I’d been a weird, lonely kid who grew up as an SF/F fan at a time when nobody else I knew liked or cared about it. I put a lot of my own feelings of isolation into the story. Plus there’s a lot of adventures and exploration and flying and people-eating monsters who wouldn’t want to read about that? How hard it is to leave your past behind. Learning to fit into a complex society and web of relationships that seem almost impossible to understand. Learning to trust when suspicion, paranoia, and pretending to be anything other than what you are have been your main survival traits. Like finding a family and a home and protecting it against outside attack and environmental pressure. I always felt that despite having non-human protagonists, the themes of the series were universal. It was the book of my heart, a book that in many ways I had always wanted to write.īut at first, nobody seemed to want to publish a book with no humans in it, where the main characters were matriarchal bisexual polyamorous flying shapeshifting lizard-lion-bee people. The first book in the series, The Cloud Roads, came out in 2011, after taking two years to find a publisher. It’s fitting that The Harbors of the Sun is about the end of a journey, because it’s been a long road to its publication. All good things come to an end, and for The Harbors of the Sun, the last book in Martha Wells’ Raksura series, the author takes a look at how she got here, and what the series, and the journey of writing it, has meant to her.Īfter four novels, and two novella collections, The Harbors of the Sun is the last book in the Books of the Raksura series.

The Ships of Air by Martha Wells