timing, if you ask me.[end-mark] Buy the Book The Emilie Adventures Martha Wells Two novel-length steampunk adventures, together in one volume for the first time. Buy Book The Emilie Adventures Martha Wells Two novel-length steampunk adventures, together in one volume for the first time. Two novel-length steampunk adventures, together in one volume for the first time. Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Martha Wells Book Club: <i>Wheel of the Infinite</i> appeared first on Reactor.