Originally published in 2000, Wheel of the Infinite has returned from the depths of ebook-only backlists thanks to The Murderbot Diaries’ publisher, Tordotcom, bringing out many of Martha Wells’ older novels in new “author’s preferred” editions. These have been revised by Wells herself, and she has brought with her the advantage of having another twenty-odd years’ writing experience under her belt. In the case of Wheel of the Infinite, just like last year’s re-released City of Bones, I’d wager that the vast majority of readers will be coming to the book for the first time. Since Wells has never been one to follow the genre crowd, Wheel of the Infinite still feels fresh even twenty years after the novel’s original publication.

The story opens with Maskelle, disgraced and exiled Voice of the Adversary, trekking through mud to get back to the city of Duvalpore, capital of the Celestial Empire, in time for the Hundred Year Rite. Every year, wizard-clerics of Maskelle’s priestly Koshan order perform an annual rite in which they construct the Wheel of the Infinite, fixing everything in the world in its existing place. The Hundred Year Rite gathers even more power to do the same, and there are real consequences to the Rite going wrong, or altering the shape of the world within it. In the past, as Maskelle tells Rian, the wandering swordsman who becomes her bodyguard, Koshan priests altered geography and existence itself using the Wheel to save the city and the priesthood.

Maskelle’s status as the Voice of the Adversary would normally guarantee her residence in Duvalpore and her presence at the Rites. The Adversary is the only one of the Ancestors who never lived in the world as a human, and is maligned as a demon in some cultures, but is in fact the champion of justice, perhaps best thought of as the red team. But Maskelle’s poor choices in the past have led to her being banished, and to her no longer being able to hear the Adversary’s voice.

Maskelle was responsible for her second husband’s death, and what makes this awkward is that her second husband’s son now sits on the throne as the Emperor. When the Celestial One summons her, then, Maskelle joins a wandering troupe of performers to journey back to the Emperor’s capital city (in turn, they need help with one of their puppets, which has acquired a demonic curse)—but when she, Rian, and the other Koshan priests begin to suspect that the Rite is being targeted by unknown enemies, they encounter much larger problems than mere etiquette. It further becomes clear that these adversaries have their own Wheel and want to use it to remake the world, meaning the stakes of this particular Hundred Year Rite could not be higher.

Wells’s strengths as a fantasy writer are on full display in Wheel of the Infinite. Her protagonist, Maskelle, is a jaded, middle-aged woman who has made serious mistakes in her past and whose judgment remains in question, not only in her enemies’ minds but in her own. Her status as the Voice of the Adversary, to say nothing of seven years in exile, predisposes her to a certain detached viewpoint, but she’s drawn back into the Koshan hierarchy and the schemes of the court, as well as back into human connection with Rian, the Ariaden players, and her fellow Koshan clerics—making her an ideal viewpoint character, as well as someone whose journey and struggle feel grounded in adverse life experiences, in a way that isn’t always common in fantasy fiction.

Rian’s backstory is also interesting, as he comes from a backwater, honor-constrained warrior culture whose bounds he nonetheless decided to cross when it became clear that the price for his unrequited loyalty would be his own death. His relationship with Maskelle is also refreshing; she’s middle-aged, and he’s definitely at least in his thirties. The Ariaden players and their theatrics, however, were probably my favorite element in the novel, as their stage shows intersect with the plot in innovative ways. The verve of the details about their culture is also productive, as when the players use hand signals to cover for a possessed puppet interrupting a performance, and then subdue the puppet onstage, without anyone in the audience being the wiser.

The novel’s worldbuilding throughout is rich and interesting, with a welter of varied cultures interacting through trade over vast distances, and the Koshan cosmology of the Infinite underlaying them all. Aspects of that cosmology recall elements of Tibetan religious practices in our world, and Duvalpore and the Celestial Empire feel reminiscent of South and Southeast Asia at times, but Wells avoids any simple one-to-one correspondences—her rich development of the Infinite makes the book’s varied societies very much their own thing. She also deploys one of my favorite underused tropes, in which white people—in this case Rian—are unusual amidst societies where the default majority is brown-skinned. (In some ways, the world of Wheel seems not unlike the polyglot, multicultural world that the vanquished conquerors of Witch King [2023] overran in that book’s immediate backstory, although the worldbuilding in Witch King goes in different directions.)

The adversaries of Wheel are also interesting, in that their annihilatory aims are clear but their backstory remains hazy in some respects. As the story continues, not only do further revelations about Maskelle and her relationships highlight not only the fact that she doesn’t like to think about her past, but also that she may have misjudged significant parts of what actually happened. Without spoilers, the novel’s resolution brings together multiple plot threads, some of which just seemed like interesting details at first, and weaves a fascinating finale from them. Change is hard and complicated, but it is possible, and it is possible to make redress for past mistakes.

Although The Murderbot Diaries has rightly made Wells’s name as a science fiction writer, Wheel of the Infinite is more proof that her more numerous fantasy novels are just as worth reading. While my favorites of Wells’s pre-2010s books probably remain the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, Wheel of the Infinite is another richly detailed novel that showcases Wells’s talents. Luckily for all of us, she’s still writing—and there are two books remaining in her backlist deal with Tordotcom.