Christopher Ruocchio's EMPIRE OF SILENCE (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

Christopher Ruocchio cannot be reckoned an unambitious writer, if his debut novel, Empire of Silence, is anything to go by. Combining elements of space opera and epic fantasy (and yes, that includes neo-feudalism, never my favorite, but I'm setting that particular gripe of mine aside for the moment, though I'm sure it will come up plenty as I explore the half-billion planet spanning galaxy of the Sun Eater saga) as it does, it immediately invites comparisons with works like Frank Herbert's Dune and its dizzying array of prequels and sequels, certainly, but I first learned of Ruocchio and the Sun Eater series in a Twitter discussion about genre fiction series that might be worthy of being talked about, if not in the same breath, at least in the same general conversation with, one Gene Wolfe and his Solar Cycle. Buckle up. 

Empire of Silence definitely shares DNA with the works I mention here. The biggest political union in the thoroughly human-settled galaxy (our good old Milky Way) is an Empire that House Corrino would find familiar, complete with a Landsraad of aristocratic families, some of ancient lineage (we learn in the appendix to EoS that our hero's family claims descent from the British royal family we 21st century types know and thumb our noses at), some gotten up robber baron types who bought their way into the nobility by time honored atrocities like slave trading, and planetary populations enjoying various levels of material comfort on terraformed worlds of varying quality. And yes, there is a coveted and vital substance that holds the Sollan Empire and its neighboring republics and federations together in a plural galactic civilization, but it's nothing we 21st century types would regard as exotic or semi-magical, it's just good old Uranium.

So, nobody is going to metamorphose into a giant worm or anything, nor is anyone exhibiting supernatural or superhuman abilities like prophecy or telepathy. The highest class, the Palatinate (lots of echoes of the Roman Empire in the Sollan) has benefited from millennia genetic engineering and breeding and enjoy extraordinary attractiveness, health, height and life-spans, but it's just science. 

Our hero, Hadrian Marlowe, is the elder son of a mid-level planetary noble and the grandson of that planet's hereditary ruler, but as we get to know him on his home world of Delos, we see that he's neither his father's favorite to succeed nor is he exceptionally interested in doing so; he's more inclined to scholarship than politics or diplomacy, and only undertakes the rest of his training out of a sense of duty to the people who would otherwise someday be ruled by Hadrian's younger brother, who exhibits the martial temperament and bloody-mindedness that people expect of a ruler but has a cruel streak and a seeming disinterest in anything that isn't fighting or fucking.*

But when Hadrian takes a diplomatic matter somewhat into his own hands, unbidden, and makes a hash of it, his father decides to ship him off to the Chantry, the rigid religious order that generally seems to exercise greater power in the Sollan Empire than the Emperor and nobility do, and name Hadrian's brother as heir. 

Only Hadrian wouldn't be a monk so much as... a torturer; the Chantry enforces orthodoxy the nasty, Inquisitional way. And like I said, Hadrian is more of a scholar than a religious zealot.

The main plot of Empire of Silence, then, is what happens after Hadrian, his tutor and his mother hatch a plot to escape this fate, and what goes spectacularly and fascinatingly wrong with their plans. 

The galaxy we begin to explore with Hardrian proves to have a bit more diversity than we ever saw in the Herbertverse; in addition to human societies who owe no allegiance to the Empire, there are other species, though only one of them has attained space flight and reached out into the cosmos. More about them in a bit. The rest of the species humanity has encountered have been less technologically and (apparently, presumably) culturally advanced and you can probably guess what that has meant for them; colonization and, usually, enslavement. Thus a mysterious alien race native to the backwater planet where Hadrian winds up for most of this novel are reduced to manual labor and subservience and are considered by most to be little more than animals, though a few scientists have continued to study them, their unique modes of consciousness, and their means of communication. But these scientists are not Sollan Empire citizens and are themselves regarded with suspicion and hostility by their hosts, who all adhere to the rigid doctrines of the Chantry, which, OK, let's talk about the Chantry, for it is where the Sun Eater series most differentiates itself from the Herbertverse or the Solar Cycle.

The state religion of the Sollan Empire feels extremely and uncomfortably familiar because it's basically the settler-colonialist mentality as holy writ. Humanity has a Manifest Destiny to own and control the entire galaxy, maybe eventually the entire universe; any other races it encounters must be subjugated for their own good (and, of course, the good of their human masters). All the stars and all the planets and all the rocks and cosmic dust in between are there for humanity's use. Refreshingly, though, there is no messiah figure or religious narrative (at least not as appearing in this first novel); the object of worship is nothing more, nothing less, than the mother planet, Earth, which we've lost track of in our rush to expand and expand. Maybe it's a myth? But don't say that aloud, because the Chantry will get you and punish you as a heretic. Oh, and the Chantry has elements of Dune's Butlerian Jihad, too: cybernetic implants, artificial intelligence, etc are absolutely banned. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, etc.

So yes, there is a lot of world-building going on in this first novel, but, refreshingly, it never feels like the reader is getting info-dumped upon. Hadrian is a fine narrator of his experience and incorporates all of this exposition very naturally into his story -- and he hooks us in right away by revealing, right at the very beginning of the book, that his long, long life (spanning thousands of years, though he's only something like 18 years old when he leaves Delos) has made him famous to some, infamous to others. In pursuing peace with an enemy I haven't mentioned yet, he has been forced by circumstances we're not going to get to know much about in this first novel to destroy an entire inhabited star system. Hadrian is the Sun Eater of this series' title.

Lordy do I love a villain-hero, almost as much as I love an unreliable narrator, though I'm not sure that Hadrian is the latter. His narrative voice is introspective, honest about his faults and failures, anxious about his shortcomings, guilt-ridden, self-critical, all the things that the genre reader's favorite unreliable narrator, Severian, much more concerned about justifying himself and persuading us that he is a really good guy and irresistible to women, etc. is not. Hadrian doesn't care what we think of him; indeed, is resigned to never being able to improve or alter the opinion of him his imagined readership is understood to have already. Sun Eater is no apology, nor is it a parable. To diminish it a little, I could compare it as justifiably with something like Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant as with Dune or Book of the New Sun. It's big and sprawling and ambitious as hell, but it's not set before us as a puzzle to solve or a tractate on What is Humanity; it's just a great big story of great big events with lots of action, emotion and satisfying character relationships. And a few mysteries, starting with pretty much everything about the only other spacefaring race in the galaxy, the Cielcin, with whom humanity has come into armed conflict over territory, and what, if any, the Cielcin's and some of the other subjugated species relationship might be to a dead civilization that has left mysterious and sophisticated ruins on many of the worlds to which Humanity is the Johnny-Come-Lately.

I haven't even gotten into the other characters sharing Hadrian's journey but this is getting long and my hands are seizing up (I can't use Dragon Naturally Speaking very well in the summer because the only way my attic office is bearable is with a loud old swamp cooler noisily rattling day and night, so I'm actually having to type this!). But there are some wonderful ones, a beggar girl who rescues and befriends Hadrian when he washes up on the backwater planet of Emesh instead of the planet-sized university analogue he thought he was traveling to, friends beside whom Hadrian fights as a gladiator, courtiers in the palace of the parvenu nobility who eventually yank Hadrian out of the arena, and the aforementioned foreign scientists from other polities who don't truck with hereditary nobility or Manifest Destiny or banning cybernetic implants and who expand Hadrian's mind. 

And, by the way, these are men and women and there don't seem to be gender roles as such in Sollan society? A gladiator or a planetary ruler or a Grand Inquisitor or a scientist can be either, and it's no big deal. And at least one of the alien species seems not to have sex or gender at all that we can determine so far, and that's also no big deal except occasionally grammatically as Hadrian tries to wrap his head around their not-quite-language to better understand them. And it's these elements as much as anything that make me not mind the neo-feudalism, and want to continue through this whole series and its several sidequels, which I will continue to enjoy in audio form because the narrator (who seems to be in for the entire run), Samuel Roukin, simply is Hadrian. I first encountered him in the American Revolutionary War TV drama Turn, in which he played the insufferable redcoat villain Simcoe, and it's impossible not to imagine Roukin as Hadrian himself in the movie in my head. Roukin gives Hadrian just the right combination of aristocratic self-assurance, self-criticism and wonder, though I wish he'd cut back on the Shatnerian pauses in the middle of phrases, which are not merely annoying but at times interfere with comprehension because Ruocchio is not a great user of dialogue tags, meaning that sometimes what starts of sounding like mere narration is actually someone's dialogue and not necessarily Hadrian's. But I quibble. As I said, Roukin is Hadrian, and I'm already diving into the direct sequel to EoS, Howling Dark. The title alone is irresistible and makes me think, of course, of Alastair Reynolds and his Inhibitors. Arooooo!

*We get hints that there might be more to this brother than we or Hadrian give him credit for, and he gets a spin-off novel that I'll have a look at when I'm through the main series.

Alan Moore's JERUSALEM (Narr by Simon Vance)

"That's what art's for; it rescues everything from time."

An early chapter in Jerusalem, Alan "Swamp Thing" Moore's enormous contribution to prose fiction, depicts a black man, born a slave in the United States but freed by the Emancipation Proclamation as a teenager, whose wanderings have landed him in and around Northampton, England in the early 20th century. Henry, sometimes called "Black Charlie" by the locals, first surfaces briefly in a prior chapter as a figure that chapter's point of view character (who is actually named Charles but goes by "Oatsey," a nickname derived from Cockney rhyming slang and who turns out to be someone famous you're going to have to read the book to find out about) encounters at two interesting moments in that character's life. When the next chapter proved to be focused on Henry/Black Charlie, I felt a rare delight in that the author had recognized that a figurant in one story was interesting enough to deserve his own chapter. As I've observed here before, I have a habit of getting more interested in background or side characters than I am in the protagonists, and I'm usually left frustrated. But not here!

And not only does Henry get a fascinating back story and a fulfilling afterlife in "the Upstairs"*, but his chapter is the most moving one yet encountered as one settles in to this enormous work of over 1200 pages (just over 60 hours!). Henry, who travels the countryside on a sturdy bicycle with ropes for tires, drawing a cart as he goes about his rounds, with wooden blocks attached to his feet for braking (because this is from before bicycles had brakes) learns near the beginning of his day that his favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace" was written by a pastor at a church in Olney, which is not far from where Henry hangs his hat and dotes on his family. On a whim, Henry takes time out from his ordinary rounds to visit the church and bask in the wonder that a white guy in England wrote a song that Henry has always felt best reflected the Black experience in America. Upon arriving, he is disappointed to learn that the pastor, John Newton, is not buried by the church in Olney, but, as readers who already know about John Newton, or even can just guess there's going to be some irony here, can foresee, this isn't going to be Henry's worst disappointment of the day. Go read about John Newton at that link, if you don't already know.

We are spared a scene where the kindly churchwarden who admits Henry to the building and shows him Newton's portrait reluctantly shatters Henry's illusions about the author of "Amazing Grace"; when we pick up with him again he is pedaling home and having to stop every mile or so to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Of course, I had to wipe my own. Alan Moore, what are you even doing to me, man? I was ready for some crazy magick (I'm a huge fan of, for instance, Promethea) or some gratuitously gross Lovecraftiana (seen Neonomicon? Jacen Burrows was the illustrator, if that gives you any clue on that score), or another round of "let's dump out the whole box of action figures and make them fight evil together (Hello, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) or some intensely esoteric and deep pop culture local to Moore's hometown of Northampton (Dodgem Logic, anyone), but not to get my heart torn right out of my body and squeezed dry before I'm even sure what this enormous doorstop of a novel is really going to turn out to be!

Which is kind of a hybrid between one of Edward Rutherford's better efforts and B. Catling's Vorrh Trilogy (even to including quite a significant role for one William Blake in its back story)**, except tossed into a kaleidoscope, there to be manipulated with manic energy at varying speeds by its author-operator. Ah, there at last is the Alan Moore I expect.

Interestingly, the reader's experience of Henry's "Amazing Grace" experience makes a useful lens through which to look at one of Jerusalem's larger themes; for as much as it is geographically concerned with Northampton and the region within it known as "the Boroughs", it is, in terms of character, somewhat focused on a peculiar family, first known as the Vernals and later the Warrens when a woman of the family in the early 20th century marries a man named Tom Warren and it's their descendants we subsequently meet and observe, who have been marked out by an ancestor's possibly fated encounter with an angel (and these angels are just as weird as Catling's Erstwhile while also partaking of, at least metaphorically, the internet's obsession with the weirdness of "biblically accurate" angels) in the 19th century. A strain of supernatural power that presents as a distressing mental illness appears in many of them, but what it amounts to is that they have come to perceive time very, very differently. They see all of it at once. So, for example, when John "Snowy" Vernal's first daughter is born, he can't handle the birth because he already knows how her whole life will go, what tragedies she will face, and how she will die in 80-some years: all alone and not even noticed for a few days. I'd probably jump up on a nearby roof instead of watching the delivery, too, Snowy.

So our experience of wincing in anticipation for Henry's loss of innocence regarding the author of "Amazing Grace" (presuming the reader already knows the realities of John Newton's life, which I think is pretty commonly known now? But I live in a bubble of internet where it is and maybe you don't? Anyway, pretend you did because it's dead easy to educate yourself) mirrors that of Snowy and others of his family, earthbound kwisatz haderachs without the benefit of sworn fedaykin or interstellar travel.

The Vernal-Warrens, often in sibling pairs, continue this weird existence well into the 21st century, in which their unique birthright as sort of supernatural watchmen of "the corners" makes them an integral part of a great universe-defining Event set for 2006, for which the first half or so of the book, including a whopping 11 chapters of a toddler's near-death experience, is just table setting and elaborate foreshadowing and even so when the Event finally comes, the reader is by no means ready for what's coming.

A lot of this book is written from a sort of multidimensional, godlike perspective we've seen Moore play with in, for instance, Watchmen, whose Dr. Manhattan character narrates his experience in an omniscient "everything that happens is happening at once" style, finally perfected for Jerusalem because the characters in Jerusalem afflicted with this power still care. They care deeply, whether they are angel-Builders who know that what they're asking of the Vernals will be hard for them or fathers who know that their granddaughters are doomed to die young even as they watch the baby's mother being born. 

This continues even into the novel's ostensible main character (and Moore's self-insert figure), the irascible, seemingly sociopathic artist Alma Warren - whose younger brother, Mick, was the toddler who spends eleven chapters choking on a cough drop while his spirit is lead on a bewildering and revelatory tour of time and space by a gang of deceased fellow Northamptonians who have chosen to spend their afterlives as street urchins calling themselves the Dead Dead gang*** -- is passionate about the welfare of what's left of the denizens of her beloved Boroughs, where England has been stashing its unwanted working class and its unwanted weirdos for some 800 years, and mad as hell at how the forces of globalization and gentrification (given form in the Upstairs as a giant torus-shaped chimney, sucking in and burning up the very substance of the world from a spot near a pub) have torn the community apart and especially what this means for its older citizens who have known no other life and are suddenly uprooted and moved into unfamiliar apartment blocks full of strangers. This is her hobby horse and the great subject of her coming art exhibit in 2006, which is ostensibly the Event towards which everything else in the novel is leading us, except...

Except about halfway through one figures out that the most important person in this novel is one whom we've barely met, who doesn't even get a name unless you're paying very close attention/going back to re-read or re-listen to sections (her name is Marla). She's just a poor, drug-addled sex worker whom we see sort of in the background of other scenes in 2006 and for most of the novel she's just a bit of local color, until we realize [SPOILER ALERT DUH] that she is the same person whom Mick briefly met during his tour of the Upstairs, a woman who had a terrible past but turned it around and wound up doing an incredible amount of good by developing a questionnaire that helped a future-from-our-perspective UK government humanely and sensibly handle a flood of climate refugees and all around prevent the country from becoming, say, what we see in Alfonso Quarron's searing Children of Men.**** She's so important that Asmodeus himself tried to manipulate a young and ghostly Mick (newly arrived in the Upstairs) into promising to help Asmodeus kill her someday, but instead, with the help and inspiration of the Dead Dead Gang, he helps rescue her from a client-turned-rapist who has decided to murder her (this act of heroism also involves ghosts from other time periods and living relatives of Mick and Alma but it all starts with the Dead Deads).

But up until her escape from gruesome death, she has been the only person we've met who hasn't gotten the Henry treatment. Do you think maybe Alan Moore has a point in all of this? Maybe something about always be kind and stand up when you can because you never know how important what you've done might turn out to be for future generations, maybe? What a silly, comic book writer thing to spend 1200+ pages to tell us. Silly, silly Mr. Moore.

Anyway, like we always love to joke about Gene Wolfe, patron saint of big complicated books you have to read many times to understand, I just read Alan Moore's Jerusalem and all got was the sinking feeling I'm going to have to read it again. Because I almost got too distracted by the epic flights of fancy (we haven't even talked about Snowy Vernal's afterlife, journeying to the very end of time and space itself with his beautiful baby granddaughter on his shoulders!) to notice this, and at first I actually found the ending of Jerusalem a bit of a let-down. But it's not. Because what seems like the ending -- Alma's exhibition and its moderately satisfying but decidedly not epic denouement -- isn't the point at all.

Magicians are tricky.

Anyway, wow.

*Which is sort of Heaven-like but a lot more interesting than most afterlives, incorporating as it does a lot of elements of the kind of space-and-time-bending geometry that marks the last act of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar but still manages to serve as a stage for a lot of good old fashioned character drama and a rollicking good post-mortem adventure story. Because Alan Moore

**Others have insisted this is a sort of James Joyce homage/pastiche, and there are certainly elements of that, but for me the Rutherford/Catling elements are far too prominent in comparison to the Joyce ones, for all that there are whole chapters of Joycean near-gibberish - which, cheers to Simon Vance for rendering so perfectly comprehensible that his narration has half- convinced me to try Finnegan's Wake after all. 

***And if you're thinking those eleven chapters are my favorite part of Jerusalem, gold star to you. Mick's adventures with the Dead Dead Gang are so delightful even the denizens of the Upstairs are fans, because one of the kids, Drowned Marjorie, managed to write and publish a complete account of them in the afterlife, but hasn't yet as these adventures take place, except the kids keep running into beings that are huge fans of theirs and do them favors as a result, because time is way more than wibbly-wobbly and if Alan Moore is ever allowed near Doctor Who it'll pretty much collapse all of existence. 

****A movie that came out in 2006, which is the year in which Alma's Exhibition and the Rape of Marla/Kaff take place and this cannot be a coincidence; if there's any writer living who pays razory attention to pop culture, it's the Wizard of Northampton.