Here in Perrysburg, we have an ice cream stand called Mr. Freeze. I bought one of their homemade ice cream bars once. It was nearly impenetrable; I almost broke a tooth trying to bite into it, and I ended up with a sore jaw by the time I finished it– but the ice cream was good enough to make it worth the effort. That’s how I feel about Alastair Reynolds, who has written some truly outstanding hard-SF space operas. Reynolds is the author most like Scott Westerfeld, but there’s a difference: Westerfeld writes with a light, spare style that makes his books much easier to read than Reynolds. I’m reminded of Pascal’s aphorism (“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”); Westerfeld evidently put a great deal of work into streamlining his writing.
The Risen Empire opens with a hostage crisis: the sister of the Emperor has been taken hostage by the Rix, a cult that worships machine intelligence; an Imperial warship has been dispatched to effect a rescue. The sister, the Emperor, and lots of other characters in this novel are elevated– that is, they’ve been equipped with a symbiote that protects them against death. Invented by the Emperor himself 1600 years prior to the book’s opening, the technology that assures eternal life has become an extremely powerful social influence in the Eighty Worlds, but not everyone thinks it’s a good influence. The central tension in this novel, and its successor, is between “gray” (traditionalists, including the Risen dead)
and “pink” (what you might call dynamists; a faction that believes that Imperial society is dragged down by the grays’ adherence to tradition and preservation), and that’s the really interesting point on which the book turns.
Westerfeld has written some truly outstanding battle sequences, too; all of the technologies he describes are logical extensions of current ones, without any of the stupid hand-waving magic that a lesser author might have tried to pass off. Despite the fact that the characters are so far removed from us in time and space that they might come across as unsympathetic, it’s easy to identify with both Laurent Zai ( the gray captain of the Lynx) and Nara Oxham, a pink Imperial senator and Zai’s more-or-less accidental lover. (My favorite character was actually Marine private Bassiritz, who is more or less a good Southern boy who joins the Imperial Marines to see the world(s)).
The second book, The Killing of Worlds, picks up exactly where the first leaves off (modulo a bit of clumsy linkage that I suspect the publisher made Westerfeld add). An extended space battle is the centerpiece of the second book; the Lynx takes on a much larger, more powerful Rix battlecruiser in a surprising and suspenseful duel that’s extremely well executed. The love story between Oxham and Zai continues to develop, with occasional flashbacks that further illuminate their individual lives. Once the starship battle is over, the center of mass switches to a political battleground where Oxham and her allies try to stop the Emperor from a planetary genocide– and then things get really interesting.
I highly recommend these two books, but only if you read them both. Westerfeld calls these two the opening arc of the “Succession” series, and I’ll eagerly look forward to the next books in the series.
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