I found the book in a local bookshop, and I'm always on the lookout for an audio book that will tide me over in between works, as I get one "credit" per month, with which I can pick up a free audio book, so I tend to be on the lookout for lengthy works with cheap price tags, and the book interested me.
So what is it?
Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.
It was not his war.
The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders.
But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.
On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world.
Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand. --Empire of Silence, Sleeve SummaryThe book, it turns out, is "part 1" of a series, so all that cool stuff about fighting a war and destroying a star, while teased in the opening of the book, don't actually happen in the book. Instead, it serves as the introduction to the main character, the aristocratic Hadrian Marlowe, and chronicles his noble origins, his fall from grace, his arrival on a new world, and his slow journey from ignominy back into a sort of freedom; that pursuit of freedom from the "gilded cage" of aristocracy is the core narrative thread of the book.
The book is decidedly space opera, and almost an homage to Dune. It certainly differs from the book, in tone and in setting, as it explicitly includes aliens (including the Cielcin, against which the mentioned war is raged, but also other aliens, at least two others which feature in the book) and nothing like the spice of Dune or the hints of drug culture rife throughout that book. Instead, it features aristocratic houses, shield belts, blade combat, and a more medieval culture, with an all-powerful religion featuring inquisitions, forbidden technologies replaced with superior mental training and genetic engineering, and sprinkles in gladiatorial combat for good measure.
Is it Bad?
I'm sorry --Hadrian MarloweThis audio book clocked in at 24 hours, which is three times the length of an average book, which leads me to believe it's somewhere around 1000 pages long, which is fine if it's chronicling a very extensive story, but it is, instead, a first volume to a larger saga, shades of Robert Jordan. It definitely overstayed its welcome, and I was glad to be finished with it. I would have have cut at least a third of the book, were I its editor, and this is a first published work of the author, as far as I can tell.
The character himself is someone tedious. I believe the author was going for something of a subversion of Paul Atreides: instead of a fearless man who holds to his duty, we get an apologetic man who runs from his duties in disgust. It's not quite the subversion that we get from Consider Phlebas, which felt like it was mocking the typical space opera hero, but a deeper meditation on what sort of person might become a space opera hero, and attempts to inject realism into such a journey. The hero is often driven by events beyond his own control, and regularly makes mistakes that cost him... or that come to benefit him.
The book revels in our hero's disgust a little, showing the horrors of the Empire, including at least one detailed torture scene. It's a brutal book in general, putting Hadrian Marlowe through hell in more ways than one and chronicling his misery. It is, by no means, "grimdark," though I found myself comparing it to Warhammer 40k, with the Cielcin a sort of "realistic" Ork, and the Inquisition as...well, an unsanitized version of the Inquistion. It offers a sense of wonder, mainly through the glimpse of alien ruins we eventually get treated to and, of course, the Dune-esque detail to the strange universe.
It uses a very high sort of language and routinely borders on, or even crosses into, pretension. This is space opera as written by a well-educated member of the British peerage and drips with it. It even touches on some modern, politically correct themes: the Earth is gone, destroyed by over-industrialization; homosexuality features prominently (though it is not portrayed as especially good or bad, simply there), and he emphasizes the equality of women. I will say that the author does not hamfistedly drop political anvils, only that these themes are there. The narrator of my audiobook narrated in the most received of received pronunciation, and it fits the work.
This is not a classic space opera romp where the hero gets the girl (though, at the risk of spoiling things, he is eventually offered the hand of something akin to a space princess, but flees from it) and kills the vile alien . I've seen it compared to Game of Thrones, and that's an apt comparison. Both have this drive towards "realism," this grim cynicism that refuses to accept the mythology of space opera, and while using typical technologies and tropes of that genre, treats them very seriously. If you don't mind that, and you don't mind a long read, then...
Is it Good?
Well, I finished it didn't I? Better books have failed to hold my attention. Empire of Silence has a good grasp of how to build up to a moment of tension and then leave you hanging, to draw you in and entice you. It takes its time getting to those answers, and I've certainly read more exciting works, but it does reward your patience.
Christopher is a master of "Show don't tell." To be sure, Hadrian Marlowe has an incessant internal monologue, but he often fails to draw conclusions that the astute reader could pick up on. Why do particular characters hate one another so much? What political moves are being made and why? Not all of it is explicit, and Hadrian occasionally meditates on them, but the book very much invites you to read between the lines.
The "Show don't tell" approach means that the setting is richly described. For example, the world of Eemesh swelters with a tropical heat and sticky humidity and a literally heavy air (as it has more gravity than Earth does), that oozes from the pages in a stultifying atmosphere that you can positively feel. He lavishes his often genetically perfected characters with appropriately beautiful descriptions and returns to them again and again, which is a technique I like and try to emulate myself.
By showing us this world, Empire of Silence gave me something I was very much looking for: an exploration of a setting. I don't especially care about the travails of poor rich-boy Hadrian Marlowe, and while Christopher Ruocchio clearly does, he's willing to accept that I'm just there to see the sites and obliges in exquisite detail, from torpid cities barely reaching over the still surface of a tropical sea to the dance of too-polite realpolitik of interstellar aristocracy to the very languages of the setting and the details of its exotic aliens to the most interesting lightsaber expy I've seen, the "high matter sword." If you want to read (and read and read) about a sumptuously detailed space opera setting, this is where you should go.\
I think I might buy a physical copy of it, so I can go over it in more detail (and so I can go over a glossary, which I'm supposed to be able to download from Audible, but can't seem to find).
But is it Psi-Wars?
Oh my yes. While doubtlessly less harsh, the book very much reminded me of the aristocracy of Psi-Wars, with their careful genetic pruning, their dueling culture, the watchful eye of their church (though the Akashic Mysteries are far less prone to torture than the Chantry). I'm totally going to steal the technology buried within their signet rings. It's definitely a worthy read if you want more inspiration for how the Maradonian elite might behave.
They also feature alternate human cultures, from the psuedo-Ottaman Jadians to the super-technological Demarchists to the cybernetic pirates, the Extra-Solarians, who steal men away with their black-masted ships and force slave implants into them, which remind me of the Psi-Wars approach of having alternate "cultures" of humanity. I may borrow the Extra-Solarian idea as well, though I think I would tie them to remnants of the Great Galactic Threat.
I wanted "something like Dune, but different" and I certainly got it. I wanted loads of new ideas, and I got those too. I do recommend the book, with the caveats that it's long and pretentious.
I may give it a try. Margaret Weiss wrote a trilogy some years ago that might work as Psi-Wars inspiration. They are necessarily great but they are Psi-Wars-esque. The series is the Star of the Guardians and the first novel is Lost King. I'm sure you can find a cheap paperback at Amazon or maybe a local used bookstore.
ReplyDelete