Lightning Round 1
Hello, all. Welcome back.
As promised at the end of my Shadow of the Conqueror review, I want to do a lightning round of three trilogies I finished in 2022. All three of these are series that I genuinely enjoyed and hope that you’ll check out for yourself.
1) The Licanius Trilogy
Stats
Titles: The Shadow of What Was Lost (Book 1, August 2014), An Echo of Things to Come (Book 2, August 2017), The Light of All That Falls (Book 3, December 2019)
Author(s): James Islington
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Orbit (The Shadow of What Was Lost was self-published in 2014 and then re-released by Orbit in 2016)
About
Twenty years ago, the powerful psychics known as the Augurs were overthrown and exterminated in a rebellion. Their servants, lesser psychics known as the Gifted, have been quarantined to their ancient monasteries, shackled by a magical contract that allows non-psychics to freely persecute them without any fear of reprisal. When a teenaged Gifted name Davian is tasked with bearing an ancient relic out of his monastery, he finds his fate meshed with that of an amnesiac man named Caeden. For the forces of the Dark Lord are rallying themselves to once again invade the mortal realms, and only Davian and Caeden together can thwart their apocalyptic plans.
On the surface, the Licanius Trilogy is standard epic fantasy fare. There are eldritch monsters, mystical powers, powerful kingdoms with multiple factions vying for dominance, ancient civilizations whose actions have scarred the world, and a steady buildup to a cataclysmic struggle between Good and Evil (here bluntly represented by this setting’s versions of God and Satan).
As I delved deeper into it, I discovered many layers of additional detail. This story used the magic systems (there are two, one for the Gifted and one for the Augurs) to express the deeper thematic conflict between those who believe free will cannot coexist with fate and those who believe that fate is an essential framework to sustain life. Said systems are hard magic that, even at their most insane power levels, still facilitate conflicts with a lot of tension. While the story leaves most of the world’s history shrouded in legends and myth, enough is shown to confirm that this world existed for millennia before the present narrative. The Dark Lord trope is present, yet it is taken in an interesting direction, one that gives said Dark Lord depth without spinning him as a victim.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story is that it successfully employs time travel without ripping the narrative apart. This is a setting where one cannot change the past, only become a part of it. (This ties back into the power of fate.) What’s more, I’m pretty sure that all time loops are closed by the end of the series. It’s a hefty epic (more than 2200 words), so it’s possible I forgot one, but as far as I can tell, Islington accounted for every detail by the epilogue of The Light of All That Falls.
The thematic conflict is a tad on-the-nose at times. The followers of both sides get some blunt monologues where they spout their views. Credit where it is due, at least the monologues are always natural to the context in which they appear, rather than breaking from the narrative to lecture to audience. Characters who are priests have understandable reasons for preaching. What’s more, while the series does ultimately make a definitive statement about fate by the end (as is often the nature with climactic battles in epics), it doesn’t put the audience on the spot with is delivery, focusing on the greater idea rather than any specific implementation of that idea. The story is also quite ambiguous as to which side is morally correct prior to that final showdown. Those who stand by fate believe that God cast down Satan into the mortal world, and that Satan is trying to shatter reality to escape; those who want to be freed from fate believe that the mortal world is a cage that Satan built to hold God and torment mortals. Up until Satan drops the mask and goes for the finishing blow, there’s no definitive evidence of either side being more correct than the other.
A point that is harder to defend than the bluntness is the pacing of the last book. It is very sluggish, and the climax is rushed. The reason for this, accordingly to Islington himself, is that an entire subplot (roughly 30% of the entire book) was cut to get the book down to manageable size (which is itself still massive). Given how the characters in that subplot are the ones who leaned more into action elsewhere in the series, I’m guessing that the pacing of the book would have been much more even with everything together. Islington stated in the same interview that he planned to publish the cut subplot as a standalone novel. (I’m not sure if he’s done this yet; his latest book, The Will of the Many, appears to be the start of a wholly different series, though I haven’t read it yet to confirm.)
Rating: 9.5/10
This is a phenomenal epic that blends, character drama, themes, and magic together to create something unique and memorable. If you want to lose yourself in a new series, this is well worth your time.
2) Hostage of the Empire
Stats
Titles: The Throne of the Five Winds (Book 1, October 2019), The Poison Prince (Book 2, November 2020), The Bloody Throne (Book 3, March 2022)
Author(s): S. C. Emmett (Lilith Saintcrow)
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
Publisher: Orbit
About
The people of Khir have lost their war against the empire of Zhaon. As part of the terms of surrender, Khir must give up their princess as a hostage, to be married off to the Crown Prince of Zhaon. But even a captive princess must have a retinue. Her closest friend, the Lady Komor Yala, is sent to Zhaon with her. Surrounded by the intrigues and dangers of this foreign court, Yala must defend her princess and her princess’s new household against power plays and assassins alike – the situation grows all the more precarious as the Emperor’s health fails and the princes fight over the throne.
This series is fantastic. If you enjoy Asian court dramas, I think you’ll enjoy this; if you liked the intrigue of A Song of Ice and Fire, I think there’s something here for you, too. Yala is an incredible protagonist with an iron will and a keen mind, and she endures a great deal of both struggle and tragedy as the fight for succession is waged around her. She’s also a deadly action hero. A key aspect of Khir society is that the women are trained to keep an unsheathed blade up one sleeve, and Yala is terrifying effective at using it against assassins.
There is a wider ensemble, of course. Just looking at Yala’s romantic suitors (because yes, there’s courtly romance), there’s General Zakkar Kai, the man who defeated Khir in the aforementioned war; Third Prince Garan Suon-ei Takshin, the brooding younger brother of the Crown Prince; and Ashani Daoyan, half-brother of Yala’s hostage princess. All of them get POV chapters. There are easily fifteen other characters who are also core players driving the plot forwards, all of whom get at least one POV chapter as the series progress. Emmett does a good job are creating the vibe that everyone, even the characters we are supposed to hate, is the hero of their own story. It brings a lot of nuance and depth to the story.
The multiple POVs do have two downsides. Because of how Emmett sets up each scene, you can easily go three or four pages in without knowing which of the characters in that scene is the POV. It makes it difficult to tell how we’re meant to interpret any new developments at the start of the scene. There’s also the issue that some of the POV chapters are narrative dead weight that contribute nothing to the plot, characters, or world, often exploring one-off POV characters in whom we have no investment. A noteworthy example is a chapter in The Blood Throne that introduces a new POV character who serves no purpose outside of yaoi fanservice or virtue signaling. Another chapter in the same book discusses the personal life of a man whom orchestrated an earlier assassination. We didn’t actually see this assassin doing the deed, since his role was entirely off-sage, and learning about his girlfriend doesn’t tell us anything important to the story, as it was just a job he did for a paycheck. The worst case of dead weight, though, was in The Poison Prince. Emmett sinks between fifty and a hundred pages (multiple POV chapters) into a character who undergoes barely any arc and then dies off-screen. I suppose this is done so that we’d feel an emotional gut punch when this character died, but after two books of being told and shown that this character is unlikeable, it ultimately felt like a colossal waste of time and emotional investment.
The other problem that this series has is the dense lexicon of “untranslated” words. I can only assume that this was done for flavor (or, in the case of “kaburei”, to mask the fact that our heroes own slaves), but when “rai” is indicated to be rice is all but name (and, according to Google, is a word for rice in some Asian languages), there’s nothing gained by not calling it rice. What’s more, Emmett evaded giving any proper exposition on these terms in the narrative itself. She just slapped a translator’s note into the start of each book (saying how some words could not be translated faithfully into English) and then stuck footnotes at the bottoms of pages to define words (thereby translating them anyway, and in a clinical manner that makes it seem too unimportant to both remembering). The Throne of the Five Winds has 59 footnotes. Even Emmett realizes that this was not helpful, as she excused herself from even providing any more footnotes in the translator’s note for The Bloody Throne.
That said, these two issues are not enough to ruin the overall experience. If you are already interested in reading more than 1750 pages of political intrigue, I’m confident that you can take them in stride.
Rating: 8/10
Political intrigue, court romance, and a fantastic protagonist – this series has them all. Definitely worth the read.
3) The Thrawn Trilogy
Stats
Titles: Heir to the Empire (Book 1, 1991), Dark Force Rising (Book 2, 1992), The Last Command (Book 3, 1993)
Author(s): Timothy Zahn
Genre: Science Fiction (Space Opera)
Publisher: Del Rey
About
If you have spent any significant amount of time in Star Wars fandom, you’ve heard of this series. I’ve known about it since the tender age of 10, and I didn’t read it until Disney retconned their retcon of Legends and did a re-release of the series.
Mitth’raw’nuruodo (“Thrawn”, for short), Grand Admiral of the Galactic Empire, has left a mark on this franchise that few characters have, despite never appearing in the films (though since the Disney acquisition, a diminished version of him has appeared in the Rebels TV show). This book series, released years before the Prequel Trilogy, is the Sequel Trilogy that many fans hungered for. A common rumor is that the Disney+ TV shows, including The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, are building up to an adaptation of these books.
Five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, the New Republic has retaken Coruscant and shattered the Empire into splinter states ruled by warlords. Han and Leia are expecting twins; Luke is preparing to rebuild the Jedi Order. Then Thrawn emerges onto the galactic stage. Despite being burdened with aging warships and untrained personnel, he initiates an aggressive and devious campaign that knocks the New Republic onto the back foot, reclaiming miliary assets and entire worlds for the Empire. What’s worse, Thrawn has allied himself with a Dark Jedi named Joruus C’baoth, who seeks to build a Jedi Order in his own image, starting with Luke, Leia, and Leia’s twins.
If I had to name one flaw with these books, it’s that it feels like Zahn didn’t want to write about the heroes from the Original Trilogy. He doesn’t assassinate Luke, Han, Leia, or Lando or break them own to build other characters up, but their subplots do feel like busywork to keep them distracted while his original characters got to do things. C’baoth, in particular, feels like a bad clone of the Emperor (which is ironic, given both that cloning in a plot point in this series and that the Dark Empire series happens a year later within the Legends timeline).
Thrawn more than makes up for this problem. He is a perfect example of how to write a hyper-intelligent character. He isn’t the only reasonable person in a room full of idiots; he doesn’t display omniscience or wild leaps in logic that only make sense if he’d read ahead in the book. Every one of his decisions and conclusions are calculated and rational, based on information he could reasonably have, and displays that he genuinely understands his enemies. Sometimes he gets things wrong, thereby allowing the heroes to escape him, but even then, his mistakes are completely logical when one considers the information available to him. He is terrifying, he is ruthless, and he lays intricate plans that a subtly foreshadowed before surprising you with a master stroke. I’ve spent twenty years reading about how intelligent this character is from various source books. They failed to do him justice.
The other characters introduced in this series are also interesting. This is where we meet both Mara Jade and Talon Karrde for the first time. As mentioned, their efforts to stay ahead of Thrawn as he cracks down on their smuggling operation is far more interesting than anything the Original Trilogy characters get to do, even if their paths cross multiple times. Gilad Pellaeon also gets a major role in this series as Thrawn’s second-in-command. I’m not sure this was Pellaeon’s first published appearance in Star Wars media, but it is the earliest I’ve seen him, and it was interesting to see him as a Captain rather than as the Admiral (and, later, Supreme Commander of the Empire) I grew up reading about in The New Jedi Order and Legacy of the Force.
Rating: 9/10
If you are a fan of Star Wars, I highly recommend reading this series. If you just enjoy a good space opera, I still think it’s worth checking out. And, if course, if you need to study how to write an intelligent character, this should be your go-to-reference.
CONCLUSION
Diving into a new series can always be a tricky proposition. Sometimes, the first book isn’t enough to get you to read further; other times, you reach the end, only to be slapped with a disappointing anti-climax. I am confident in declaring that the three trilogies above don’t suffer from either problem. If you are interested in the premises of any of these series, you will be hooked all the way to the end, and you’ll come out of the experience feeling that your time has been well-spent.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for the next book I’m going to be reviewing.
PREVIEW
Notorious Sorcerer, by Davinia Evans, was a book that I was excited to start reading. I really enjoyed the first 25%. By the 50% mark, I was only kind of enjoying it. Then it nosedived.
I wasn’t expecting to deviate from my intended review format so soon after Shadow of the Conqueror. Much like Shadow of the Conqueror, though, this is a book whose flaws can’t be properly broken down with a brief analysis. Thus, we’re going to be getting another multipart series. Hopefully I can keep this one to just three parts, but I make no promises. There are important lessons to be learned here.
Part 1 will release sometime in February, with subsequent parts released weekly after that. Buckle up, everyone. Notorious Sorcerer is going to be a bumpy ride.
