2003 military SF, second book of Succession. Captain Laurent Zai
tries to win a space battle; Senator Nara Oxham tries to survive
imperial politics.
This is the second half of the book that began with The Risen
Empire. I did have one small reservation going in: that building up
tension is easier than resolving it. And there is one bit that falls a
little flat at first: the Emperor's Secret, the thing that has been a
significant motivation in large parts of the action of both books, is
eventually revealed, and, well, it doesn't seem so very terrible
after all. Except, of course, that it means that millions upon
millions of people are finding out that they have been lied to. And at
that point it doesn't matter what the actual secret was.
The major narrative strands deal with an extended space battle against
a superior force, including pauses for emergency repair, and politics
back on the Imperial homeworld. I think Westerfeld's heart is really
in that space battle, which manages to achieve technothriller levels
of detail while still being very much about the people involved in it.
The cascades of decisions and consequences that were such a feature of
the first book are here too, in microcosm: weapon A does damage B
which combines with heroic engineering feat C to cause problem D. It
feels genuinely uncertain whether anyone involved will survive.
However smart these new flockers were, though, the captain had made
one point with which Marx had to agree. Cruder Imperial technology
had an advantage at high velocities. Flockers and piloted drones
used up a lot of their mass being clever, and cleverness didn't
always pay off when a firefight took place in the blink of an eye.
Sand was as dumb as a stone club, but its destructiveness increased
with every kilometer per second.
All right, there is the unspoken assumption that when a sapient AI
copies itself from one data medium to another the original will
mysteriously be erased, but hey. There's also a very fine smart home
in a remote location.
Now that summer had arrived, the views from six balconies revealed
gardens and artificial waterfalls all the way to the horizon. The
house had littered neighboring peaks with outpost colonies of
self-sustaining butterflies, their mirror wings reflecting sunlight
to keep plants alive and water flowing, cast artful shadows, and
bring the pale reds of the arctic sunset to three hundred sixty
degrees of vista.
But fundamentally this is always about the people, human and
otherwise. They are interesting as individuals and become more so
when they interact, and I stayed up to finish this book, something I
rarely do any more. I cared about these people.
Perfect, she thought. To encounter fear for the first time while
falling—at sixty meters per second and without a parachute—into a
heavily guarded enemy facility.
"Love," h_rd said bitterly. The rampant wind tore the word from her
mouth without comment.
Don't read this book without first reading The Risen Empire (and see
notes there on combined editions). This book concludes an arc of story
in a highly satisfactory way, though it certainly doesn't dot every i
when speculating about how things will go after the narrative ends.
Probably my favourite book of the year to date.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.