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.

Lois McMaster Bujold's THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE

It's considered simply scandalous in many of my circles to have never read any of Lois McMaster Bujold's famous and sprawling Vorkosigan saga, but as it turns out, I'm pretty glad that I hadn't until now, because that scandalousness landed me in the best and most amusing circumstances in which to read these books at long last, to wit, I am a Reading Ranger over at Skiffy and Fanty*, part of a revolving crew of podcasters who occasionally get together for a group geek-out over them now. Some of us are Vorkosigan veterans (of the likes of Alex Acks and Paul Weimer) and some of us, including Stina Leicht (yes, that Stina Leicht) and myself, are reading these books for the very first time. There are two episodes of Reading Rangers so far, covering the first two books (going on narrative internal chronology, rather than publication order), Shards of Honor and Barrayar, over at Skiffy and Fanty, so if you want to hear my thoughts as well as the rest of the gang's, go give those a listen. I'm only a little bit of a heretic over there.

But so, this time around I'm not in the rotation for the show, so I'm just treating this third novel, The Warrior's Apprentice, as a regular read here at Kate of Mind.

Spoiler alert: I loved it.

I wasn't entirely expecting to, mind. As those who've already listened to Reading Rangers know, I was quite taken with the heroine of the first two novels, one Cordelia Naismith, who is the mother of the hero of, I gather, pretty much all of the other novels. When I learned that the focus was going to shift rather abruptly (from my perspective) to her son, Miles, I was a little let down, because Cordelia is everything I never get in a space opera hero: not only a woman, but a single and middle-aged woman, who nonetheless kicks a lot of ass and only takes names when she marries maybe the only dude in the universe possibly worthy of her, a crusty, battered, smart and tough-as-nails artistocrat from another world.

But so, Miles. Remember Miles? This is a book about Miles. Except to understand Miles one needs a bit more backstory: Cordelia's aristocratic military husband, Aral Vorkosigan, is a man of such high position and influence, and so incorruptible, that he has a ton of enemies, some of whom want him dead, one of whom actually tried and almost succeeded, but Cordelia, while pregnant with Miles, was also affected by the attempt, and fetal Miles even more so. So he's short, a little malformed, and has extraordinarily brittle bones. And he's grown up in a culture that is equal parts Roman and Russian Empires, meaning that quite a lot is expected of aristrocrats' sons, including excellence in military service. Which means it's a wonder he's even been allowed to live.

So Miles has grown up watchful and wily, smart and observant and thinking around corners and pretty much like the literary bastard offspring of Tyrion Lannister and Francis Crawford of Lymond, except he's not a drunken lecher, nor is he a pretentious emo pain in the ass. One of the greatest characters ever to grace genre fiction, is Miles Vorkosigan.

Here in his first novel we meet him as a young man, struggling through the entrance requirements for a military academy/officer candidate school. He's aced all the written stuff but as for the physical stuff, well, not-quite-dwarf and not-quite-straight-spine and brittle bones, what do you think? Soon his career is under a cloud and no one is quite sure what to do with him, so he gets sent off to visit his maternal grandmother on Cordelia's home planet, which has a very different and more accepting culture, by the bye.

Not that he's there long, either. Along with his bodyguard, the gruff and dangerous Konstantin Bothari (who has a long and complicated history of his own and whose fortunes are very much tied up with Miles' parents) and his beautiful daughter Elena (Miles' childhood friend, very much an Arya Stark type, as her father is trying to shoehorn her into a life of genteel femininity, but she likes to fight and think and drink and know things), he's soon off on a half-assed adventure out in space on an obsolete freighter he's mortgaged himself to the hilt to lease/purchase because of reasons and he's running blockades and bluffing mercenaries and telling lies and meanwhile, back at home, his adventures are having bizarre and Byzantine consequences because did I mention his home world is an honor culture nightmare?

All this told in a great, elegant prose style with a lot of vivid imagery and analogy. We like, at Reading Rangers, to linger and dote over our favorite bits, and I have a lot of them, but probably my favorite favorite bit is really Bujold's style in a nutshell. As Miles prepares to go into battle, he thinks "This must surely be the worst part, waiting helplessly for Tung to deliver them like cartons of eggs, as fragile, as messy when broken." Oh man, that is the stuff!

So, it's with difficulty that I'm not plunging right into Miles' next adventure, but I'm waiting for more Reading Ranger adventures, and meanwhile, I've got lots of ARCs piling up for review over at Skiffy and Fanty. And other things.

And I'm not sure what Vorkosigan book we're doing next anyway.

*Speaking of Skiffy and Fanty, I'm now a book reviewer over there, too, which is why I've not been posting on books to this blog as often as I once did. It's a WordPress blog so I'm having difficulty creating an overall link to my posts there, but the most recent one, on a recently Kickstartered anthology called Strange California, is here.