Christopher Ruocchio's KINGDOMS OF DEATH (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

We've come a long way with Sir Lord Hadrian Half-Mortal Demon in White Marlowe since he was a young sprat who wanted to be a Scholiast just like his dear old tutor and ran away from home when his father decided to make him a torturer-priest instead. 

 Along the way with Hadrian through Christopher Ruocchio's massive Sun Eater series, we've explored anarchic gatherings of extreme cyborg self-experimenters; battled and defeated two great princes of humanity's archenemy, the Cielcin; met an effectively immortal Saturn who prolongs his life by taking over his children's bodies and keeps a pet/slave artificial intelligence from the dawn of recorded time that renews itself with human body parts and human brains; learned mind-blowing secrets about the galaxy's history from before humans took to the stars; survived court politics that make those of Byzantium seem tame and dull; died at least once and resurrected' gained superpowers of incredible utility that are almost impossible to use when they're most needed; made friends that would die or kill for him; become the idol of at least one cult... and now, as we catch up with him in this fourth novel of the main sequence of the series, Kingdoms of Death, he's being pressed into service as a diplomat. His mission: to persuade the Lothrian Commonwealth to join forces with the Sollan Empire and its allies to defeat the Cielcin once and for all, before the Cielcin can defeat humanity and turn us all into livestock, both the kind that labors and the kind that gets eaten.

Buckle up. 

This fourth volume in the main series is both its most exciting and its most tedious. Some of Ruocchio's finest action set-pieces, including a truly heroic chase-cum-last stand, are paired with long chapters of crushing boredom and sameness that do almost too good a job of depicting life as a prisoner with no hope. Oh, and trigger warnings for torture, I guess, but, being the under-medicated chronic pain patient that I am, I found that most of our hero's agonizing experiences sounded pretty much like getting out of bed and trying to get dressed every day (at least until they started peeling his long muscles like fruit), so, your mileage may vary, etc.

As usual, there are two halves to this narrative, with the first bringing Hadrian and his enterage to a whole new-to-us society that is half Yvgeny Zamyatin and half Ascia (there's even an emphasis on Groups of Seventeen). The Lothrian Commonwealth is a totalitarian horror so complete that people don't even have names, live in cells in vast hive-like buildings under opaque domes (their planet not exactly being naturally hospitable to life, or much to look at) that function also as Faraday cages, the better to keep its population from ever organizing against the regime. And the very language of the Lothrians is downright Ascian, consisting only of aphorisms from its Black Book of doctrine and containing no personal pronouns at all.

Hadrian has been given yet another impossible task by his cousin, the Emperor, who still claims to be shielding Hadrian from the many forces at court who wish him ill, but whom Hadrian and his people still suspect is really trying to shield his power from Hadrian. What better way to get him out of the way for half a century or so than tell him to go convince this bizarre and depressing society to give military aid to humanity's existential struggle, preferably without completely upsetting the social order there, hmm?

The second half sees Hadrian alone and friendless and utterly in the power of the Cielcin Prince of Princes, Syriani Dorayica, who accords Hadrian a disorienting level of respect even to regarding Hadrian as the true "King of the Vermin" and insisting Hadrian participate in rituals meant only for the Cielcin elite -- while also mutilating, imprisoning and torturing Hadrian for, in the grand tradition of torturers through the ages, information that the Cielcin already has. And the Prince of Princes has even worse in store for Hadrian, for Hadrian's entire Red Company of 90,000 human souls has also fallen into Cielcin power.

And Christopher Ruocchio is definitely of the GRRM school of callous beloved character deaths. And told ol' George to hold his beer. Which means I'm a bit angry with him at the moment, but I can't say I didn't know this was coming. Hadrian's being in Doctor Who Jeopardy and being Palatine, with a life span far exceeding pretty much everybody else's, guaranteed that this was coming. But still, I bite my thumb at you, Ruocchio!

Now I have to wait like the rest of the plebs for the next volume, Ashes of Man, to come out in December. I could scratch my Sun Eating itch with some sidequels and novellas, but I dislike spending audible credits on such short reads and I insist on finishing these with Samuel Roukin's voice in my ear, so those will have to wait for the next sale-or-stupid-windfall, I think. Meanwhile, I have a library full of other stuff I've not listened to or read yet, but December sure can hurry the hell up. I'm ready to watch Hadrian eat the damned sun already.

Though that might be another novel yet?

Jen Williams' WINNOWING FLAME TRILOGY

I've been following Jen "Sennydreadful" Williams' career with more than casual interest since pretty much the dawn of Twitter, when she was still working up the guts to go for the glory and letting goober nobodies like me beta read her early novels (*cough* Ink for Thieves when? *cough*), including the entire Copper Cat Trilogy. It has been an experience I can only describe as extra to watch her bust out with an even more imaginative triple-threat follow-up, and then to branch out into whole different genres from epic fantasy. 

In other words, this is one of those posts I've got to issue with a caveat: I have zero objectivity where this writer is concerned. 

For her Winnowing Flame Trilogy, consisting of The Ninth Rain, The Bitter Twins and The Poison Song, Williams has created a fascinating and deeply realized original fantasy setting... and then subjected it to centuries of periodic attacks by eldritch horrors from outer space that would give H.P. Lovecraft hives. And then hollow him out from the inside, the better to provide raw material for a horrifying green varnish with which the invaders intend eventually to coat and cover the whole world of Sarn.

Opposing the mysterious and terrifying invaders, the Jure'lia, are the progeny of a vast god-tree, Ygseril, which drops fruit-like pods each time the invasion resumes. The pods, in turn, hatch into war-beasts, giant beings, some familiar to fantasy fans like dragons and griffins, but also giant bats, giant flying cats and wolves and... whatever Helcate is. We'll get back to poor sweet Helcate later. Point is, these creatures are huge, big enough for people to ride them like the dragons of Pern, and they are intelligent, able to talk and plan and strategize and bond deeply with each other and their riders, who are traditionally Eborans, members of an elf-like (or, really, Melnibonéan) race who tend to the tree between invasions, or "rains" in their parlance, and in the periods between rains enjoy incredibly long lives (courtesy of Ygseril's sap) and a high degree of civilization and culture which sets them apart (or, if you ask them, above) the mere humans who live everywhere else on Sarn.

As The Ninth Rain opens, Sarn has long been at peace after the Eborans and their war-beasts defeated the Jure'lia and sent them retreating to... wherever they go after their asses have been kicked again, but the Eighth Rain was only ended at great cost: Ygseril has gone dormant, if not died outright, and stopped producing the life-extending sap the Eborans rely on to stay healthy and ready. Alas and alack! But this isn't the worst of it. 

A century or so before The Ninth Rain begins, the Eborans discovered a handy substitute for Ygseril's magical sap: human blood. And so occurred a reign of terror as the Eborans' new bloodlust made them a scourge almost as terrible as their ancient enemy as the Carrion Wars pitted them against the humans they'd always defended -- until it turned out that drinking human blood instead of Ygseril's sap produced a terrible and degenerating disease in the Eborans. Meaning that by the time we meet our handful of Eboran characters, there's only a handful of them left in the world.

Meanwhile, while only a small percentage of Sarn is covered in green alien varnish, other Jure'lian effluvia have had a mutating effect on the world's flora and fauna, making large swathes of the countryside dangerous and wild and full of bizarre monsters that barely resemble the ordinary wildlife from which they degenerated.

Oh, and there are also "Parasite Spirits" now, only approximately corporeal beings that turn living things inside out on contact.

Jen Williams sure do have an imagination on her. 

Against this backdrop, we meet a small and ragtag band of misfits who are soon going to have to try to perform the same tasks that the entire Eboran civilization barely managed in its prime. Hestilion, an Eboran noblewoman, has devoted her life to finding a way to revive Ygseril and has resorted to ever more desperate and depraved measures. Her brother, Tormalin the Oathless, has decided to chuck his Eboran birthright and become a sword for hire. Their cousin, Aldasair, has slowly lost his mind over the centuries and now just kind of sits there in his family apartments, barely even breathing.

Not very promising, eh? But wait, there's more. Like Noon, a young human woman with the ability to conjure a searingly hot green fire from her hands with the life energy she can absorb from others at a mere touch (this is the Winnowing Flame that gives the trilogy its name). More promising, right? Wrong. Noon, like nearly all the similarly gifted women of Sarn, was collected by The Winnowry, an institution dedicated to sealing such women away from the rest of humanity for humanity's good. Their "Fell-Witch" prisoners are kept in complete isolation, underfed and kept as weak as possible, except when they are periodically allowed to draw a small amount of energy from a member of staff for the purpose of cooking up a batch of a powerful drug with a high black market value. Sad trombone.

Elsewhere, there is Lady Vincenza de Grazon, of a wealthy human family in the sunny south of Sarn's prime winemaking country - hence her preferred nickname, Vintage. Vintage is a restless middle-aged soul still pining after a romantic youth spent exploring and studying Jure'lia relics and remains with her lover, the long disappeared Eboran Lady Nanthema. Vintage, whose family makes the best wine in Ebora because they use mutant grapes, occasionally still goes out adventuring, hoping to find a trace of Nanthema, and has hired a certain Eboran renegade to be her bodyguard-assistant; Tormalin (remember Tormalin?) will work for wine, so it's a cozy arrangement...

Until The Plot happens! The Ninth Rain eventually brings all of these characters together as they discover that another Rain is imminent, unravel a few mysteries with very unpleasant solutions, and, well, do actually manage to get Ygseril to poop out a few new war-beast pods for them, but at tremendous cost.

The Bitter Twins explores the immediate aftermath of the tiny victory won in The Ninth Rain; Sarn is again home to war-beasts, but only five have hatched and they are somewhat crippled by the weird circumstances of their rebirth. Where ordinarily war beasts re-emerge with the very souls and memories of all of their previous incarnations, only one, the beautiful white dragon Vostok, possesses this advantage. The rest are blank slates, only just able to employ the telepathic link they have with one another and with the Eborans -- and one human -- with whom they bond. Vostok is paired with Noon; a giant flying cat named Kirune*   pairs with Tormalin; a huge and feisty griffin, Sharrik, bonds with a character who barely figured in the first novel but comes into his own here, the human warrior Bern; a flying wolf, Jessen, bonds with a much-revived Aldasair, and the runt of the litter, Helcate (who, I never really got a mental grasp on what he looks like, but when he grows up he can spit acid) bonds with a young Eboran boy discovered orphaned in an outer settlement, Eri. Not a lot with which to save the world, but sometimes ya gotta make do.

Of course, since only Vostok has her memories, she assumes a leadership role that not all of the others, all of whom have war-beast pride if not war-beast collective memory, necessarily feel she deserves, and there is friction only increased by the Eborans' slight but undeniable discomfort that the human, Bern, is in their number, although if anybody deserves to ride a griffin, it is Bern. Bern is a prince of one of those loose collectives of tiny city-states near the coast that is still host to a whole lot of Ju'rellian ruins, ruins that began to stir unsettlingly in The Ninth Rain, sending Bern and a delegation of his countrymen to petition the Eborans for aid. Once the reality of the Eborans' situation was made plain, Bern set to work trying to set things right, repairing, restoring, replanting with his prodigious strength and kind heart. In the process, he also brought Aldasair out of his stupor, beginning a relationship that deepens in The Bitter Twins to the point where Bern gives Aldasair one of his two beloved axes, which he calls the Bitter Twins, to wield as his primary weapon. But Bern's axes aren't the only bitter twins in the novel.

Once upon a time, a great artist fashioned incredible tablets that were not only visual but also dream-memory records of the war-beasts in their prime in the Eighth Rain, as Vostok recalls. But when the blood disease began to wipe out Ebora, the artist, his twin sister, and a handful of followers sailed away to start a colony somewhere else, and were never heard from again. Soon Team Sarn forms the notion of having Noon/Vostok and Kirune/Tor set off on a mission to find the artist and/or his art in the hope that it might rekindle at least some of the war-beasts' lost memories.

Meanwhile, Vintage kind of takes over as the unofficial new ruler of Ebora, together with Aldasair, Bern and Eri, who continue trying to train and prepare for their historic responsibilities -- while the revived and returned enemy Jure'lia begin a program of regrouping and, soon, attacking Sarn anew with their terrifying combination of bizarre insectoid monsters**, and begin considering how best to exploit a turncoat and the resources the turncoat brought along for the nauseating, weird, destructive ride.

What the Away Team learns about the artist and his sister, and about the true nature of the Eboran people, leaves everybody shaken with perhaps less confidence than ever and things truly don't look great for Team Sarn as this middle chapter comes to a close, the way middle chapters should.

The extraordinary emotional intensity of the trilogy comes to an all-time high in The Poison Song, as the advantage seems to brutally see-saw between Team Sarn and its enemies (which now number more than just the seemingly infinite resources of the Jure'lia when some human kingdoms, still bitter at the memory of the Carrion Wars, seem poised to try to strike out on their own, or are conquered by traitor Fell-Witches, or are just finally playing the price for lifetimes of derring do and famous exploits). In this post-George R.R. Martin age, we can't assume that the beloved main heroes aren't going to die in emotionally gutting ways (as indeed the loss of one member of Team Sarn in The Bitter Twins motivates more than a little of what happens in this third volume), and Williams isn't above letting truly extraordinarily strange and cruel twists of fate remove crucial players from the board at crucial times to face their personal demons and buried past trauma instead of being there to help their friends in present battles, tuning the emotional pitch of this volume to a shriek that only, say, the flying wolf could hear. Like, almost unbearable amounts of tension, you guys.

As I finish this post, we have just had an announcement that Jen Williams is back on her fantasy bullshit after a very good sojourn into the straight up suspense genre, proving that she really can do pretty much anything. I, for one, ambivalent as I am about epic fantasy to this day, am pretty glad to see she's going back to her first love again for a while. Bring it, Senny!

 *That cover artist Patrick Insole rendered as a tiger but I imagined while reading as something more like a Sphinx cat. For much of the trilogy, Kirune is kind of bratty and uncooperative and standoffish and that also reads more weird housecat than tiger, but maybe that's just me.

**Which, get ready for these. If you have a serious insect phobia, you might find these a lot scarier than I did. As it was, well, I might have been rooting for them for a teeny bit, for a while, until the Jure'lia queen became a character instead of an abstraction.

Christopher Ruocchio's DEMON IN WHITE, Narr by Samuel Roukin

Two new characters introduced in the great sweep of the third novel in the main sequence of Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series, Demon in White, give us an even greater idea of the enormous scope the author has imagined in imagining this universe. Both also quickly rose to prominence in my estimation, contending against protagonist-narrator Hadrian Marlowe and his beloved Dr. Valka Ondare* for the title of My Favorite Character so far. And one of them even survived the novel!

The first I want to discuss is Lorian Aristedes, a junior officer whose tremendous organizational talents and gift for strategy have been languishing unnoticed in a minor post in the Sollan Empire's legions for a long time because he is something the Empire abhors: a child of a member of the Palantine and some other caste. This isn't mere class snobbery, though; because Palantines, with their physical perfection, greater height and incredibly long life-spans, are as much the product of post-conception tinkering as of selective breeding to preserve the advantages originally bestowed by genetic engineering centuries ago; decanted as much as born, grown in vats to order. Hadrian himself is one such, and has several times had to face up to how this really makes him little different from the variously augmented (cybernetic, surgical and genetic) Extrasolarians he met in Howling Dark. Lorian had one such parent, but the other was not, meaning he's a sport, and all sorts of weird recessive traits that have lurked unexpressed in the Palantine genomes, removed by careful post-conception pruning in sanctioned children, have manifested in this man's body. He is short, has malproportioned limbs (much is made of how he needs what amount to ring splints to use his "too-long" fingers), is functionally almost an albino. He is, in other words, a living exhibit of how perfect the Palantines really aren't, and has had to struggle mightily all of his life to justify his very existence.

Miraculously, Lorian Aristedes does not exhibit much of a chip on his shoulder once Hadrian finds him and sweeps him into his orbit and gives him rank and responsibility in Hadrian's increasingly infamous Red Company. Most of the time he is quietly competent and matter-of-factly rescues his fellows' fat from the fire; occasionally he concocts brilliant strategies that combine with Hadrian's ever-expanding all-but-supernatural abilities (we'll get into that in a bit) to deliver successes that can only be described as miracles by the time word of them reaches the rest of the Sollan Empire, and never mind that it's going to be Hadrian, Valka, and the rest of their weirdly glamorous band of former gladiators, military misfits and exotic "homunculi" who both spread and share in Hadrian's growing legend.

My other favorite new guy is Udax, a member of one of those alien races humanity has conquered/colonized as we expanded into the galaxy to occupy billions of worlds. Unique (I think?) among these races so far, though, Udax's people presumably fought back, else how would the Sollan Empire come to recognize their martial prowess enough to be willing to incorporate units of them into its Legions? When Hadrian first meets Udax and his fellow colonial auxiliaries, the Not-Amarantin are finishing their training and are about to form the Empire's first non-human unit. Hadrian and his friends are fascinated to watch these raptor-like people at work, for yes, they have feathers and talons and huge wings that work; the Sollan Empire is about to gain a unit that combines infantry and air force! Or, as I kept thinking of them, Flying Sepoys. 

But, the Not-Amarantin are very, very touchy about being gaped at like carnival freaks or zoo animals and don't take too kindly to the Red Company's frank interest and Things Get Ugly, revealing, d'oh, yet another plot on Hadrian's life. Udax had been paid by, probably, a Chantry agent to pick a fight and try to kill Marlowe and as much of his entourage as possible! Their little mutiny is quickly put down and its hotheaded young ringleaders rounded up for disciplinary action straight out of the John Company's brutal past, but Hadrian decides that if he can talk Udax around, Udax might be worth sparing. This, of course, happens, and Udax and his fellow sepoys become a very important addition to the Red Company just in time for their next mission for "Earth and Emperor": to join the Imperial Fleet to help ward off a massive Cielcin attack threatening a strategically important system through which a great deal of commerce and military assets must frequently travel.

A good century or so has passed since the events of Howling Dark, and just as Hadrian and his friends have kept busy -- before the Not-Amarantin join the Red Company they have been on the Empire's library planet exploring Restricted Archives of Forbidden Knowledge up to and including meeting yet another leftover Artificial Intelligence left-over from the "Mericanii" whose machines enslaved almost all of humanity back when we just had the one planet and Hadrian's having another visionary encounter with the Ancient Aliens he calls "The Quiet" -- so have the Cielcin. Among other things, they've been trading with the Extrasolarians, whose scientists have happily accepted the challenge of building giant Cielcin cyborgs with extra limbs and Admantine exoskeletons and armor (Adamant being the only material that swords like Hadrian's light saber High Matter sword can't cut, and traditionally only used for space ship hulls). We learn that in events between Howling Dark and Demon in White, the Red Company encountered some early prototypes of these monsters and defeated them, and a second encounter with a better version of one opens Demon in White by way of showing us how much more badass the Red Company has gotten since Hadrian killed his first Cielcin prince and got his nickname of Half-Mortal, but they haven't seen anything yet!

The serious high drama and action of Demon in White takes place on the target system's planet, where the Red Company has been assigned to defend its chief city and its millions of inhabitants from the Cielcin provisioning runs that are sure to take place while the giant spaceships in orbit duke it out (remember: Cielcins eat humans with relish and poor table manners). Lorian and Udax both demonstrate their worthiness of my love, and Valka, who was literally fridged through a lot of the fighting in Howling Dark and hasn't stopped berating Hadrian for it, not only gets to fight but gets to prove her point that he would have taken a lot fewer losses if he'd let her fight last time; coming as she does from a culture with no taboos against implanting computer enhancements in human bodies, she has a head full of powerful circuitry that lets her hack the terrifying flying borers the Cielcin launch in combat to chew through enemy forces, armor and all. Which, good thing, because not only have the Cielcin cyborgs gotten even better since last they tangled with the Red Company, but also a whole lot bigger. Like 30 meters tall, with extra arms and implanted howitzer-type artillery and metal claws that let them do things like scale tall buildings, King Kong-style.

Fortunately, Hadrian has some new tricks up his sleeve as well, for "The Quiet", not content with outright resurrecting him in Howling Dark have now expanded Hadrian's very senses. He can now, when he concentrates properly, see all of the possible outcomes of an incident, choose the optimum and make it reality, all in a split second, allowing him to perform some feats that look impossible but are really just astronomically improbable, and are only really possible for someone with Hadrian's Palantine self-assurance and talent for melodrama. And yes, this marks him out as an even greater threat to the Chantry and to the Emperor (who wears the "whiter than white" color called Argent and could be taken for the Demon in White of the title, except ahh, Hadrian, whose close familial relationship as a cousin of the Emperor is also entitled to wear that color, is the one who gets the actual sobriquet) and his court (never get more popular than the boss), but he'll have to deal with that later! Because right now, his duty is ACKSHUN!!!!

What I'm saying is, these battle scenes kick all kinds of ass, once again enhanced by audio book narrator Samuel Roukin's bone-chilling rendition of the king hell cyborg's impossibly deep and hollow voice as it taunts Hadrian, and later that of the big bad Cielcin overlord who has been uniting the clans and introducing things like strategy and tactics to their formerly atomized and half-random attacks on human assets. I mean, the Cielcin overlord sounds a lot like Kharn Sagara, but Roukin's only one guy, you know? 

Meanwhile, in the big Sun Eater plot, more becomes clear to Hadrian and to us, through the same set of mind-bending revelations that have led to his new superpowers. The Quiet turn out to be even stranger and more unsettling than Hadrian had previously thought, and while he's previously proceeded on the assumption that what he calls The Quiet and the Cielcin call The Watchers are the same Ancient and Powerful Beings, much has thrown his assumptions into doubt. Ruocchio, through his ancient narrative persona of Old Man Hadrian who is recounting his centuries and centuries of life and warfare, does a magnificent job of balancing this overarching plot with the episodic natures of the individual novels, guaranteeing that I'm going to be very antsy after I finish Kingdoms of Death and have to wait for December and the new installment, Ashes of Man.

Space opera, guys. It sure is space opera.

*Once again, I hit that flaw that comes with enjoying these books as audio productions; I have to cast around the internet for other reviews or summaries in order to see how things are correctly spelled. I haven't found a proper spelling for Valka's last name, or for the bird-race to which Udax belongs, which is why I call them Not-Amarantin, referring to Alastair Reynolds similarly bird-like alien race from his Revelation Space universe. If pressed I would say the species name in Sun Eater is something like "Ektani"?