James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s upcoming A Palace Near The Wind is the first installment in Ai Jiang’s Natural Engines secondary-world natural fantasy¹ duology.

In exchange for a regular supply of new Wind Walker brides from Feng, the king graciously slows the inexorable growth of the Palace into Feng. In this way, Feng’s doom, while still clearly inevitable, is delayed.

Liu Lufeng has a bold solution, one that will require her to get within arm’s reach of the king.

Liu is Feng’s senior unmarried princess. As such, she will be the next to marry the king. If Liu finds some way to avoid the marriage, her younger sister Chuiliu will marry in her stead. As the fate of the brides is unclear, Liu has no honorable course of action but to marry the king.

Liu plans to put this marriage to good use. She will murder the king. By removing the Palace’s senior person, Liu hopes to disrupt the Palace and by so doing, end or at least delay the technological structure’s growth into fantastic Feng.

Once ensconced in the Palace, Liu discovers that her plan was based on false premises. The Palace is not the supreme creation of the humans, but merely one of many similar creations. The king is not the supreme ruler, but more akin to a franchise manager. Killing the king is unlikely to have long-term effects.

Rescuing her relatives trapped within the Palace before fleeing might be the least dismal option available. There, too, Liu discovers certain previously unknown facts make success unlikely. Nevertheless, doing nothing is unthinkable, no matter how hard the players on the other side try to make it appear that it is Liu’s only option.

~oOo~

The Wind Walkers are plants. Their arms are braided and tangled branches, their skin is bark, their legs are roots. The humans (or Land Wandererss) seem to be standard model humans, although the boundaries between one sort of person and another may be more fluid than they appear. As the humans see their standards as the only acceptable standards, the Wind Walkers are expected to embrace radical grooming choices to bring their appearance into line with the Land Wanderers preferences. I believe this is what they call a metaphor.

So too, I suspect, is the fact that many Wind Walkers don’t need to be threatened into compliance. A few luxuries suffice.

Cognitively, Wind Walkers and Land Wandererss appear to function more or less the same, or at least they would if they had a common language. As Lui discovers, her misunderstanding of what’s going on is because her first language is impoverished with respect to relationship terminology, so arrangements can only be described in narrow, misleading terms².

Liu goes into her adventure not fully apprised of the extent of Palace malevolence. Happily, the Palace staff are keen on having meaningful, informative conversations about their dark plans within Liu’s earshot. Why wouldn’t they? Almost everyone in the Palace is in on the joke, and there’s nothing obvious the Wind Walkers can do to stop them.

I am not doing a spectacular job of selecting books with no relevance to the current unpleasantness. USA delenda est! However, the events herein have global relevance. It would be easy to point at analogous situations across the planet (or even within Canada).

This novella is the first of two parts. I am not entirely certain why two novellas and not one novel³. Perhaps the author preferred that arrangement. Perhaps we live in a golden age in which novellas are commercially viable. I read the novella as a stand-alone; the ending seemed a bit abrupt, but only a little.

Jiang does a dandy job of chronicling Liu’s slow search for answers, as she begins to understand how Wind Walkers are being used for Palace purposes. I am looking forward to the second volume.

A Palace Near The Wind is available here (Titan Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: For a discussion of natural fantasy, see my upcoming review of the Fabula Ultima Natural Fantasy Atlas, which I would link to if I had a time machine.

2: It seems possible that the reverse is also true, that some Wind Walker concepts cannot be meaningfully expressed in Land Wanderers terms… but the Land Wandererss almost certainly don’t care.

3: Duologies are less common these days. It’s possible that twenty years ago large booksellers simply refused to purchase speculative fiction if the books were longer than a certain page count. Hence the number of duologies published then. Or maybe this isn’t the reason? Comments welcome.