The Wings Upon Her Back
336 Pages
$10.49
9781616964146
Tachyon Publications
Genre fiction can be hard for new properties to break into. Any new work set in a world outside of our own must sell the reader on the reality of that world. As such, it’s easier for well-established IPs to continue pumping out new works set in worlds that audiences are already familiar with. There’s a reason that Disney puts out a new Star Wars TV show every six months, even though it’s based on a movie from the Carter administration. It’s not quite as difficult to break through in the world of novels (see the sleeper hit A Court of Thorns and Roses), but new books by new authors must fight an uphill battle for readers’ attentions. The Wings Upon Her Back is a book that stands a good chance at winning that battle.
Published in April of 2025 by Tachyon Publications, Samantha Mills’s novelistic debut is an overall triumph. Readers of fantasy and science fiction will have no trouble sinking their teeth into the world Mills has so painstakingly crafted. Set in Radezhda, a sprawling metropolis inhabited by five ancient gods, her characters inhabit a world neatly balanced between magic and machines. Every interior and means of conveyance, the people and their mechanized implants, and even the roles they fill in this society is stuck together with pneumatic pipes and copper gears. Fans of the Netflix series Arcane might recognize some similarities in these settings. It is a world where the fantastical and mechanical cohabitate, where machine gods craft a world populated with mechanics, engineers, and warrior priests. Combining science fiction and fantasy is a gamble, no doubt, but it has paid off well. Instead of muddling the setting, the magical and scientific aspects play off one another to create something intriguing and well-grounded.
Thematically, The Wings Upon Her Back is laser-focused on class society and social stratification. This social stratification, the division of Radezhda’s society into five “sects,” is reminiscent of young adult fiction from the early 2010s. Books like Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games, or Divergent split their worlds into houses, districts, and factions. However, unlike these fictional societies, the world found in The Wings Upon Her Back is not divided based on individual personalities, but on something more realistic, class position. The five sects, workers, farmers, scholars, engineers, and warriors, are not equal in size or in stature. Radezhda is something like a military dictatorship ruled by the warrior caste with the engineers and scholars serving as a pampered middle class. Class mobility is something greatly desired with “every worker family who kept sending their children past basic reading and arithmetic an inspiration.” (49) The great mass of society, the workers and farmers, are in theory equal, but in practice are actively repressed by the warriors, all justified by a stultifying religious orthodoxy.
It is this repression that kicks off the novel’s plot. Our protagonist, a member of the warrior class named Zemolai, is seized by a strange burst of sympathy for a supposedly “heretical” cook engaged in improper religious practices. In showing him clemency, she commits a terrible crime against the social order she has sworn to protect, and is shorn of her mechanical wings. These wings, gruesome mechanical implants granted to all of Radezhda’s warriors, are ripped from her flesh, her “god… disfiguring her beyond repair.” (27) Left to die, she is coerced into joining a brewing rebellion against the reign of the warrior caste she was expelled from.
The bulk of the book is concerned with Zemolai and her uneasy alliance with a rebellion she feels deep reservations towards. At its core, a book about rebellion and conformity, The Wings Upon Her Back may resonate with those grimly fixated on current events. A novel that focuses on the impact of rebellion and unrest, as well as the circumstances that drive people to such ends is well suited to our current moment. The twists and turns of the rebellion, the response of civil society to it, and the course it ultimately takes are genuinely compelling. Though the characters are merely serviceable, and often follow well established archetypes, the world is richly textured and contains the kinds of nuance that fans of worldbuilding crave.
Samantha Mills has, until this point, only worked in the form of short fiction (notably publishing the multi-award winning story Rabbit Test.) Any author’s first novel is going to be a leap, but this was a leap worth taking. Ultimately, The Wings Upon Her Back contains all of the elements of a surprise hit, and while there’s not much point in wishcasting chart success, if it ever takes off, don’t say you weren’t warned.
Meet the blogger:
JAKE NICKELSON is an amateur writer and history major attending Hamline University. He’s been telling stories since he could talk and reading stories since he could read.
