Christopher Ruocchio's ASHES OF MAN (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

I love a lot of things about Samuel Roukin's narration of the Sun Eater series, Christopher Ruocchio's gigantic space opera spanning five novels in the main line and an ever-growing library of side-quels, but what I've liked best is something I've barely mentioned in my posts about these books: his performance as Tor Gibson, series hero Hadrian Marlowe's childhood tutor and, by a remarkable set of circumstances that reunite them a good century after Gibson abetted Hadrian's first escape, friend. Roukin gives this character, who is supposed to be as stoic and emotionless as a Kohlinar- trained Vulcan, an incredible warmth and tenderness that he seems to have saved for this character alone -- without Gibson ever seeming to drop that controlled facade of unflappable calm and unassailable logic. It's quite a feat, and it's why sometimes you take do want an actor for a narrator. 

But so, of course this latest novel in the main line, Ashes of Man, begins at Gibson's grave. Sigh.

"Heroes do break, you know," Hadrian warns us early in the book, just as he has so many times before. Hadrian is one of the most fallible heroes I've encountered in recent genre fiction -- not a bumbler or a fool, but gloriously imperfect and limited despite the superhuman advantages plain old heredity, genetic engineering, corrective surgery/surgical augmentation, and a mysterious godlike entity from the future have given him. He's a well-educated generalist who uses his time wisely but he is still just one guy with one brain and one set of experiences in which to draw -- except when he's not, but even when he is juggling space and time to find that one tiny and astronomically unlikely inflection point that lets him survive the unsurvivable, he still just this guy, you know?

Mostly. 

This latest installment of his sage shows us still more of the amazing universe in which he exists, which is full of all of the coolest bits we love in space opera/ planetary romance; in the first third of this novel a city* straight out of James Blish's classic Cities in Flight descends on a planet Hadrian happens to be on while attending to his cousin, the Sollan Emperor, and the Emperor's vast peripatetic court. The city doesn't come with a population itching to get to work like Blish's "Okie" cities do, but it's still a whole damned city slowly descending onto the ground, meant to replace wholesale one that the Cielcin destroyed decades ago when it laid waste to this planet. It's an incredible thing to have happen, even in these books -- but of course to most of the Sollan Empire's jaded courtiers is just another excuse for a party and some more intrigue. They're barely even all that interested in the legendary Half-Mortal, Lord Hadrian, or his frenemy Bissander Lin, the only guy besides Hadrian to have fought and killed a giant Cielcin cyborg super-soldier!

More incredibly, speaking of Lin, who hasn't appeared for a couple of novels now, good to see you again even though you're still not my favorite, one thing I've really noticed in this last novel is how brilliantly Ruocchio manages character. Not characteristics, not characterization, but characters; several times now he's slipped a new one into the crew several novels before that person really becomes important, or even gets much dialogue, so that when they do come to the fore, when their innate talents are called for or they're called upon to do something "out of character (usually transcending their limitations)" they don't feel new or like they're replacing someone that got killed off or left behind, just finally getting to shine a little in Hadrian's attention, because never forget that while Hadrian has greater claim to honesty than a Severian, say, it's still his subjective view of the story we're getting. So in this novel, Lorian, to name my favorite example of this and the character who prompted these musings (as I noticed that Roukin's voice for him is, well, he doesn't sound much like Warwick Davies or Peter Dinklage, though those are my fan-casting picks), is now fully part of Hadrian's inner circle of planners and doers as he, Valka, Lin and a whole Legion** (replacing the lost lamented Red Company) prepare on direct Imperial order to try to take the fight, not merely to the Cielcin but to the Cielcin's terrifying eldritch gods, which are not abstractions requiring belief to even exist like humanity's gods, but are part of that reality that doesn't go away when you quit believing. They might have an actual physical presence, even a location. And the Empire might have clues that might lead to that location's discovery. Clues they've had since the very first Sollan Emperor, William Windsor the First (the current Emperor is William XXVII but remember the ruling class enjoys ridiculous longevity so the time since William I is much, much, much longer than what we could call a generation. And of course the Emperor hasn't always been a William. Or, necessarily, in possession of a willy, as such), nuked Earth to radioactive slag to save Humanity from the Mericanii and first made contact with the mysterious entity/entities Hadrian knows as The Quiet.

Two other near-figurants from the prior novels come to the fore in Ashes of Man to become proper characters, too, with even more impact on the overall plot than Lorian gets to have, but that's because they are more important people in the books' universe: Olorin, who originally gave Hadrian his light saber high matter sword, and Emperor William the XXVII, but they don't have near the claim on my affections that Lorian does (though how much of my love for Lorian is really displaced affection for Miles Vorkosigan is anybody's guess. There's a reason Peter Dinklage is my fan-casting choice for the role of Lorian if a screen adaptation ever comes to be. And speaking of which, ahem. Make with the clicky and weigh in on that!). William even gets to be a little bit of a hero, though he causes as many problems as he solves as he, Hadrian, Olorin and Valka (and the Emperor's staff and military command) struggle to coordinate the evacuation, not only of the live inhabitants of a world under attack by the Cielcin, but also millions of colonists in cryosleep that have been stored there for seeding future human worlds -- and would thus be the universe's greatest meat locker for the ever-hungry, carnivorous Cielcin hordes.

In the process, inevitable tragedies occur, both for some of the tiny handful of beloved ongoing characters who have survived the prior novels and for some new friends, as is inevitable in any decent series concerned primarily with war. We're used to grieving with Hadrian by now, but by novel's end he feels like he's been dragged back to the beginning and taken us with him, without even the faint hope that, say, a pal frozen in carbonite out there somewhere can lend us. I'm still all in on this series and am already looking forward to my habitual "I've got to refresh my memory of all the prior books by reading them again" before the next one comes out which is... when? This time I don't even have a title to watch for, to mark as "To-Read" on StoryGraph or pre-order. HELP!!!!!

But for now, excuse me. I've used up this box of tissues and need to find some more. *Sob*

*And when I say "city" I don't mean some cute little portable mini-city like London in the film adaptation of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, I mean a big freaking city. The Sollan Empire only makes things to one scale, and it is stupefied. I mean, Hadrian routinely travels light years of distance aboard ships he casually mentions are over 50 miles long! You think it's a long walk down to the chemist's but that's just peanuts compared to...

**Who, by the way, is led by a fellow goes by the name of Sharpe.

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?