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.

Matt Wallace's SAVAGE BOUNTY

 I told you it wouldn't be long before I took up Volume Two of Matt Wallace's Savage Rebellion trilogy. This is both because the first, Savage Legion, was everything I like and nothing that I don't about epic fantasy, but also because I have definitely decided in my old age that the closer together I can read books in a series, the better, although Matt Wallace and his publishers actually did us all a solid in the form of a very helpful "Previously in" introduction that summarizes the key points of Savage Legion and can this become a norm, please?

Savage Bounty picks up almost right where Savage Legion left off, with the newly ascended Dyewan, no longer a bright little cleaning girl rolling around the campus of the Craiche Institute of Technology (properly called the Planning Cadre but I like thinking of it as CIT) participating in the funeral rites for Edger, who revealed himself as the secret actual ruler of Craiche but also as a moral monster of unconscionable proportions at the end of Savage Legion, prompting Dyewan to take the step she had unconsciously been planning for anyway, of killing him. But her unconscious-yet-brilliant plan allowed her an easy alibi; everybody just blames a failure of the wonderfully weird assistive technology Edger used to talk and breathe that I'm still going to make you read the books to discover. Dyewan is now poised to take over as the secret ruler of Craiche, setter of priorities, maker of plans, architect of Craiche's future. Whoa.

Meanwhile, Lexi is now the prisoner of one of the bureacrats who has been thwarting her efforts to preserve Gen Stalbraid and to find Lexi's missing husband. Councillor Barr is descended from the former nobility of Craiche and has managed through cunning, manipulation and all the other dark arts to hold on to just enough power to conceal the fact that she still owns a huge chunk of property just outside the city that she has turned into a sort of living history museum and I can't have been the only person to have read this and thought of Antebellum, right? Barr has servants in livery and a castle and refers to Lexi as a Lady and is just a complete Madame D'Auroet of a person. She has a role for Lexi to play that in a way offers Lexi everything she could want short of getting her husband back, but Lexi already distrusts her all the way, even before Lexi almost gets eaten alive by some giant carniverous plants that guard an apparent escape route from the garden.

As for Evie, she has managed to convince what's left of her Savage Legion to join with their supposed enemies, who have been revealed not to be a mighty rival nation opposing Craiche but the last pathetic remnants of various peoples upon whom Craiche has been pursuing a campaign of genocide for generations, and is fixing to lay siege to a city that it turns out used to belong to her new allies. Oh, and she's a legendary general now, and the spy who was her first frenemy is her lover and it's all very Paul Atriedes without the mystical bits, which is excellent.

And now, off on adventures of their own is the nonbinary warrior Taru, late of Gen Stalbraid and Lexi's only true friend, now themselves conscripted into a Savage Legion and shambling along with them to defend the very city that Evie the Sparrow General is about to attack!

Somehow, though, this brewing battle for Craiche's Tenth City is not nearly as interesting as how Dyewan's and Lexi's widely divergent paths threaten to eventually come together, as Dyewan strives to extend the promise of Craiche to all of its citizens and not just the ones who are traditionally useful (read: not poor, not sick, not injured, not old) while Lexi is caught in a plot to drag Craiche back to its elitist feudal past. Again, not thinking about the real world circa winter of 2022 at all, nope, nope!

Alas, as is so often the case in middle volumes of trilogies, while the trajectories of our three heroines start veering towards an intersection or two, they don't yet touch (and was Wallace trying to warn me of this by naming a character Edger, I wonder?), while that of Taru comes so close to one of the ladies' that I wanted to scream when I realized I was reading the final chapter of Savage Bounty and I wasn't going to get to see them meet. And then I did scream, because [REDACTED] happens, and now I'm going to have to join the obnoxious chorus of people asking Matt Wallace if he's done writing Volume Three yet, has he, huh, huh, when do I get it give it to me noooooooooow.

Which means that, by any measure, Savage Bounty is a roaring success. Now excuse me. I need some Throat Coat tea to heal my poor throat. It's been a while since I shrieked like that. Kthnxbai!

Matt Wallace's SAVAGE LEGION

I've been a fan of Matt Wallace since the heyday of Podiobooks, a site where freely offered author-created audiobooks helped jump-start the careers of a fascinating and diverse cadre of genre authors. Back in those days, he was the Failed Cities guy and he and birthday-twin Mur Lafferty were also setting the gold standard in writing-advice podcasts, first on her wonderful I Should Be Writing and more recently on, Ditch Diggers.

More than a decade later, most people now probably think of him as the Fantasy Food Guy, for his outstanding five novella cycle chronicling the adventures of a catering firm with an elite and supernatural clientele, the Sin Du Jour series. He's entered the Middle Grade fiction market, too, with some charming work I'll probably be writing about in this space soon, because I still have a 12-year-old's heart (and no, you don't get to know where I keep it, how I got it, or to what use I put it).

And along the way, he has tried his hand at epic fantasy, a genre that I occasionally indulge in but don't love and am more likely to avoid -- unless it's coming from someone like Wallace, whose Twitter feed is as full of honest criticism of genre tropes and stereotypes as it is anecdotes about the writing life (and his former career as an honest-to-goodness professional wrestler). I trust him not to disappoint me with another Chosen One/Emperor of Everything/Thinly Veiled Manifesto About How Much Better It Was In The White Male Middle Ages.

Reader, he did not disappoint!

Savage Legion takes us to a fantasy world that could well actually be a science fiction one that is our own in the distant future, like Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire or the Urth of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Like both of things, whether it's a fantasy world or not is kind of beside the point, the sort of notion that might occur to you at some point but you're too busy breathlessly devouring the story at speed to care much. What's happening in this cool world to these great characters? What's going to happen next?

At the center of the story is an imperialist city-state named Craiche, which has a long history of struggling for utopia but at some point decided to settle for just looking like one to its citizens. Once upon a time it had problems like inequality and hereditary nobility and a primitive eye-for-an-eye justice system, but now it's a thriving and beautiful mercantile democracy, though it still has a class system and there are still poor people living in a slum called The Bottoms.

Power now mostly rests with a kind of guild system, though that term implies that the organizational principle is based on trades alone. The guilds, here called Gens, can be organized around trades, yes, but also around ideas like breeding the insects with a weird and useful life cycle that provide the artificial lights, indoors and out, that free citizens from the tyranny of nighttime darkness, or advocating for social justice.

Craiche also has a lot of other cool things to show us, like a sort of elevated rail system powered by the muscular strength of members of yet another Gen, and a central governing complex/amphitheater that is vast and complicated and also somehow all carved via arts now lost, from a single humongous stone; even the seating and tables and shelves -- I wanted to just say "furniture" but I've studied too many languages in which that category of object is explicitly described as something you can move around -- are of a piece with the edifice.

We get to know this world, of Craiche and its environs, through the experiences of, at first three and later four characters: rough and ready Evie, first found getting disgracefully drunk in a tavern, picking a fight with a guy who hits on her, and then getting arrested and thrown into the clink, where she meets our next point-of-view character, Dyewan, a young woman with crushed legs whose inability to walk upright has reduced her to a life of sliding around The Bottoms on a sheet of greased metal and living by her wits -- which turn out to be considerable; were this an ordinary fantasy novel, she'd look perilously like a Chosen One in the making, but what she is and becomes is much more interesting.

Meanwhile, Lexi, a member of a somewhat recently established Gen only a generation or two old, is dealing with the disappearance of her husband, Brio and the rumors being circulated, mostly by the governing body of Craiche through unofficial and not quite official channels, that he disappeared because he is some kind of traitor -- which many individuals in the government's ruling council think isn't so recent a development because Brio chiefly concerned himself with investigating the complaints and advocating for better treatment of those pesky poors in The Bottoms instead of doing something more convenient and productive. The disappearance and the rumors threaten the continued existence of their Gen, and Lexi is down to just herself and a fascinating non-binary retainer, Taru (who gets a point of view chapter at the end of the novel that bodes great things for the next book!), to make things right again. 

As things progress, Evie, instead of just being fined or serving some time in the cells, gets hauled with most of her fellow prisoners way outside the city, where they learn that they are now part of the Savage Legion, untrained and badly armed arrow-fodder in Craiche's endless and somewhat secret wars of expansion and conquest. If Evie manages to survive 40 battles (ah, but most are killed in their very first), she can go home to her family or whatever. If she runs away, though...

The Savage Legion's non-training camp is where we see our first bit of Is-It-Magic-Or-Weird-Future-Science, used to conspicuously mark and possibly track Savages who try to desert. Deserters are fair game for a set of terrifying and disreputable looking bounty hunters whom the Savages of course get to meet after the ordeal that marks them forever as the hunters' prey. So, there are not a lot of deserters, especially since they don't really know where they are and the territory in which they are soon to battle is so desolate and inhospitable that it makes Arrakis look like a vacation spot.

Dyewan is spared this fate, however. She is kidnapped soon after Evie is, but where Evie is In the Army Now, Dyewan finds herself in what amounts to the Craiche Institute of Technology, an island off the coast full of craftsmen, inventors, scholars and assorted other nerds. Since the dean, Edger, is himself disabled (with a fascinating and bizarre form of assistive techno-magic I'm going to make you read the book to discover), he makes it a point to recruit the facility's support staff from the similarly disadvantaged. Dyewan, who renames herself Slider to divorce herself from her miserable past while still honoring it, is going to be a messenger and is given an ingenious wheelchair-like contraption to do so and is soon making friends and teaching herself to read -- and, unwittingly, showing herself more than capable of doing much more than hauling notes and materials around campus.

Everybody settled in their new situations, the real plot  starts unfolding, and it's a doozy, involving shady political manouvering, possible war crimes, wicked conspiracies, and the slow but relentless disclosure of the litany of crimes that really make Craiche work.

But lest this sound like a whole lot of politics, politics and more politics, remember, this is Matt Wallace, who could have written Write the Fight Right if our friend Alan Baxter hadn't already done so. There are great huge battlefield conflicts, brutal nighttime raids, assassination attempts and scenes of single combat a-plenty and they're all expertly conveyed even to the reluctant mind of a reader like me who usually skips over the action scenes. Part of this is just because Wallace is, of course, very good at creating characters I care about from the get-go and I'm worried for them every time swords are drawn, daggers readied or fire arrows nocked, but also because he writes his combat scenes with clarity and just the right amount of detail. My heart was in my throat every time.

And no, I don't trust the fairly hopeful note on which most of these storylines ended, for this is the first volume of a trilogy written by a guy who grew up on Star Wars. I'll be taking up the sequel, Savage Bounty, very soon. Freaking trilogies...

Clark Thomas Carlton's THE GHOST ANTS OF GRYLLADESH

It's been a while since I had a new "Antasy" to enjoy -- though it's rather bittersweet to be doing so right after we lost the great E.O. Wilson -- but at long last Clark Thomas Carlton has come through with the third in his bizarre and delightful series that began with Prophets of the Ghost Ants and continued in The Prophet of the Termite God. When I first encountered these books, I described them as "Dune with ant-riders" but as we move into this third novel it has so much more in common with George R.R. Martin's big unfinished fantasy series that this could almost be called "A Feast for Ant-Crows" or some such. Except, you know, not horrifyingly repetitive.

It is, however, as grim as AFfC for much of it. We'll leave aside for the moment some questionable tactics in this continuation of our boy Anand's quest to save the people he persuaded into a new way of life way back in the first novel (I guess there's neither a Security Council nor any Geneva Conventions in his world) because they are employed defensively (but make for rough reading if you're at all sensitive to things like biological or chemical warfare because trigger warning if you are); those aside this is still the darkest view of this world, in which humans have evolved into near-microscopic creatures who ride ants like horses (see cover art) and have entered into more-or-less symbiotic relationships with many other insects despite most of those insects being much larger than humans are, that we've yet seen.

We get a somewhat bewildering array of new and returning POV characters who, I guarentee, will send you scurrying back to the helpful dramatis personae at book's beginning just to keep straight*.  They all have very intense adventures once again as the world of the Antasy reels from the wars fought in prior novels, only to find itself embroiled in new conflicts as forces held down or blocked by the evil Hulkrite Empire are now free to seek revenge, conquer lost territory, and wreak general havoc on Anand and his forces -- and on the civilians who have been caught in the middle of it all.

Like in GRRM's opus, we get the perspectives of people on all sides of the conflict(s), including a refugee princess (Trelanna) who finally, after three novels, garners reader sympathy (she suffered plenty in the prior novels, but elicited schadenfreude rather than pity or sorrow, at least from this reader), not by enacting a redemption arc so much as just really becoming abject and pitiful as she gets swept up in an invading army's progress to attack her homeland and has a forced marriage to its leader to look forward to once her unborn children (by Anand!) are got rid of, one way or the other. Did I mention that The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim? The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim.

Of course, Trellana's mother Polexima, who joined with Anand in establishing a new nation based on freedom, tolerance, and an abandonment of her native land's absurdly rigid hierarchy, in previous novels, had it even worse and bore up much better, never wavering in her commitment to the new way even when hamstrung and hobbled and repeatedly raped by the terrifying army Anand defeated in the second book, so feeling for Trellana only goes so far.

Then there's Anand's cousin-I-think Terraclon, elevated last novel to what amounts to the pope of the religion devoted to Goddess Ant Queen and the series' sole LGBTQA+ representation (unless we count [REDACTED] the non-POV character who becomes his lover by this novel's end), who has pretty much held Anand's forces together while Anand has hared off on weird mission after weird mission on the back of a high-flying locust. Pleckoo, the main villain of the last two novels, gets a quick cameo but is basically fridged, while a new royal lady, Fewlenray has quite an arc of her own while, in one of the things I like best about Clark Thomas Carlton's work (besides the arthopods, of course), several villains get point of view chapters that win, if not our sympathy, at least our empathy as their plans clash with Anand's, assuring that no matter how this ends, somebody we've come to love, like a little, or at least respect, is going to be brought low and we'll cry along with them at least a little bit -- recalling that arch-villain Pleckoo started out his Antastic life as Anand's best friend and cousin, after all...

But the novel is still very much about Anand, whose character deepens and becomes yet more complicated as circumstances and his own shortcomings tempt him into atrocities of his own. He is still that poor nobody from the midden at heart, and while his time among the freedom-loving Dranverites taught him a lot and gave him the courage to share what he learned with his former society, he still reacts at times like that scared and bullied young man, even as he also copes with the fact that both of his very pregnant wives are captives of the very hostile nations who threaten his co-creation of Bee-jor. He becomes a little less lovable but a whole lot more believable in this book, does Anand. Would you have made different choices? Could you have thought of better solutions to his problems?

The novel ends on even more cliffhangers than did The Prophet of the Termite God, so I sure do hope CTC doesn't take our least favorite page out of GRRM's book. Write fast and stay healthy, Clark!

*Indeed, I dithered as I read over whether or not I should backtrack and read The Prophet of the Termite God again because for a lot of these characters, I was uncertain about whether they were completely new for the third novel, or just newly prominent and having emerged from the background of the previous two. I think I should have backtracked.

Mark Lawrence's KING OF THORNS

When I wrote earlier this month about the first volume in Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire series, Prince of Thorns, I made some comparison to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, but said that Lawrence's grimly unlikeable antihero was a much more reliable narrator than Severian.

As I've finished the second novel in the series, King of Thorns, I find I need to retract that statement somewhat. Jorg isn't always telling the truth as he leads us through the layers of his story, but I'm not sure his intent is to deceive anyone so much as to discover himself what is true, of what he is actually guilty, whose motivations he has actually acted upon, what manner of character he really possesses. It's really, really complicated. Deliciously so.

As the novel opens, Jorg has been king of the little nation he wrested from his uncle (the guy who had Jorg's mother and little brother killed. Or probably the guy) for several years and is getting married to a slip of a girl who seems like a bit of a simp but turns out to be anything but. Meanwhile, his little kingdom is under an enormous assault, being attacked and invaded by something along the order of 20,000 men under the command of a destiny-driven knight in shining armor, the Prince of Arrow, who is an almost perfect foil to Jorg in that everybody loves him and for good reason -- he is everything a royal should be, accomplished, daring, fair, kind, good, noble, handsome, trustworthy. And prophesied to unite again the Broken Empire of 100 Kingdoms that once dominated Europe in the years between the nuclear apocalypse that turned our world into Jorg's and Jorg's own time.

Oh, and Jorg is going to have to fight off -- or bend the knee to -- the Prince of Arrow on his very wedding day. And if he fights, he only has 300 men or so. Yes, he addresses the whole Thermopylae thing. A very well-read young man is our narrator Jorg.

But don't worry! He has a plan! Only, sort of Doctor Who style, he doesn't know it! Because like in the last novel, Jorg is still beset by subtle, sneaky, nasty wizards who can manipulate men's minds as well as reading them. But he found a way to beat that nasty subtle wizardry, oh yes! He found a wizard of his own who could cherry pick and remove Jorg's memories and seal them in a little metal box that is impervious to the workings of Jorg's magical foes! Jorg can judiciously access these a little at a time, but only a little. This results in a lot of Bill and Ted type shenanigans in which Jorg and his men are constantly stumbling across amazingly helpful things by surprise as Jorg's deliciously complex and devious defense scheme plays out. Joy!

So see, much of the time we've been reading Jorg, we've only been reading bits of Jorg, because he's hidden so much even from himself, and thus from us. He's working from a heavily redacted script, and drawing many false conclusions about his role thereby. It's absolutely fascinating.

So after two novels, I'm no longer sure exactly how detestable Jorg really is. Oh, he's still plenty brutal and spends lives like Napoleon and is still hell-bent on revenge and is an amazing killing machine, but it seems that some of his most heinous deeds might not really be layable at his door. Then again, they yet may.

This all unfolds again in multiple time frames and multiple layers. In addition to the wedding day battle plot, we again follow a parallel narrative from four years before, when King Jorg hit the road with what's left of his brothers and toured his world, gathering allies here, re-encountering old foes there, losing brothers, gaining powers, and exploring in greater detail the origins of this strange semi-fantastic semi-science-fictional world of his. The careful reader will pick up lots of hints as to Jorg's deliberately-forgotten battle plans as well as develop a more complex picture of what Jorg's all about.

And then there's a scene between Jorg and his step-aunt, Katherine, with whom he has an obsession that is almost romantic but definitely sexual, most of which is part and parcel of the memories he had removed from his head and stored in his box to unfold piece by piece along with his strategy. Thus the relationship between Jorg and Katherine is also subject to reinterpretation. Deliciously so.

And then there is a narrative from Katherine's point of view, told in snippets from her diaries. For much of the book, these feel kind of unnecessary and unsuccessful, but they lend tremendous weight to the novel's final revelations as the stage is set for Jorg's run for the imperial thorne, to be detailed in the last book of the trilogy, Emperor of Thorns, which of course I'll be reading very, very soon. Deliciously so, I am sure.

Guy Gavriel Kay's FIONAVAR TAPESTRY

This post is going to concern itself with not one but three books, because once I'd finished the first volume of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, The Summer Tree, I immediately plunged into its sequel, The Wandering Fire, and when I finished that (in a little over a day and a sleepless night), I plunged immediately into the concluding The Darkest Road and then I had a good cry but did not wish for more because everything wrapped up so satisfyingly that I did not need more.

This pretty much never happens. Especially with epic/high fantasy, a genre for which my lack of love is pretty well known.* Hey, I'm as surprised as you are (though my love for Kay's A Song for Arbonne should have given us all a clue, I do suppose). And yet right now, I'm happily also in the middle of that Broken Empire stuff, too. It pays sometimes to ignore your prejudices, eh wot?

Anyway, I started off, a week or so ago, prepared not to like this one so much. Alarm bells started ringing right away as I settled down to read the first book, which starts off with a lengthy and detailed dramatis personae, a thing that always makes me roll my eyes because it so often suggests to me that either someone doesn't trust me enough to keep track of all the characters contained in the story such a list precedes, or someone's publishers don't think the author did a good enough job making said characters vivid and distinct enough for anyone to be able to keep track without a handy guide. Either way, my hackles go up, and yes, I had the same eyebrow raising experience the first time I cracked open Dorothy Dunnett, but her books are so damned intricate and complex that those lists turn out to be (occasionally) necessary even for an attentive reader because hundreds of pages sometimes go by between encounters with some characters in Dunnett, oh yes. But Dunnett has been an exception for me in this, as in so many regards.

Guy Garviel Kay, turns out, is another. Except I didn't need, ever, to refer to the dramatis personae, because as in Arbonne, so in Fionavar (to which I'd seen a reference in Arbonne as "Fionvarre" and had been wondering about since, to my happiness): Kay's characters, both his own creations and those he borrows from mythology and legend, are alive and distinct and unforgettable and captivating. As is their world, their struggle, their story.

The trilogy's focus is on five of them, more or less, young university students who come from our world (and from Toronto, my very favorite city), who attend together a lecture on Celtic myth by a world-famous expert and then find themselves whisked into said expert's company after the lecture under the guise of showing him a much better time than would all those dreary academics who are expecting him at their post-lecture do. But it is the lecturer, who turns out to be a powerful mage from another world named Loren Silvercloak (and yes, that name gagged me at first, as so many names in the d.p. gagged me, because I hate epic fantasy, remember?), who whisks them away -- to another world, where they are "needed" as ceremonial guests for a king's golden jubilee. By magic, he and his "source"**, a dwarf named Matt Soren, transport the five to Fionavar, the first of all worlds, kind of like C.S. Lewis' Aslan's Country, the world of which all other worlds are just sort of imperfect copies echoing its motifs and patterns.***

And then it turns out, of course, that the Five -- handsome, playful, emotional Kevin; helpful, kind, wise Kimberly; wounded, stand-offish, moody Paul; beautiful, proud Jennifer; and big, strong oddball Dave -- aren't just there for a party. There are roles and very important work for all of them to fulfill in Fionavar, if they're willing, or maybe even if they're not.

And those roles are deeply archetypal, a Jungian parade of quests and tasks and ritual enactments and sacrifices that could all get so hokey, so in-your-ribs and on-the-nose, but don't because Guy Gavriel Kay is some kind of wizard. Even someone who knows the archetypes he's playing with very, very well has surprises in store for her, reading these novels. They might not be plot surprises per se, for such a reader; the surprise is how deeply felt and emotional these developments can be, how necessary they are to make the overall story work, and how they raise lumps in the throat, make tears sting in the eyes such that one could all but short out her ebook reader. Excuse me for a moment.

And yes, the girls' stories matter just as much as, sometimes more than, they boys', and no, it's not because the girls strap on boobplates and are suddenly strong enough to wield giant claymores or because they develop preternatural skills at archery or in any way, really, do anything remotely like what the boys do. Kay laughs at the Bechdel test. Kay understands women and men and honors them both. Kay writes people. Extraordinarily.

And he writes extraordinary fight scenes, including one single battle between a larger-than-life hero and a giant unkillable demon that goes on for some ten pages and is riveting not just for the well-described action but for the scene's staggering emotional content, deft shifts of point of view, and barely-hinted at future importance. As I said over on Goodreads after finishing that scene, "Jesustitsfucksake, Lancelot!"

Yes, that Lancelot. Arthur and Cavall are in this, too, drawn in from their eternal twilight afterlife just as Kevin and Kim and Paul and Jennifer and Dave were from theirs, but not quite given their interiority. Kay knows well enough to leave his most archetypal characters as just that, archetypes, icons, who nonetheless are integral parts of this story and who interact with Kay's own characters in a myriad of ways without in any way ceasing to be icons to be regarded with awe and reverence. Neat trick, that.

 I'm still in awe myself from the experience of reading these books. And this is a trilogy with a flying unicorn in it, for Pete's sake.

Yes, boys and girls, a high fantasy trilogy with a flying unicorn made me cry. Go outside and check the skies for falling crabs and periwinkles.

And read these books, if you haven't.

*Nor are those detailed in that sonnet the only reasons I generally roll my eyes at the genre, as I'm sure my long-term readers figured out long ago, and as I'm sure I've made even more clear in this post.

**I'm not going to get into the details here, but magic in Fionavar is different, yo. As in it takes two, a mage and a second person who is the source of his energy, to do it. And the relationship between a mage and his source is a powerful one even when they are not already otherwise best friends or lovers or both or all of the above, i.e. it's quite fraught.

***Look, the trilogy is referred to as a tapestry. So much weaving/fibercraft metaphor in this. So much.

Mark Lawrence's PRINCE OF THORNS

Admit it. You've always wished that George R.R. Martin was gutsy enough to let Joffrey Baratheon have the odd point of view chapter. So, apparently, did Mark Lawrence. And he did something about it.

Admit it. You loved Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun in all its occult glory, but wished it had a reliable narrator, and would give bonus points if said reliable narrator was a boy psychopath. So, apparently, did Mark Lawrence. And he did something about it.

And here's the kicker -- he did both of these things in the same damned book! And thus Prince of Thorns and its two Broken Empire sequels came to be. So we have an extremely post-post-apocalyptic setting, in which civilization has been bombed back to medieval France but there is so much bizarre and inexplicable leftover technology and other phenomena about that it's basically an epic fantasy setting chock full'o'magic... and we have a boy psychopath, a prince of the blood with a thirst for revenge and a giant cauterized wound where his conscience might be, leading us through it from his perspective.

This is not a pretty book, folks (especially not for someone coming off the ravishing loveliness of A Song for Arbonne), but damn, is it a compelling one.

It does perhaps require something in the order of a trigger warning, though. Our boy, who rejoices in the name of Prince Honorus Jorg Ancrath, is truly a wicked one. Though only 13 years old when we first meet him, he's already a murderer, a thug, a manipulator, and, yes, a rapist (though the rapes occur offscreen). The book itself starts off with rape and murder and violence, as such is Jorg's origin story; when he was nine, he, his mother the Queen, and his little brother were waylaid on their travels; mama was raped and murdered; little brother was mutilated and murdered; Jorg only survived because he got tangled up in the world's wickedest briars and was held helpless and out of sight by the thorns, hence the book's title. He has scars inside and out, yo.

To make matters worse, his father the king declines to take revenge on the attackers. It's politically inexpedient. You'll understand when you're older. Be a good boy and go page through your Plutarch and leaf through your Livy and don't leave too many stiffened socks for the servants to clean up.

Wrong answer, dad.

So by the time the lad is 13 (the nine/ten-year-old Jorge we meet in judicious flashbacks), he's left home and become the head of a band of ruthless bastards. And these aren't fun, funny bastards like Scott Lynch has made us love. These are evil, violent, bloodthirsty marauders who you will find yourself a little abashed to be rooting for (more or less).

Some readers have complained that it's impossible for a 13 year old boy to take control of such a band. I'll let his friend Sir Makin answer that, as he did when Jorg asked him what he meant when he said Jorg is good: "Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing  experience with genius."

And then there is the matter of some mages. Sneaky, powerful, subtle, nasty mages, who can manipulate other people like puppets. Arguments can be made that some of Jorg's precocity, and maybe some of his ferocity, aren't entirely his own.

Maybe.

Regardless of who the baddest guy really is, though, regardless of how nasty things get, because Lawrence has presented Jorg's point of view so convincingly, so clearly, so logically, the reader winds up in some way rooting for him. Even if we find him utterly irredeemable, we love watching him go.

Yeah, you'd better believe I'm going to read the rest of his saga. With frequent showering in between chapters, but I'm going to be reading it. Soon.

Maybe I'll intersperse it with Guy Gavriel Kay. You know, just so I don't wind up hating humanity altogether 8)