Son of the Storm

STATS

Title: Son of the Storm

Series: The Nameless Republic (Book 1)

Author(s): Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: May 2021

Publisher: Orbit

SPOILER WARNING

Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story.  I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required.  I will keep the first paragraph of section as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.

PREMISE & PLOT

Barnes & Noble has the following to say about this book.  It is almost word-for-word the same as the blurb on the back cover of the physical book.

In the ancient city of Bassa, Danso is a clever scholar on the cusp of achieving greatness—except he doesn’t want it. Instead, he prefers to chase forbidden stories about what lies outside the city walls. The Bassai elite claim there is nothing of interest. The city’s immigrants are sworn to secrecy.

When Danso stumbles across a warrior wielding magic that shouldn’t exist, he’s put on a collision course with Bassa’s darkest secrets. Drawn into the city’s hidden history, he sets out on a journey beyond its borders—and the chaos left in the wake of his discovery could bring down an empire.

This premise is misleading.  Danso is indeed a scholar who rejects the expectations thrust upon him, but the encounter with the fugitive doesn’t put him on a collision course with any secrets.  The events of the story are more about the fallout of his encounter with the fugitive has on his life and his sense of self.  The information referred to as the “darkest secrets” is neither all that dark nor all that secret.  Multiple characters of varying backgrounds take the revelations in stride so casually that they might as well have been things that were accessible to the public but that no one really cared about.

What the premise also fails to mention is the subplot about Danso’s “intended” (his betrothed), Esheme.  The fallout of the fugitive’s arrival in Bassa and Danso’s encounter with said fugitive thrusts her into the dangerous games of power and politics that simmer beneath the surface of Bassai society.  She must fight tooth and nail to both survive and protect her family’s holdings.  Her subplot is the best part of this story (more on that later).

RATING: 4/10

I know I’ve been putting all the ratings for single-part reviews at the end thus far, but this book has convinced me that I should just give my overall impressions and the rating up front to provide context for my criticisms.

Son of the Storm is a curious book.  In some ways, I feel like it is a twisted twin of Shadow of the Conqueror. Both fantasy novels featured worldbuilding that the authors were clearly passionate about and put hard work into making consistent.  Both possessed a clear intent to present audiences with messages that reverberate back into the real world.  These similarities, coupled with the precedent established by Shadow of the Conqueror, informed my rating here.

Son of the Storm should have scored higher than Shadow of the Conqueror.  Okungbowa did not set himself for failure by going out of his way to make the protagonist unlikeable.  The narrative does not suffer from glaring structural issues or loss of tension due to rampant power fantasy.  The quality of its writing, including the delivery of exposition and the handling of power levels, is superior as well.

However, what Son of the Storm and Shadow of the Conqueror share is a botched execution of themes and emotional payoffs, and the way that Son of the Storm botched it ultimately dooms it.

Where Shadow of the Conqueror put in the legwork to be deep and subtle with its messages, Son of the Storm bludgeons the audience over the head with many shallow and unsubtle messages.  Shad Brooks failed in the execution of many of his ideas because his ambition exceeded his abilities; Okungbowa succeeded in transferring Twitter rants into a fantasy narrative.

That shallow messaging is what really kills this book for me.  Every message in the story, no matter how universal or specific, unifying or divisive, is used to slap the readers repeatedly about the face, even when nothing is happening in the narrative to earn it.  The result is a book that is exhaustingly self-important.  It was a real slog to get through.

And unlike Shadow of the Conqueror, there wasn’t a sense of gratification for finally getting to the end.  I wasn’t rewarded for surviving the journey.  The book just ended (frankly, a few chapters too late, with a lame climax that we’ll get to later) and set up a sequel.  Thus, while I could at least bump Shadow of the Conqueror up to the point of recommending it as an experience, I don’t have adequate reason to ask people to overlook the flaws of Son of the Storm.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this book lacks redeemable elements.  I wouldn’t have been able to finish it if that was the case.  The strong elements just aren’t enough to elevate the work as a whole.  Okungbowa surprised me enough times in the first third of the story that I held out hope, thinking that he might be able to bring the book to the same sort of satisfying payoff as Shadow of the Conqueror.  That never happened.  When this book finished, I was just glad that it was finally over.

CONTENT WARNING

This book has three sex scenes.  They don’t just acknowledge that characters have sex (which is indeed relevant to the story).  They go just far enough into the events to edge into erotic territory.  These are very brief, never more than a paragraph, but they are there.  If you don’t want to read that sort of thing, you have been duly warned.

I would say that this is absolutely a case of a writer injecting personal fantasies into the writing.  This wasn’t obvious from the get-go.  The first two sex scenes are at least used for characterization early in the story.  It’s the third one that tips Okungbowa’s hand.  It is smashed into the narrative without any greater purpose or even a logical sense of cause and effect.

The sex scene in question involves two female characters (one of whom is Esheme) who have shared three previous scenes with no signs of prior physical or emotional chemistry.  Esheme, who was a participant in a previous sex scene, had also shown no prior sexual interest in other females (putting her in a similar position as Siyon in terms of not convincing me that she isn’t heterosexual).  This is the opening of said sex scene:

“It took Esheme a while to circumvent Ulobana’s block and secure a visit to [important plot location].  Once she found her way there, she met only [Female Character] at the [location] and knew immediately that, in a few moments, they were going to have sex.”

This is stupefying.  Notorious Sorcerer was porn with suffocating sexual tension in the most mundane of situations, but at least that tension laid the groundwork for the sex scene. Okungbowa didn’t even try to justify his fantasy for two females having sex.  The scene then evaporates from the narrative, with its only contribution to the overall story being some exposition that did not need to be delivered via pillow talk.

(And if you’re wondering why I kept saying “female” instead of “woman”, you can thank Okungbowa for that.  He is the one who chose to recycle a virtue signal character for this third sex scene.)

WHAT I LIKED

Empire Restored (Heavy Spoilers)

Esheme should have been the focus of this book.  Her story is like a compilation of the best bits of Palpatine’s story from the Darth Plagueis novel and the Prequel Trilogy films.  We see her start off on the back foot and, through cunning deals and the daring gambits, rise in power and influence.  It appears that Okungbowa is setting her up to be the Big Bad of his series.  In this aspect, he was quite successful.  Esheme is very capable and dangerous as an adversary.

Starting off as the daughter of a powerful fixer named Nem, Esheme is clawing her way up the social ladder.  She was betrothed to Danso to capitalize upon his family’s diminished but still viable reputation, and she resents how his inability to meet social expectations weighs her down.  When her mother’s dealings with the mystical substance known as ibor brings powerful aristocrats down on her head, Esheme needs to cut deals with political dissidents to protect herself and turn the tables on the aristocrats.

The story somewhat telegraphs the final twist of Esheme seizing control of Bassa and declaring herself the city’s Red Emperor.  I don’t think that is a bad thing, though. There was a clear trajectory to her story, and it flowed through a clear sequence of cause and effect.  Esheme’s ruthlessness is also established early on, so none of the atrocities or betrayals she commits in her rise to power feel out of character.  The only flaws that exist in this subplot are reflections of issues that affect the overall narrative, rather than being an issue with the subplot itself.

Just In Caste

Son of the Storm is a story involving caste systems.  Bloodline purity and adherence to the Bassai Ideal are extremely important in this city.  Castes are dictated by ethnicity, both in the skin color and the associated culture.  Everything from social position to accepted hair styles flows from it.

I’m not a big fan of caste systems in stories.  There’s nothing objectively wrong with including them from an artistic standpoint; I just don’t like reading about them.  Still, Son of the Storm won me over in this regard.  Okungbowa really thought this system through and made it an integral part of the story without watering it down into a rebranding of racial or class issues (even if the story does engage with those themes).  Also, while the web of power dynamics was rather complicated, I couldn’t identify any obvious contradictions or plot holes.  I think this is a good example of the right way to incorporate concepts not common in Western literature into the genre.  It’s explored as part of the world, rather than being used as a skin for ideas that the West is more familiar with.

Soapbox Success

I meant what I said about this book being shallow and self-important.  The constant invocation of its many messages is aggravating.  With that being said, it (mostly) succeeds at something that other books fail at: it makes modern-day sociopolitical commentary fit organically into its created world.  You can understand the issues being invoked without needing an awareness of real-world Western politics.

Pages 70 through 75 are one extended rant by Okungbowa.  He virtue signals about his beliefs about homosexuality and has a Twitter-level debate between characters about the value of activist organizations.  The last time I got slapped this hard in the face by “subtext” was Darling in the Franxx.  It is also next to pointless.  Yes, the scene establishes that there are activists seeking to put a new emperor on the throne of Bassa, but that is only a tiny part of this rant.  It could have been established very easily by showing said activists in almost any other scene.

And yet … the scene works.

Homosexuality isn’t shunned in Bassa because of some unspecified prejudice with no depth attached to it.  The Bassai Ideal values fertility.  This scene points out that men who can’t have children are in the same boat as homosexual people for failing to uphold this aspect of the Ideal.  (How, exactly, this medieval society knows that an unmarried man can’t have children is not explained, but the internal logic of the Ideal is sound.)  A foundation is laid.  This issue exists within the world and doesn’t require you to break immersion to reflect upon the real world.

Likewise, the discussion of activism happens because Danso and his friends have a difference of perspective about activists they see protesting in the streets.  The protest itself is triggered by an event that occurred in the introduction in the story, not because of any vague cause or principle that maps back onto the real world.  The argument that springs up is then about whether the activists are accomplishing anything and whether they should be given more money, with sides taken based upon how the individual characters feel about the activists’ accomplishments thus far.  Shallow though the discussion itself may be, it felt natural in context.

Later, when the book introduces a non-binary character, the book doesn’t stop to explain gender ideology.  A pronoun is dropped into the scene. The discussion moved along without further comment.  It felt natural.  This is where Son of the Storm succeeds while The Stardust Thief failed.  Okungbowa didn’t feel the need to ram in two lines of dialogue to call the audience’s attention that he is included this character.  It’s incredible how much of a difference two short lines of dialogue (or, rather, the lack of those two short lines of dialogue) can make to delivering a message.

The sociopolitical commentary in this book is not perfect.  It is riddled with the same flaws that affect all messaging in this book.  As mentioned in the last review, Okungbowa also sinks to a ridiculous low to preach about gender ideology. In one scene, he inserts a paragraph just to praise how Stunning and Brave the non-binary character is for being non-binary, without any support from the narrative itself to back up the claims being made about obstacles to this character.  It is horrendously unsubtle.

However, on the whole, Son of the Storm successfully integrates its commentary into the setting.  It is a natural inclusion within the world itself.  Science fiction and fantasy writers who want to make commentary about the real world should learn from this example.

WHAT I DISLIKED

Let Me See the Script

Time and again, characters in this book are fed one small piece of information and then instantly (and, more importantly, accurately) figure out everything that was previously shared with the audience.  It’s like all of them are hiding copies of Son of the Storm in their clothes and read along with us whenever they aren’t currently in the scene.

This was first apparent with Danso.  He accurately deduces the truth behind a scheme that deceives the entire city based upon nothing but bumping into the fugitive and being confronted by Esheme.  At the time, I assumed that Okungbowa was taking a shortcut to establish Danso as an intelligent character.  This assumption was seemingly validated when Esheme started making similar, if not quite as extreme, leaps, since she is also supposed to be seen as intelligent.

However, then side characters start doing this.  There are a couple examples, but the most memorable is near the climax.  In one scene, a side character secretly cuts a deal with the antagonists to sell out Danso and the characters allied with him.  In the very next scene, Danso’s faction realizes that there is a trap, spring it on their terms, and then a character with him not only identifies the traitor without any further information being provided, but also spells out the traitor’s motivations.  This is despite the fact that the traitor’s motivations weren’t even established for the readers until the scene when the betrayal occurred.

This issue extends beyond characters merely getting caught up on the plot.  Remember how, when covering the premise, I said that the “darkest secrets” are neither dark nor secret?  A (supposedly) major development in this story is that a mystical substance called ibor exists, as do the supernatural properties described to it.  This revelation … affects absolutely none of the named characters.  All of them either already know about it or else instantly deduce what ibor is when they encounter it, and they take the existence of supernatural powers in stride.  The only people who seem at all dismayed by evidence that should upend their entire world view are the mobs of background characters who need to be manipulated by their emotions for the plot to happen.

If You Say So (Heavy Spoilers)

The people of Bassa are a powder keg, buckling under economic oppression, ready to explode into violence at the slightest pressure.

How do I know?  Because the plot says so.

The activists who are supposed to be helping the people are taking money from the elites to maintain the status quo.

How do I know?  Because the plot says so.

The elites of Bassa are moral hypocrites who live by double standards.

How do I know?  Because the plot says so.  (We are somewhat shown this with Esheme, but we’re also supposed to think that the aristocrats are worse than her, so just showing her double standards isn’t enough.)

Bassa – a civilization with the tech level of medieval Africa – has somehow exhausted the resources of the continent so severely that they have triggered massive climate change, with forests turning into savannah in places far from the city itself and the seas whipped into such violence that islands have been swallowed and the coastlines are rapidly deteriorating.

How do I know?  Because the plot says so.

Danso undergoes a journey of personal revelation and gains a newfound understanding of truth and liberty while walking through the woods and casting Animate Dead on a bat.

How do I know?

You get the gist.  This book does not earn its messages or a significant portion of its plot and character development.  We are told problems exist, but outside a few scene descriptions that seem to exist solely to milk surface-level messages about the plight of the poor, we aren’t provided with evidence.  The story evolves because the author says that it does, not because of a logical progression of cause and effect.

This is fine for the opening of the book.  The whole point of the opening is that things are just getting started, and so information needs to be fed to the audience as efficiently and effectively as possible.  Sometimes telling really is better than showing to get the job done.

Where it’s not acceptable is the end of the book.  The final uprising of the people should not hinge on social unrest that only seems to manifest when Esheme needs to ignite an uprising, nor should the end of a character arc hinge on Danso pretending that wandering through the woods and accidentally zombifying a bat has somehow shattered his world view (especially when the changes he claims to have undergone aren’t connected to the walk or the zombie bat).

This sort of telling also doesn’t work if a writer has messages they want the audience to walk away with. We need to see the messages demonstrated in a way that will emotionally resonate with us.  Unless one is preaching to the choir, simply repeating messages over and over won’t accomplish this.  Support is needed.  Maybe this level of telling might have gone over better if Okungbowa didn’t insist on such blunt message delivery.  As it is, this lack of evidence is a big reason why the book is so shallow and self-important.  It is preaching to us about messages that it fails to put any weight behind.

The Ultimate Showdown (Heavy Spoilers)

Okungbowa made the wrong choice for this book’s finale.

I understand why he chose this scene.  Were I in his place, I would have at least drafted something similar.  Looking at the final product, though, this scene should have been cut before publication.

In the finale, Esheme (having been crowned as the Red Emperor) personally leads a group of soldiers to capture Danso and force him to hand over a chunk of ibor in his possession.  The showdown occurs at a rickety bridge over a chasm.  Esheme brings along Danso’s father as a hostage, threatening to kill him if Danso does not comply.  The altercation ends with Danso escaping and his father being killed. Esheme then returns to Bassa to plot her revenge, fueled by both a desire for vengeance and a need to show her strength to the people by punishing those who disobey her.

The thing is, the book is effectively over prior to this point.  Danso has (or, rather, is telling us that he has) completed his arc.  Esheme is already the Red Emperor.  Esheme’s motivation to hunt down and make an example of Danso existed already – it’s the reason this finale happened in the first place.  The only thing the final altercation changes is that Danso’s father is now dead, and frankly, he didn’t have a big enough role in this story to build a strong emotional connection to him. Given that Esheme is being set up as the Big Bad, this altercation could have waited for a later book in the series.

Published on Twitter

The fact that this book leans so heavily on telling instead of showing is a big part of why the messaging in this book was so exhausting.  However, the sheer volume and density of these messages is the other part of the equation.  It reads as though Okungbowa wrote this book by grabbing several Twitter threads and then coloring in a fantasy world around them.

What really makes this particularly messy is that he couldn’t commit to one topic.  If this book was just about truth, liberty, class systems, ethnic prejudice, activism, gender ideology, environmental stewardship, or homosexuality, that could have worked.  Time could have been taken to explore the chosen topic in depth and fabricate a narrative to properly support the ideas in question.  With proper management, two or even three of these ideas could have been explored.  Okungbowa chose instead to cram in all of them.  There’s nowhere near enough time or focus to explore them.  They are just shouted at the audience, and we’re expected to take Okungbowa at his word that they do in fact matter to the story.

To make matters worse, the fantasy premise doesn’t even support most of these things.  This isn’t like the Licanius trilogy, where the magic system embodied the greater struggle between free will and fate.  Ibor and its magic just sort of exists in the background.  Any time spent on the magic system is therefore time that is not spent to support the messages.  To frame this in Twitter terms, we’re not reading the Twitter thread of some expert or demagogue.  This is the Twitter thread of someone you followed for professional networking purposes but ultimately had to mute because your feed was being drowned in shrill political outbursts with little or no connection to your industry.

Shut up, Danso! (Heavy Spoilers)

When I said Esheme should have been the focus of this book, that wasn’t just praise for the quality of her subplot.

Danso might just be the most frustrating character I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about.  Daylen Namaran had anti-social personality disorder and a vast list of atrocities, but at least we’re supposed to hate him.  We are supposed to like Danso.  We’re supposed to think that he is intelligent.  The only flaw we’re supposed to see in him is naivety.  He’s a bit like Wesley Crusher in that regard – and must like Wesley Crusher, I just want him to shut up and leave any scene that he appears in.

The concept and introduction for Danso aren’t bad.  In his first few chapters, Okungbowa successfully convinces me that Danso is a screw-up who is burdened by the expectations of society and his family.  I feel sympathy for Danso; I also feel sympathy for Esheme, as despite her being set up as the antagonist, it makes sense that Danso’s failures would cause her stress within the context of their culture.

Then the plot starts.  Danso’s characterization begins gyrating in whatever direction is necessary to either drive events forward or tell the audience things that Okungbowa thought were important.

After he meets the fugitive mentioned in the premise (her name is Lilong – I haven’t really talked about her because, quite frankly, she doesn’t have a significant footprint upon this story outside of being the fugitive who kicks things off), he suddenly wants to pressure his father for details about his mother.  Why?  It’s not clear.  He didn’t have any interest in this previously, and to say that it is the result of cause and effect would really be stretching things.  He also chooses this moment to stand up to his freeloading uncles, something with zero sense of cause and effect.  The bit about his mother then fades into the background for about half the book, and him standing up to his uncles doesn’t come up again at all.

The example that really bugs me, though, is when Danso decides to leave Bassa.  He encounters Lilong for a second time, after she has nearly killed Nem and been framed for murdering a city leader.  Esheme arrives and begins throwing accusations.  This is where he somehow figures how everything that Nem was doing during scenes he wasn’t present for and shouldn’t have any reason to know about.  He then sees Lilong do a knife trick that may be magic (she telekinetically controls it).  The scene takes place in the dark, and it was a stressful and chaotic moment, but given his characterization, he probably should have doubted what he saw.  Instead, he acts like Paul having his sight restored.  He then makes a ridiculous argument to flee Bassa through the forbidden region known as the Breathing Forest.  This is his logic, paraphrased with context for ease of digestion:

“The forbidden manuscript written by the emperor with a known history of mental health problems and opium addiction got one fact right: supernatural forces do indeed exist.  Based upon this one point of evidence, all stories about supernatural creatures are false.  The Breathing Forest is safe to enter.”

Do I really need to spell out why this is nonsensical?

This would be fine if the story presented him as searching for any excuse to challenge the established narratives of Bassa, making his conclusion a result of cherry-picking information, but it doesn’t.  The story frames this as an intellectual conclusion spawned from a change in this world view.  It even doubles down on this framing in the Breathing Forest, where Danso reiterates that they need to be open to the possibility that the supernatural creatures don’t exist … in a situation where his companion is only asking him to be open to the possibility that they do exist (again, after Danso was shown evidence of supernatural powers being real).

Lilong later tells him that yes, supernatural creatures do exist, and the giant demon bat that attacks them later confirms that Danso was naïve.  The problem is that the story never actually acknowledges that Danso was wrong before.  Him being naïve is only an accusation; he brushes it aside and experiences no growth from this.  The framing makes it clear that we really were supposed to think Danso was saying smart things previously, rather than utter nonsense that he was only saying to facilitate him getting to the next scene in the outline.

The rest of Danso’s subplot does not improve upon this.  Danso walks through a dangerous forest, learns to cast Animate Dead, and visits an enclave of people outcast from the caste system.  None of these events affect him as a character.  His worldview doesn’t shatter at any.  He certainly talks about personal growth and the themes of the story, and the narrative frames it like he’s changing, but he’s very clearly the same person at the end as he was at the start.  The changes he claims to have undergone also aren’t supported by the events that took place.  Okungbowa clearly wanted the messages Danso spews to be takeaways from the audience, but there’s no sense that any of it is earned.

There are so many ways that Okungbowa could have addressed this problem.  He could have framed Danso’s poor decisions as being motivated by desperation or by a bias against the established order of Bassa.  He could have had Danso make a genuine mistake that forces him to rethink his way of doing things.  Instead, he just has Danso keep doing the same things over and over and then claim to have learned something in the end.

I suspect that Danso is Okungbowa’s self-insert character.  He isn’t a Mary Sue or a blank slate, but the narrative fails to acknowledge his actual flaws, let him face a genuine challenge to his values or views, or make any meaningful mistakes.  It reads as though Okungbowa shares Danso’s mindset and views, and thus it didn’t occur to him that there might be problems with Danso’s reasoning or supposed character development.

LESSONS LEARNED

Earn Your Messages

All writers put pieces of themselves into their work.  A great many writers have things they want to say, messages that they want the world to hear, ideologies they want to promote or criticize, or causes they want to stand for.  From an artistic perspective, there is nothing objectively wrong with this.  It is something that has happened since the dawn of storytelling, and it will continue long after our modern stories are forgotten.

The problem is that we need to earn the messages we present.  When we write and sell a work of narrative fiction, we are not activists, politicians, priests, or sage neighbors offering Tim Allen advice over the top of a fence.  We are entertainers – and in the case of science fiction and fantasy writers, we are also facilitators of escapism. The audience comes to us to forget their stress and their worries for a few minutes or a few hours of their day, not to be preached to ad nauseum.

So, if we want to provide our audience with messages, we need to find a balance.  What that exact balance is will vary depending on the message and the intensity with which it is being put forth.  I believe that there are three key factors that must be taken into consideration:

(1)   Does what we have to say blend in seamless with the narrative and the world, thereby allowing the audience to interact with it without breaking their immersion?

(2)   Is the message supported by evidence within the text?

(3)   If all direct statements of or references to the message were removed (leaving the associated plot and character beats intact), does the narrative still function and deliver the message to the audience?

It’s easy to answer “yes” to these questions for universal or timeless messages.  By their very nature, most of the audience will already have accepted them, and very little needs to be done to a story to make them fit.  “Power corrupts”, for example, is not an idea that is difficult to defend in your work.  However, if you want to preach about divisive ideas or socio-political issues, you need to put in the legwork to justify it.  Part of the reason that The Grapes of Wrath or Animal Farm are considered great works of literature because, despite how incredibly heavy-handed their messages are, the entirety of both books were crafted to support their messages with emotionally powerful narratives.

Intelligence, Not Omniscience

Intelligent people in our real world do not know literally everything.  They may know a lot of things, and they draw conclusions based upon the things that they know, but their conclusions are constrained by the information available to them.  Fictional characters must adhere to this same standard, with the added caveat that they cannot “know” things unless the audience is given a good reason to believe that they could know these things.  If you want to write an intelligent character, write a Grand Admiral Thrawn.  Don’t do a Danso.

RETURN TO REACH

After a couple of heavy books, I thought I’d dig into some lighter fare for our next entry, not to mention flashing back to the past.

HALO has grown to a massive multimedia franchise over the past two decades.  It encompasses multiple video games, an animated anthology, some low-budget films, and a vast array of novels.  (There’s also the Silver Timeline, but I am in the camp that prefers to pretend that terrible fan fiction doesn’t exist.)  In 2001, though, there was only HALO: Combat Evolved and its prequel novel, The Fall of Reach.

I won’t pretend that The Fall of Reach is the greatest science fiction story of all time.  Far from it.  However, I find myself coming back to it year after year.  When I packed my bags for Japan (cramming in what meager library I could), I knew I had to bring it along with me.

So please, join me for a walk back along memory lane, as we revisit an old classic.  Expect the review out sometime in mid-May.  I’ll see you all then.