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?

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"?

Christopher Ruocchio's HOWLING DARK (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

I could already tell, less than halfway through the second volume of Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series, that it's going to be one I'll enjoy returning to, even if it doesn't have a conclusion as satisfying as I currently believe it will. I still watch the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the first four of Babylon 5  (and hope ardently that we get to see its reboot/revival), after all. 

As always, here there be dragons, by which I mean spoilers, except maybe I actually mean dragons, hmmm? Of a kind? Waving lots of pale and grasping human hands in the dark?

Howling Dark launches the story of Lord Hadrian Marlowe, renegade interstellar aristocrat, some 50 years into the future from where we left off in Empire of Silence. He's also a long way from the planet where he washed up after escaping his unwanted destiny as a cleric-cum-torturer for the repressive Chantry, the Sollan Empire's state religion. At the end of Empire Hadrian made contact with a small party of Cielcin, members of an alien race with which humanity has been at war for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Chantry and other local powers assumed these Cielcin had come as a vanguard to an invasion force, but Hadrian, the only person on the whole planet who had ever learned any of the Cielcin's language, discovered that they were actually there on a religious pilgrimage, to visit some intriguing ruins left by a long lost ancient civilization that long predated human or Cielcin exploration or conquest. And in so coming to understand that much, Hadrian saw a possibility to try for Peace. There's a being of some kind out in the dark who has a way to actually make contact with a leader of a major clan of the Cielcin (who are so predatory and warlike that they will prey and war on one another as soon as humanity) -- but that entity dwells on a mysterious and possibly only legendary planet!

And so Hadrian has embarked on a unique mission to try to find this entity, The Undying, on that planet, Vorgossos. With him are many of his friends from his gladiator days and one or two from his unpleasant time as a courtier on the backwater planet he's left behind - and a whole lot of new people, most of them military or mercenaries, representing not only the Sollan Empire but a few other human polities as well.

And here we're experiencing a few elements of the 21st century's revival of Doctor Who, and not just because we know that the Hadrian telling us his story is a Hadrian centuries old who has the guilt of genocide on his conscience; we also have elements specifically of Stephen Moffat's controversial habit of introducing new-to-us characters who have established long and deep relationships with our hero off-screen. For one thing, Hadrian has a lover, Jenan, who was originally part of a kind of pirate crew Hadrian's mission fleet tangled with, defeated and absorbed some time over the 50 years since Empire. And while Hadrian is nominally the Lord Commandant of the mission, it's really a career military officer, Bassander Lin, who is calling the shots. Their relationship is mostly cooperative and cordial, until Plot Things Start Happening!

But so, I found a sense of breathlessly having to catch up as Howling Dark opened, very similar to how I felt when I managed to read Malka Older's Centenal Cycle in the wrong order. I suspect that this will someday be an unusual experience, though; the Sun Eater series already has a few side-quels and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if a future novel or novella might be devoted to the early years of Hadrian's ragtag fleet. I would opine, though, that such would really not be necessary (but then, I'm also on Team Never Show Us Jim the Fish). The Sun Eater saga is wonderfully enriched by strong character relationships, but it's got a big looming plot question ahead, as the series' entire point is explaining to us how Hadrian Marlowe became the Sun Eater. How he unseated a tyrannical captain and recruited his crew isn't very important to the arc and these are all very long books already. 

I will say this, though: Ruocchio is way better than Moffat at this trick. I mean, Moffat just dropped the Paternoster Gang on us out of the blue and we never even really got to know much about how they met or why they were so fiercely loyal to the Doctor. Moffat just counted on the characters being too awesome for this to annoy us and just kept jingling the keys. Ruocchio made the new characters awesome and explained where they came from and why. And he did it well enough to make some early scenes of irrevocable parting between them feel earned and honestly affecting. Very affecting. No, you're the one who's crying.

Several unsavory encounters and gripping fight scenes and followings of clues later, Marlowe and his friends have found the legendary Vorgossos (orbiting a brown dwarf star!) and come under the jaundiced eye of its unnaturally immortal ruler, The Undying, whose name is Kharn Segara* (a figure of myth from the founding era of the Sollan Empire) and suddenly we're in yet another literary territory, once which I absolutely did not see coming even though our narrator is surnamed Marlowe! For the interlude on the lost planet whereat Hadrian seeks a contact through which to begin peace negotiations is straight outta Heart of Darkness, my friends, with Kharn Segara a 15,000-year-old Kurtz ruling a mad kingdom at the ass end of known space, and yes, my friends, it gets that dark. Actually, more so, because this heart of darkness is also a demented cyberpunk hell-hole where Kharn employs unspeakable means to prolong his own and his exclusive clients' lives and to satisfy the perversions common to bored playboys everywhere and I was bracing myself for this to get truly icky but Ruocchio is a tasteful writer as well as a talented one.

Unlike in Conrad's most famous tale, though, here Kurtz is only a first or warm-up boss; there is so much worse to come, even in his own realm, than Kharn Sagara, you guys!

Anyway, while we're in Kurtz Kharn's realm, we also get to watch Hadrian's relationship with a character I didn't mention last time, the enigmatic Valka, develop in a lot of interesting directions. Last novel, Valka seemed poised to be a love interest, if one whose levels of education and culture were dizzyingly above Hadrian's and then there's also the fact that she's from a civilization that doesn't share the Sollan Empire's maniacal Butlerian Jihad-esque distrust/hatred of computers and artificial intelligence. In many ways, Valka is straight out of a cyberpunk novel, with a headful of neural augmentations that make her that vital character in every Shadowrun game, the technomancer/hacker, but imagine that character who is also Indiana Jones because she is a xeno-archaeologist in the Dan Sylveste mode (though she wisely mostly stays out of politics). Or a (mostly) law-abiding River Song? Anyway, Valka rocks, and Marlowe knows he is nowhere near worthy of her but wants to try to be, even though he regards her with just enough superstitious dread to basically think of her as a witch -- and hey, she almost got burned as one near the end of Empire of Silence. She still hasn't forgiven him for fighting a duel to save her when she was well on her way to saving herself, of course. Anyway, they spend a lot of time alone in various flavors of guest quarters on Kharn's dark, weird planet trying to figure out the many mysteries of what Kharn is up to, how/if they're going to get what they want out of him, and what his intentions toward the Cielcin prisoner, called Tanaran, that he has stripped them of in the guise of entertaining their petition. Oops!

In an attempt to regain control of Tanaran and of their immobilized spaceship, Hadrian and Valka go exploring and Ruocchio explores a terrifying conjunction of ideas: what if the Vatic Fountain (Gene Wolfe) were a terrifying monster out of the deep past, and what if the Pattern Jugglers (Alastair Reynolds) gave swimmers the ability to See Through Time? Meaning Hadrian gets not one but two cryptic glimpses into his future in this novel, though the first was only really a preview of the second, into his metamorphosis from renegade nobleman/mercenary to figure of superstitious awe and dread? In a terrifying encounter made all the more intense by narrator Roukin's choices in how to voice a weird collective inhumanity waiting in the dark at the end of a cyborg-guarded labyrinth?

Yeah...

While all of this has been going on, the Sollan Empire has not been sitting idle, of course; nor have the Cielcin. We learn late in Howling Dark that the number of star systems the Empire has lost to Cielcin incursion has come to exceed 900, with billions and billions of human beings dead (and eaten!) (most of them) or brutally enslaved and mutilated (in a manner chillingly reminiscent of the fate of Father Sandoz in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which, yikes).

And of course the conflict between the Empire and the Cielcin follows Hadrian to Kharn Segara's creepy dark planet, first according to Hadrian's design, because he can't start peace talks with the Cielcin without eventually meeting some Cielcin who aren't his prisoners, and then very much not according to Hadrian's design, and this is where Ruocchio goes bigger than big. And also displays a talent for manipulating reader emotions that I almost resent because of the devastating use he made of it here, leading us from baroque horror to tense diplomatic drama to huge boffo combat scenes to almost unbearable character drama (Hey, Hadrian has been warning us from the start that he has often been accused of having a taste and talent for melodrama!).

I suppose the game of spot-the-reference (and hey, we haven't even gotten to what amounts to Hadrian's possessing a light saber, which Ruocchio has managed to make even cooler than the Star Wars version by concocting a plausible-sounding pseudoscientific explanation for how the weapon works and, more importantly, what its limitations are) that I've played here makes it sound like the author has just cherry picked his favorite bits from other novels, is just a kid playing with a mismatched set of action figures and telling his babysitter the story as she indulgently smiles or blatantly ignores his babbling, but that's the least deserved criticism that could be leveled on these books. Ruocchio, who's had a pretty good career as a genre fiction editor, has impeccable taste in science fiction bits and bobs and wields them all with tremendous skill, maturity, intelligence and passion. Even the bits that seem to have no business appearing together are made to feel organically joined and earnestly communicated through Hadrian Marlowe's insightful, frank, erudite and compelling narrative voice. Hadrian is as complicated and well-rounded as a Dorothy Dunnet hero, enacting a Gene Wolfe plot (and occasionally using Wolfean vocabulary**)

through a Mary Doria Russell moral and Alastair Reynolds physical universe. I have, as the kids used to say, no choice but to stan.

Seriously, friends, don't sleep on these. Hadrian's story is already epic AF (and we've gotten the barest taste of how epic it's going to get by the revelation in this novel of why he bears the sobriquet of "Hadrian Half-Mortal) and it's only going to get more so. A fifth volume in the main narrative is coming out in December. There's plenty of time yet to catch up on the series in time to plunge into that with me and Ruocchio's other, too few by my lights, fans. Yeah, they're big fat books but they never get dull and never stop provoking thoughts and ideas and feelings and, well, what the hell do we read novels for if not to have those?

As for me, I've already started listening to Demon in White. And Ruocchio has already made me cry at least once.

*Whose name I was mentally spelling as "Khan" because narrator Samuel Roukin -- still absolutely perfectly cast as our protagonist-narrator, and if these books ever get adapted for the screen I hope it's soon so Roukin is still young enough to play Hadrian -- is very, very British.

**My favorite of Ruocchio's pseudo-Wolfean terms so far is "Xenobite," which Hadrian uses to refer to aliens the way Severian uses "Cacogens", though "Xenobite" is a more accessible and evocative word, employing the "xeno-" prefix to denote otherness while rhyming with "cenobite," which is more than just a name for the monstrous powers of Hellraiser fame. It also denotes monasticism, and those to whom Hadrian generally refers with the word are the Cielcin, whose social structure is fanatically hierarchical and to be a Cielcin's subordinate is by definition to be its (and that is the pronoun; the Cielcin are an asexual race) slave. Interesting, no?

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.