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Martha Wells's MURDERBOT DIARIES series gets omnibus editions

Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries has been one of the most critically-acclaimed science fiction series of the past eight years, winning two Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards and a Locus Award. The story of a former combat SecUnit which gains sentience and tries to find its way in a corporate-dominated future is compelling and very moreish. It's also been famously expensive, with each short novella being sold as a full-priced novel, making getting a full collection a questionably pricy endeavour.

Fortunately Tor Books has heard the complaint and the series is now being reissued in omnibus format, with two novellas to each omnibus. These will also act as a tie-in with the upcoming TV show based on the books, starring Alexander Skarsgård.

There is some minor confusion because of the seven books in the series so far, five are novellas, one (Network Effect) is a 350-page average-sized novel and one (System Collapse) is a 250-page short novel. The books are also not published in chronological order.

Publication order is as follows:

1. All Systems Red (2017)
2. Artificial Condition (2018)
3. Rogue Protocol (2018)
4. Exit Strategy (2018)
5. Network Effect (2020)
6. Fugitive Telemetry (2021)
7. System Collapse (2023)

Chronological order is as follows:

1. All Systems Red (2017)
2. Artificial Condition (2018)
3. Rogue Protocol (2018)
4. Exit Strategy (2018)
5. Fugitive Telemetry (2021)
6. Network Effect (2020)
7. System Collapse (2023)
   

The omnibus editions collect the books as follows: 

1. All Systems Red & Artificial Condition
2. Rogue Protocol & Exit Strategy
3. Fugitive Telemetry & System Collapse

Presumably Network Effect, the full-length novel, will be reissued on its own to match these new editions.

The Murderbot Diaries omnibus editions are hitting stores and digital platforms in the United States about now, and will arrive (for the first time for the series) in the UK on 17 February. Some foreign language editions have had omnibus versions for some time, and those that haven't will hopefully now get in on the act.

The Murderbot Diaries TV series is expected to launch this year on Apple TV+.

System Collapse by Martha Wells

Murderbot is back, navigating a tricky situation on a frontier planet where the interests of its employers are tested against those of the Barish-Estranza megacorp. Murderbot's team are working with the colonists to secure their own self-governance, whilst Barish-Estranza is trying to get them classified as indentured servants of the corporate interests and get them shipped offworld as effective slave labour. The situation is complicated when a hitherto unknown group of colonists is discovered underground in the polar region, with both factions rushing to contact them before the other.

System Collapse is the seventh book in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. It follows the misadventures of "Murderbot," a former security robot or SecUnit which has achieved sentience and aligned with a group of humans seeking equal rights for sentient machines, a position the megacorp-dominated far future is distinctly opposed to. Murderbot is once again operating undercover along with its powerful AI ally, ART, and a group of humans on a frontier colony being divided by legalese and moral controversies.

This is a novel rather than a novella, but still a short one at only 250 pages. The book is also slightly out of pace chronologically, taking place soon after the events of the fifth volume, Network Effect, whilst the sixth volume, Fugitive Telemetry, took place earlier in the series. Not a major issue but a quick refresh of Network Effect might be in order before tackling this book.

As usual, Wells delivers an effective mixture of action, existential musings, and light comedy. Murderbot's ongoing development towards being a fully-realised sapient being is here interrupted by an involuntary shutdown, leading to a crisis of confidence as it fears what would happen if the problem recurred during a dangerous situation, resulting in its own destruction or that of allied humans. Murderbot's attempts to fix the problem are complicated by its discomfort with the well-meaning but overwhelming attempts by ART and its human allies to help. This introspection could become a bit too much, but the limited page space means the story has to proceed at a clip, and it ends up being an effective personal crisis for Murderbot to navigate whilst it deals with more traditional action-adventure and mystery plots.

There is also a nice subplot as Murderbot has to create its own media to convince a bunch of colonists about corporate corruption and indentured service, which is an interesting twist given Murderbot's own addiction to TV shows. This is a nice idea but it's given relatively short shrift, when it feels like it could have been expanded into a much larger episode. Interesting to see if the author revisits the concept later on.

The book also has an interesting line where an antagonist is turned into an ally, and seeing how Murderbot deals with this trope it's familiar with from its media exposure should be more interesting and fun then it ends up being.

Still, System Collapse (****) does what the series does best: a short, punchy story with enough time for thoughtful musings on the nature of sentience and self-volition, whilst fitting in some very nice action setpieces, worldbuilding and characterisation. The book is available now. New omnibus editions of the previous books should also be launching around this time, and the Apple TV+ adaptation of the books looks like it will launch later this year.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

1937, Marshall College, Connecticut. Renowned archaeologist Indiana Jones is back teaching when an imposing man breaks into the college and steals an ancient cat mummy. An incensed Jones pursues the man, following clues to the Vatican, where the Catholic Church is negotiating a delicate coexistence with Mussolini's fascist government. Allying with an old friend and an intrepid Italian reporter searching for her missing sister, Jones runs afoul of an old German nemesis and embarks on an epic journey that will take him all over the world in pursuit of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.

Indiana Jones is one of the most beloved film franchises of all time, with the collaboration between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford delivering two of the best action-adventure films ever made, two okay ones and one stinker (your mileage may vary on which is which), whilst also delivering a ton of decent spin-off media, including books and a TV show. However, the franchise has often faltered in the sphere of video games. A lot of titles have been generic action games wearing a Fedora and leather whip skin, diverting but not really nailing the spirit of the movies or the character. Arguably the last all-time classic Indiana Jones video game was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released way back in 1992.

Now there's a new challenger. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has an original story and was developed by Machinegames - best known for the Wolfenstein action series - for Bethesda and Microsoft. The game is mostly played from a first-person perspective, and sees the player controlling Indiana as he goes on a round-the-world trip to stop the Nazis from getting their hands on a number of powerful, ancient artefacts. Harrison Ford declined to return as Indy, so omnipresent voice acting superstar Troy Baker takes up the role, delivering a performance which both nails Ford's sound and cadence, and is a good performance in its own right.

Where The Great Circle really succeeds is taking a step back and thinking thoughtfully about who Indiana Jones is and isn't as a character. Jones is happy to whip out a gun and shoot enemies in a pinch, but he isn't a seasoned sharpshooter. He's happy to sneak up on a bad guy and knock them out, but he's not a stealth assassin. His main skills are deduction, speaking a dozen or more languages, and exploring ancient ruins filled with curiously well-maintained traps. He is also kinda goofy as a character, prone to the occasional terrible joke and being a bit cack-handed, factors which the game also tries to invoke.

As a result, the game allows you to fire guns, but sees this as a fail state and usually this results in you getting overwhelmed, unless you are able to escape in the confusion, or you're dealing with very isolated enemies. Indy is awkward with guns and sometimes panics during reloading, which can be frustrating but does dissuade you from relying on them (headshots or pointblank shotgun blasts not resulting in instant kills is very dumb, though). You can sneak up behind people and knock them out, but doing this with your bare hands is tricky, so grabbing a blunt instrument and whacking them on the back of the head is often a better move. In theory, enemies are supposed to panic and sound the alarm upon discovery of bodies, so you can move bodies elsewhere, but in practice this only seemed to work about half the time, and never if you've moved the bodies from elsewhere. Fighting a bunch of bad guys in the Vatican and hurling their bodies from a balcony just to find the enemies below politely stepping around them without comment was odd.

Indy's most reliable weapon is his straight-from-the-films ability to wear somewhat flimsy disguises and, despite not looking like any locals at all, immediately fit in. Arriving in a new location can see a lot of careful travelling until you find a local uniform and then just stroll into enemy bases. Of course there are ways of still being discovered - enemy officers know who all their men are and will get suspicious at a new guy loitering around - as well as there being drawbacks. Otherwise friendly locals may refuse to help you if they see you in a German military uniform, but you can find local garb or just Indy's standard gear to regain their trust.

The game isn't an open-world affair, but instead has three open-ish maps which you can traverse, each one of which has multiple ruins you can explore, to service the main story, side-quests or optional activities. Penetrating ruins requires some jumping, using your whip to traverse distances or climb to higher exits, and solving puzzles. All of this is done in a very enjoyable way, and after years of solid Tomb Raider and Uncharted games, it's satisfying to see their main inspiration finally getting a game worthy of his name. Optional activities include finding relics for a museum, taking photographs of impressive sights and locating notes on everything from local cuisine to personal correspondence. Indy also spends a lot of time undercover in Italian and German military camps, where he can find locked safes and cases containing useful equipment. There are also collectibles including comic books and more useful skill books, which allow Indy to learn new skills to enhance everything from combat to stealth to improved medical skills.

Structurally, the game has some light Metroidvania elements as you can revisit previous locations with later-acquired skills or equipment to open new areas, although this element is not strongly publicised, and in fact is a bit weird: you have to wait until the game autosaves before leaving for a new location, otherwise anything you've done since will be deleted, and the game's incredibly urgent and pressing storyline means that Indy can't fly between, say, the Vatican and Connecticut willy-nilly, so any re-visits to previous areas is "non-canonical," you're really just remembering your original time in that location in a different way. This is an awkward mechanic that never really feels right, but is necessary since finding all the collectibles and side-objectives on your first visit to an area is almost impossible. It can be amusing to go back to earlier areas after levelling up your fighting skills in later areas, as the blackshirts in the Vatican are laughably easy to take out in fistfights once Indiana as even just moderately improved his unarmed combat. Watching cardinals and nuns step gingerly around a substantial pile of unconscious fascists never stops being entertaining.

You also spend a lot of the game with a companion, in this case Italian journalist Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) who is working hard to expose the dangers of Italian fascism and also looking for her sister, an archaeologist who fell in train with Indy's German rival, Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis, who not so much chews the scenery as gloriously consumes it wholesale). Gina can be useful in helping solve puzzles and provide hints if you get stuck in a particular area, though she does have a slight tendency to get in your way and block doorways (though she gets out of the way sharpish if you have problems). Gina fits right into the classic pantheon of Indy love interests who can hold their own. Voss is also a glorious opponent, prone to tedious pontificating and lording it over Indy despite being mostly reliant on Indy to work out the location of the artefacts and then trying to steal them. Also an honourable mention to the late Tony Todd, who provided a fine performance (mocap and voice) before passing away in November.

Despite the mounds of side-content, the game does not outstay its welcome: I finished the whole game, in fact almost 100%ing it (and only being prevented from doing so by a bug), in a very reasonable 38 hours. It's refreshing to play a game that isn't so overstuffed with optional side-content that it becomes a tedious grind. The game also mixes up its small open-world-ish hub areas with much more focused interstitial levels (like a trip to the Himalayas and a side-visit to Shanghai), which also helps pacing.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's biggest success is feeling like the Indiana Jones movies. The writing, dialogue and puzzles are all on-point, and the revelation of the final objective of the game is genuinely impressive (to the point you can imagine Spielberg and Lucas cursing as to why they never had that idea). If it was a movie, it would probably be at least the third-best one in the series. Like Batman: Arkham Asylum before it, The Great Circle feels like an authentic, additive entry to its franchise, not just a generic tie-in with some iconography slapped on the top.

The game does have flaws. Although I understand why they made guns awkward to use, there are moments where it can be very frustrating, and headshots not killing someone immediately is daft. The mechanic for revisiting previous location is awkward. The game is graphically beautiful (stunning, in fact) in terms of environments and lighting, but character models aren't quite there and can slip into the uncanny valley (Indy is also prone to making some odd faces and expressions). Idle dialogue can be gratingly repetitive (the sixty-first time Gina reminded me she couldn't swim felt a bit unnecessary). There are also some bugs with the game tripping over itself in trying to track objectives and some achievements not triggering until you run backwards and forwards a few times. During the game's finale a door opened but didn't "really" open, leaving the area beyond an empty void until I worked out how to trigger the proper cut scene. Early patches have eliminated some of these issues but others remain (being on 98% completion despite completing 100% of the game, but the game not recognising the last 2%, is irritating, if inconsequential).

But overall, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (****½) is easily the best Indiana Jones video game ever made, true to the spirit of the source material and a cracking good adventure even for casual fans of the franchise. The game is available now on PC and Xbox, and should launch on PlayStation 5 this spring.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

The war between the forces of Odium and those of the Knights Radiant has entered a dangerous new phase. Dalinar Kholin has negotiated a contest of champions, himself against Odium. Both sides have only ten days to seize as much territory as possible before this war will come to an end. But a devastating reversal has taken place which the Knights have no knowledge of: the shard of Odium has changed hands, and its new shardholder is a cannier, smarter foe far more willing to bend and flex than its former owner. From Shinovar in the west to the Shattered Plains in the east, the fate of Roshar, and perhaps the entire cosmere, hangs in the balance.

That sound you can hear right now is of reinforced bookshelf supports being delivered to hundreds of thousands of SFF fans across the globe. Bookshelves creak, strained by a weight they were never designed to hold. Yes, a new Stormlight Archive novel from Brandon Sanderson has arrived.

At 1,330 pages in hardcover and just a tad under half a million words by itself, Wind and Truth is the longest book in the series to date. It's also the most interesting. Whilst this is only the fifth of ten books in the series (and the seventeenth of potentially forty in the much wider Cosmere setting), it's the end of the first major story arc and has to "park" the various storylines for a planned ten-year timeskip before the sixth Stormlight book picks things back up. That book probably won't appear until the 2030s, with Sanderson committed to writing a new Mistborn trilogy and two sequels to Elantris before resuming this series.

In this sense Wind and Truth is Stormlight's equivalent to George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, which also had to "park" a massive array of character and plot arcs in the Song of Ice and Fire series in preparation for a five-year timeskip which, in that case, never happened (and arguably caused problems that series is partially still confronting two and a half decades later, but that's a debate for elsewhere). It is a climax book that has to deliver massive payoffs and tee up the second half of the series but can't actually end the series.

In some senses it delivers: Wind and Truth is a massive countdown to a continent-shaking confrontation between Dalinar, the highly redoubtable, reformed war criminal turned leader of the resurrected Knights Radiant, and Odium, the principle force of evil on not just this planet, but the entire Cosmere setting. But, in arguably Sanderson's most satisfying plot twist to date, the previous incarnation of Odium was killed at the end of the prior novel, Rhythm of War, and replaced by what had appeared to have been a minor, sympathetic semi-antagonist up to that point, one with detailed knowledge of Dalinar and his allies. This creates a situation in which our heroes are fighting an enemy they literally know exists, and knows them better than they do themselves.

This results in Odium launching a complex, multi-pronged scheme to defeat and conquer as many of Dalinar's allies as possible, as fast as possible, and their increasingly desperate attempts to fend him off and survive until the deadline, with the slight problem that Dalinar still has no idea on how to actually win that confrontation when it arrives.

This structure gives us a ticking clock element, and four primary storylines that continue through the novel: Dalinar entering the Cognitive Realm to learn the deep backstory to the setting and figure out how Odium was defeated, or at least checkmated, in the past (with Shallan unwittingly tagging along); Kaladin and Szeth visiting Szeth's homeland of Shinovar to find out what's going on there; Adolin leading a desperate battle in western Roshar to fend off Odium's forces; and Sigzil and the rest of Kaladin's old Bridge Four unit leading a similar desperate battle in eastern Roshar. Characters like Lift, Wit/Hoid, Renarin and Rlain, Venli, Jasnah and Navani also have notable subplots.

This makes for a busy novel that - somewhat - justifies its yak-stunning length. This is an improvement over Oathbringer, which probably could have been reduced in length by half without losing anything too major, and Rhythm of War (aka Die Hard with a Sprengeance) which was not far off the same. Wind and Truth has a lot going on and Sanderson juggles it mostly quite well. That's not to say the novel doesn't occasionally feel indulgent: strategy meetings where characters debate the plot rather than getting on with the plot recall some of the sludgier moments of The Wheel of Time, and the elaborate Cognitive Realm TED Talks on Ancient Rosharan History start indulging in redundancy when we get to revisit the entire storyline a second time later in the novel, from a different POV.

The plots themselves also vary in quality. Kaladin and Szeth's trip around Shinovar feels like a different, almost completely self-contained novel, one that takes place in two time periods as we see both Szeth's flashback storyline and his present-day storyline, which are very similar and take place in many of the same locations (again causing a feeling of redundancy). The divorcing of their storyline from the rest of the novel makes it feel a bit disconnected, at least until the end makes its relevance clear. This storyline also drags, especially as Kaladin has been learning the art of therapy and gets to try out his various new learned techniques on Szath's numerous neuroses with all the enthusiasm (and ill-advised lack of forethought) of someone who's watched a few too many YouTube videos on mental health and not read enough deep studies or done enough actual studying. Prioritising mental health is a good thing, and that message in one of the biggest-selling modern fantasy series is laudable, but the emphasis placed on it sometimes feels incongruous, if not pace-killing.

Adolin's storyline is probably the most traditional hoo-rah epic fantasy one here, with lots of military planning, cool action sequences, epic battles and desperate fights for survival against overwhelming odds. This sequence is great (you can almost see an anime adaptation in your head as it goes on), but is potentially a bit overwrought by the time the battle has been going on for eight or nine days and eight or nine hundred pages.

Dalinar's storyline is the most important in the book, but also the vaguest. Much of his story has him viewing narrated histories about Roshar's deep past that you can almost imagine Ken Burns narrating, which is both catnip to lore...cats, but potentially boring to everyone else, so Sanderson interjects a lot of action by having Dalinar stalked by the mysterious Ghostbloods and having Shallan acting behind the scenes to stop them. A lot of this stuff is pretty good, but again you start to ponder if this could have been structured differently (especially when Dalinar gets to experience everything he's just seen again, but from a different point of view).

The final major storyline is the best-paced, with Sigzil and his team returning to visit the Shattered Plains (the evocative setting for the first book in the series, The Way of Kings) and getting embroiled in a humdinger of a complicated battle, which is further thrown for a loop by the arrival of a third side.

We flip between these storylines quite regularly, allowing all to be serviced on a frequent basis, although this can result in plot-whiplash as the reader is thrown from city to city to illusionary dream dimension to intense battle to tragic deaths to cutesy romantic exchanges and strained humour without much regard for tonal consistency.

The book is a lot even by the standards of the series so far, which can both breathlessly enjoyable but also frustrating, especially for those who find some storylines deeply engrossing and others much less so.

This is also the book which does feel like it breaks Sanderson's (already shaky) long-ago promise that readers would not have to have an in-depth knowledge of the entire Cosmere universe to enjoy any given series or even novel within it. We even spend brief parts of the book visiting Scadrial to set up the forthcoming Mistborn: Ghostbloods trilogy, and allusions to other books come thick and fast. At one point the book stops to give us a potted plot summary of Warbreaker (where the sword Nightblood first appeared), whilst one part of the ending exists to set up the events of the previously-published The Sunlit Man. This may be good from the point of view of the wider Cosmere setting, with Sanderson incorporating more elements into Stormlight that were originally planned for other books and series (thus reducing the total number of books he still has to write in the setting, which was starting to look a bit over-ambitious), but those Stormlight fans who weren't keen on Mistborn or his other works may be less happy about those wider setting elements colliding with Roshar here.

Of course, for those who love the interconnected elements of Sanderson's wider universe, this book will be outrageously enjoyable, satisfying, and prime Wiki-fodder.

Summarising a book of this breadth and heft is tricky, especially when you want to avoid "1990s flight sim expansion pack review syndrome" ("if you liked the last thing in the series, you'll like this too, I guess"). If you've read the previous books in the series, you're going to read this, and you'll have a good time; Sanderson sceptics will find little here to convince them otherwise. Wind & Truth (****) is better than the last two Stormlight books, but not as strong as The Way of Kings. Sanderson's weaknesses - a prosaic prose style, occasionally jarring use of modern language mixed in with more formal syntax, haphazard characterisation - are still present and correct, but his strengths are here as well: impressive worldbuilding, fascinating magic, explosive action sequences and satisfying moments of plot revelation and payoff. This novel also has an impressive amount of incident going on, paced surprisingly well for the book's staggering length. The book is available worldwide now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

The Longest SFF Novels of All Time (2025 update)

It's been a few years since I last tackled this idea.

Of course, mega-long novels are not published in the industry that often, so the individual novel list hasn't changed very much. The main change has been adjusting the positions of Brandon Sanderson's novels based on updated word counts and adding his latest volume, Wind & Truth, which was published since the previous list was published.

Previously I also counted "longest series," but that's going to have to become its whole own article.

These lists are not exhaustive and consistency of reporting these figures can be quite variable. I have opted for word counts as the most accurate way of estimating length, as page counts can vary immensely based on page margins and font sizes.


Longest Novels

1. Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest
667,000 words • 1845-47

This long novel was serialised in "penny dreadfuls" of the mid-19th Century and chronicles the adventures of Sir Francis Varney, a vampire. This book's genre credentials have been disputed (with the suggestion that Varney is actually a madman rather than a real vampire), but there seems to be a general acceptance that the book is a genuine work of the fantastic, and the longest SFF work ever published in one volume (which it was in 1847). The book was also influential on Bram Stoker's later Dracula (1897) and introduced many of the tropes of vampire fiction, including the "sympathetic vampire" protagonist.


2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
645,000 words • 1957

Highly debatable as a genre work rather than a political novel, although the story is partially set against a dystopian background and genre historian John Clute identifies the novel as SF (plus it inspired the very SF Bioshock video game series and fantasy Sword of Truth series), so okay, we'll count it. Your mileage may vary.


3. Jerusalem by Alan Moore
615,000 words • 2016

Alan Moore's prose magnum opus is a massive, dizzying and baffling journey into the surreal. It's so huge that it is also available in a two-volume edition in a nice slipcase.


4. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
545,000 words • 1996

Infinite Jest has primarily literary allusions, although the book's setting - a North American superstate consisting of a unified Canada, USA and Mexico - is a futuristic dystopia. The book could have even been bigger, with 250 manuscript pages trimmed for length by the publishers.

5. To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams
520,000 words • 1993

The concluding volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is bigger than the first two novels in the series (The Dragonbone Chair and Stone of Farewell) combined. A titanic, shelf-destroying novel, it is only available in mass-market paperback in two volumes, subtitled Siege and Storm.


6. The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon
502,000 words • 2001

The fifth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series, spiced up by a time-spanning culture clash, is absolutely gigantic.


7. A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
501,000 words • 2005

The sixth volume of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander historical romance series doesn't quite match its predecessor in size but it can still be used to stun a yak.


8. Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
500,000 words • 2000

Mary Gentle's novel is a dazzling mix of SF, historical drama, fantasy, alternate history and general bizarrity. The novel was published in one volume in the UK, but the American publishers released it as four in the USA.

9. Wind & Truth by Brandon Sanderson
491,000 words • 2024

Brandon Sanderson's fifth Stormlight Archive novel is his longest to date, featuring a desperate battle to save the world of Roshar whilst also expanding the setting to incorporate more of the Cosmere. Sanderson is projecting five or six years to the next book whilst he works on other Cosmere projects, so it'll be interesting to see if the word count keeps rising.

10. The Stand by Stephen King
472,376 words • 1978

Stephen King's biggest novel in a single volume, notable for also foreshadowing The Dark Tower series. The above word count is for the expanded and revised edition.

11. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
470,000 words • 1954-55

This book needs no introduction. The most influential fantasy novel ever written, often incorrectly cited as the biggest genre novel of all time. Due to paper shortages after the Second World War, the book was released in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King), inadvertently creating the classic fantasy trilogy at the same time. The novel has been available in its intended one-volume version since the 1960s.


12. The Naked God by Peter F. Hamilton
469,000 words • 1999

The biggest space opera novel ever published, even more remarkable because it was the concluding volume of an even bigger trilogy, The Night's Dawn.


13. Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

455,891 words • 2020

The fourth Stormlight Archive novel continues Brandon Sanderson's relentless assault on bookshelf integrity everywhere.

14. Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
451,912 words • 2017

The third Stormlight Archive novel couldn't quite match the fourth for size. Remember when Sanderson told us the first novel (a now novella-feeling 380,000 words) would be the longest? Good times.


15. It by Stephen King
445,134 words • 1986

Arguably, Stephen King's most famous single novel thanks to multiple TV and film adaptations.

16. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
422,000 words • 2000

George R.R. Martin started his Song of Ice and Fire series being somewhat concerned about the word count and went to great lengths to keep the first two books down to a friendly 300,000 words or so apiece, dropping chapters back into the next volume if necessary. However, with Martin planning a five year time-jump after this book (which never actually materialised), he had no choice but to write the story to its natural conclusion. The result was a book that pushed the UK publishers to the limits of what they could publish in one volume. The paperback version, in fact, was released in two volumes.


17. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
420,000 words • 2011

The difficult-to-write fifth volume in A Song of Ice and Fire ended up being somewhat longer than A Storm of Swords, but Martin cut it down to slightly shorter in the final sweat and edit. Like Swords, this novel was released in paperback in the UK in two volumes. Where will The Winds of Winter fit in in the size stakes? Hopefully we'll find out.

18. The Burning White by Brent Weeks

420,000 words • 2019

The concluding volume of Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series.

19. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
415,000 words • 1999

Neal Stephenson's first gigantic book, but not his last (although this remains his longest book) is an interesting romp through WWII history, cryptography and weirdness. A stand-alone, but it also acts as a thematic prequel (and actual sequel) to his later Baroque Cycle.

20. An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon
402,000 words • 2009

The seventh Outlander novel is huge, but feels quite modest compared to the longest books in the series mentioned above.


21. Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon
401,000 words • 1996

The fourth Outlander novel. Given the several books in the series that are just under 400,000 words, I can only assume that the author gets through a lot of keyboards.


= 22. The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
400,000 words • 2011

Patrick Rothfuss's sequel to The Name of the Wind is considerably larger. It remains to be seen (still!) if the final volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Doors of Stone, will be bigger still.


= 22. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
400,000 words • 2014

The second volume of The Stormlight Archive is lost its record-setting status as Sanderson's biggest novel and the biggest novel in the series to all three of its following volumes. But it's still pretty big.

Below 400,000 words, the number of fantasy and SF novels in that size bracket shoots up massively. So rather than try to come up with an exhaustive list, here's some notable SFF novels with their word counts:

• Lord of Chaos is the sixth and longest Wheel of Time novel, clocking in at 395,000 words, shading the fourth volume, The Shadow Rising, at 386,000.
• Toll the Hounds is the eighth and longest Malazan Book of the Fallen novel, reaching 389,000 words.
• Maia, by the late Richard Adams, is 379,130 words.
• Magician, by Raymond E. Feist, is a relatively breezy 313,410 words (about 330,000 words in the 1992 extended edition). Which makes the decision to publish the novel in two volumes in the United States (as Apprentice and Master) all the weirder.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is a dignified 309,000 words.
• Temple of the Winds, the longest Sword of Truth novel, is a modest 307,520 words in length.
• The Order of the Phoenix, the longest Harry Potter novel, is 257,045 words in length. That's over three times the length of the shortest novel in the series, The Philosopher's Stone. 
• The Sword of Shannara, the novel that popularised and kickstarted the modern fantasy genre in 1977, is a relatively modest 228,160 words. It's also still Terry Brooks's biggest novel, by far; none of the other Shannara novels top 200,000 words and only three top 150,000 words.
• SF is generally a lot shorter than fantasy, but the fact that Frank Herbert's seminal Dune is only 188,000 words - shorter than three of the Harry Potter books! - might be surprising.

Web Series

Online web serials have become increasingly popular in recent years. These are updated so fast that this is trying to hit a moving target.

• The Wandering Inn by Pirateaba: 14,222,637 words
• A Practical Guide to Evil by Erratic Errata: 3,060,000 words
• Pale by John McCrae: 2,040,585 words
• Ward by John McCrae: 1,944,784 words
• Worm by John McCrae: 1,672,617 words
• Twig by John McCrae: 1,605,473 words

Why Page Counts Vary

It's remarkable what difference shifting a margin over by a few millimetres can make. One-volume editions of The Lord of the Rings, for example, can vary from 750 pages (for tiny-font editions on onion paper) to the better part of 2,000 (for large-print versions for readers with bad eyesight). Back in 2001 Pan Macmillan were able to squeeze the paperback of The Naked God (469,000 words) into almost the exact same page count as its predecessor novel, The Reality Dysfunction (385,000 words) despite being significantly longer, just by manipulating font sizes and margins.

This is why page count is a poor guide to working out a novel's true length, and word count is more reliable indicator.

Word counts can also differ, depending on the programme used (most modern word counts come from the ebook editions) and how they count punctuation. Some counters will also include cast lists, footnotes and appendices, others will disregard them. The publishers may even give differing word counts because they did a count before the last edits were finalised, or they forgot that the new edition has more stuff in it.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

An ex-soldier, Skif, is annoyed when his flat is destroyed by an "artifact," a strange, reality-warping device brought out of the Zone, the huge stretch of countryside surrounding the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant which has been sealed off from the world for almost twenty years whilst mercenaries and fortune-hunters, "stalkers," explore its ruins for artifacts and loot. Skif decides to head into the Zone to find out why this artifact was ejected into the outside world, and rapidly discovers events in the Zone are building to a bloody and dangerous climax.

There are few video game franchises both as beloved and janky as STALKER. The creation of Ukrainian developers GSC Game World, the original STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl was acclaimed on release in 2007 for its graphics, its bleak atmosphere and its depiction of the real-life Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, filtered through a weird alt-history horror lens inspired by the 1979 movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky and its own inspiration, the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers (who also wrote the movie script). STALKER was also famous for its numerous bugs, lengthy patching process, and subsequent fan mods which restored cut content and made the game more stable.

The game was followed by two stand-alone expansions, the somehow-even-jankier Clear Sky (2008) and the much more polished Call of Pripyat (2009), which expanded the STALKER story with new characters, factions and stories. A planned "proper" sequel was announced, followed by the company promptly going bust (some devs spun off to make the splendid Metro series of games) and, just a few years later, suddenly coming back to life. Then, as STALKER 2 was entering the final stretch of development, the developers' homeland was invaded, forcing part of the dev team to relocate to Prague (some of the other devs stayed behind to join the army or help in the civilian support effort).

STALKER 2 is here and in some respects it's like the franchise has never been away: STALKER 2 is janky, but there's a lot of heart and interesting ideas bubbling under the surface. This is an old-school game with deteriorating weapons, the need to repair equipment and think about food and water, but also has a more modern design, with a massive open-world map and various side-stories to explore alongside the main narrative. Fortunately, the game rejects the idea of Ubiclone makework BS, with the bulk of the game's 60-hour playtime taken up by consequential missions and exploration rather than tracking down collectibles.

The main narrative is the focus of the game and is fairly entertaining. You play Skif, an ex-soldier who is rather irritated when his flat is blown up by a glowing rock from the Zone. Rather than file an insurance claim, Skif decides to perform a one-man vengeance mission into the Zone to find out where this rock came from and find someone who is going to pay for a new pad. As a newcomer to the Zone, Skif doesn't know what the hell is going on and other characters try to fill him in on the convoluted backstory from the original trilogy of games (which variously baffles Skif or leaves him apathetic; this guy is really focused on finding out why a rogue geode demolished his domicile). This is obviously a boon for newcomers to the franchise who haven't play the original games either, but getting up to speed is rather tough going as you are assaulted by a battery of proper nouns, nefarious-sounding organisations (Ward, Spark, Duty, Noontide, Monolith) and introduced to a ton of characters, most of whom are some variation on "cynical soldier-philosopher." I suspect Malazan fans will love this game. The story as it unfolds is reasonably intriguing, though sometimes goes off in a weird tangent that's not very-well explained (the STALKER Wikis might be your friend in understanding some of these events) which can be a bit odd.

Gameplay is your standard first-person shooter. You shoot a lot of people, things and mutated animals in this game, with an impressive array of weapons, each of which has its own ammo supply, which also comes in variants (armour-piercing, etc) which are meant for different types of enemies. I'll be honest and say this system is great if you really want to engage with it, but I went with "fire whatever is at hand at the enemy and hope for the best," and most of the time this was fine. Unfortunately, despite being a trained soldier, Skif is also apparently an asthmatic who runs out of breath after lightly jogging for about 12 seconds, so can't carry much in the way of weapons or supplies. As the game progresses you can get better armour, even power-assisted exoskeletons, and acquire weird artefacts from the Zone that ups your carrying capacity, but even so you're never going to be able to carry more than about four weapons max. Weapon variety is solid, but mostly boils down to you being recommended to carry a silenced pistol, some kind of semi-automatic rifle, a sniper rifle and a shotgun, the latter being essential for dealing with bloodsucker mutants that are usually invisible until they attack you without warning. Oh yes, the standard stealth system allowing you sneak up behind someone and stab them silently is present and correct.

Combat against human enemies is enjoyable, with some good sniper duels possible across the rooftops of Pripyat or between office buildings in abandoned industrial zones. Combat against mutants, on the other hand, is mostly tedious. A lot of the mutants are preposterously bullet-spongey, especially galling after the game plays fair with human enemies, where headshots will take down almost everyone in one headshot, unless they have armoured helmets. Patches have nerfed some mutants (bloodsuckers are now much easier to deal with) but others, like chimaeras and pseudogiants, remain absolute joyless slogs to fight and are simply best avoided or run away from.

Graphically, STALKER 2 is frequently jaw-dropping. In some lighting conditions, the game looks photorealistic with amazing environments, textures and lighting. Fog or sunshine almost makes the game look like you've taken photos in the real Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Human characters are a still not really there, with stiff animation and uncanny valley effects, and the mutants are almost universally ugly and not really convincing. It feels like the mutants were designed right at the start of the process when they might have been thinking about the game launching on last-gen hardware and were never updated to the latest version of the game engine. Still, for atmosphere there is no game out there (bar maybe Alan Wake 2) that can match STALKER 2. Trudging through a forest miles from the nearest town, trying not to stumble into an anomaly and low on health and ammo, only for a pack of wild dogs to attack and force you to take shelter in a nearby ramshackle barn, is an unmatched gaming experience. As with the better Bethesda RPGs, STALKER 2 is at its best when channelling an atmosphere of uncanny sparseness.

The map is massive, which I ended up having mixed feelings on. Having an accurate-ish size of map for the relatively small area of countryside the game is covering makes it feel realistic in terms of scale (Ghost of Tsushima, which had a massive map for a relatively constrained 40-mile-long island, achieved something similar), and early missions are very well-constructed for how they get you to explore new areas of the Zone. However, after a while missions start sending you from side of the Zone to the other, which is a fairly formidable undertaking requiring you to load up on weapons and supplies (recalling that Skif has the carrying capacity of an elderly nun with a back complaint), travel in a straight line for about 15 minutes and will probably result in you fighting off a mutant with two heads and two arses, a plague of rats and a ghost who inexplicably throws buckets at you, along the way. There is a fast-travel-ish system in the game via "guides" who can teleport you from one base to another base, but this doesn't always help much since bases are relatively few and far between. It's also astronomically expensive. Still, the atmosphere is so great that mostly you won't mind taking long hikes to your destination, aside from potentially wearing out your screenshot button.

The in-game economy is also pretty busted, with weapons and ammo being quite expensive, repairing your battered equipment is ludicrously expensive, and you usually spend your hard-earned cash on upgrading your armour to include more carrying capacity or deploying more artefacts about ten minutes before you find a much better suit of armour in a shack in the middle of nowhere, and have to start upgrading again from scratch. Sigh.

Voice acting, in Ukrainian, is also excellent (or so it seemed to me) and the minimalist musical score, backed up by dozens of original and licensed songs in certain areas, is also very good. The English voice acting is frequently terrible though, with a bizarre variety of accents that makes the Zone feel like it's Camden Market on a Saturday afternoon. Switch on Ukrainian voices and subtitles, it adds a ton to the game's atmosphere.

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl (****) is possibly the most stunningly atmospheric video game available at the moment, with excellent combat, characters and exploration, with a solid (if occasionally obtuse) story. Mutants are a pain in the backside and the massive map can be occasionally frustrating, whilst a plethora of small bugs can occasionally disrupt gameplay, though a steady patching schedule has already fixed a lot of problems. The game's rejection of modern open-world filler is refreshing, and it manages to be a more challenging experience than most modern games whilst not being totally off-putting to newcomers. There's certainly room for improvement, and with two big DLC expansions on the way it will be interesting to go back to the Zone and explore it further.

The game is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

CD Projekt Red formally announces THE WITCHER IV

CD Projekt Red has formally confirmed the existence of The Witcher IV with a CG trailer at the Games Awards. They had acknowledged that the game existed previously, but this is the first time they've confirmed that it would be called The Witcher IV (rather than The Witcher Colon Subtitle Something) and it will focus on the character of Ciri.

The game follows The Witcher (2007), The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2015) and sees a change of protagonist. The first three games, which acted as an unofficial sequel to the nine-volume book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, saw you playing Geralt, the titular Witcher, as he grappled with various threats to the Northern Kingdoms. In The Witcher III he earned a pleasant retirement by saving Ciri, a young girl with impressive powers, who was destined to save the world. The game also saw you playing Ciri at several key points in the narrative. The game ended with Ciri in various possible states, including becoming the Empress of Nilfgaard, dying, or entering Witcher training.

The Witcher IV suggest that, whichever ending you chose, by several years later Ciri has circled back around to becoming a Witcher in her own right, wielding magical powers of the Cat School. Some fans had speculated that the game might allow you to create your own Witcher protagonist, in the vein of CDPR's other big video game adaptation, Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), but CDPR seemed to prefer to stick to the idea of using a pre-existing, firmly-established character.

The game entered development after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, although early work was slowed by the urgent need to patch and fix that game after its rough launch window. As a result, it's hard to know how far along The Witcher IV is; CDPR only recently confirmed that the game was entering full-time development, and Cyberpunk 2077's first trailer preceded the release of the game by a startling eight years. CDPR hope to speed The Witcher IV's development by using the more widely-used Unreal 5 Engine to speed onboarding of new staff. I'd be impressed to see this game released much this side of 2028 though.

As well as The Witcher IV, itself projected as the start of a new trilogy, CDPR are working on a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, a game in a totally new IP and a remake of the original Witcher game from 2007.