Do you like both science fiction AND epic fantasy and wish you could have the best of both worlds? Oh, I have I got a series for you…
Within the first fifty pages (of this almost 800-page volume), the premise is established, a mix of info-dump and quickly sketched but poignantly brave characters. An alien enemy, vast and inflexible, has swept down upon the Terran Federation, humankind’s space-colonising future society. It is implacable and wants nothing more than our utter extinction. With one last throw of the dice, the TF government gets a colony fleet out past the destruction, so that the last survivors can hide from the aliens and build a new home on a new planet far away.
The original plan was to accept that humans would always reach for the stars, and to preserve knowledge and records of the alien threat so that once the colonists once again went to space, thousands of years in the future, they would be forearmed and ready for it. But the leaders of the escaped colony have a different idea – to destory our true history, to ruthlessly suppress the innate human urge to innovate, and to enforce a false religion that will keep humans at a medieval level of technology forever, to “protect” humanity from attracting the attention of the aliens again.
800 years later, an android wearing the personality of one of the rebels against this oppressive course of action wakes up. Nimue was emplaced all those years ago to counter this exact reality upon her automatic triggering. It is her daunting task to overthrow a false religion, encourage innovation and bring forth the flowering of the new humankind.
From then on, we’re in epic fantasy territory – including the Khraazy Zhpyllyng of Phyrsonyl Naamyez – with politics and intrigues and sea-battles, all helped along by, in the classic advanced-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic sense, by a sort of wizard…named Merlin.
It is a great premise and a great story, with engaging characters and a sly sense of humour, though it is not without flaws: it’s a doorstopper and there’s sections in the middle where Merlin is introducing gun powder and new guns and cannons etc which are just like yeah, yeah, new sails, help ship go faster and turn tighter, let’s move on. Yeah, yeah, gory battle at sea, guns blowing apart ships, just tell me who wins and move on. Though I’m sure the audience this is really intended for would find that all fascinating. Which would be people who like military SF. And the Horatio Hornblower series. Quite a few of whom will be male.
Which leads me to the second minor drawback for me, the fact it fails the Bechdel Test, which I was reminded of just the other day in this discussion. (To pass, you not only need multiple female characters, but they need to talk to each other, about something other than men. Not that I think all books must pass the test, just that books that do generally hold more appeal for me.)
It’s especially blatant in this case, because the android starts off as a woman, and transforms herself into a man (yes, Nimue to Merlin, see what I mean about that sense of humour) because it’s a male-dominated society. Yes, that’s right, because women were just sitting around throughout human history producing heirs and twiddling their thumbs and waiting for someone to come along and invent feminism in the 20th century, thanks very much.
On the other hand, well, it is is a book mainly about medieval military stuff and women weren’t really involved in that side of things – no matter how much they were actually contributing to society at other levels, all right? – and Weber is the author of the Honor Harrington series so he can “do” female characters when the context is right, and there’s a queen who might become more prominent as the series goes on.
[And also I can't entirely stand on the high moral ground, because my latest book, aimed at a female audience, probably fails whatever the opposite of the Bechdel Test is, because while I do have several male characters, and they do occasionally talk to each other, they're generally talking about the women. They're all there as eye candy for the female leads. I do understand that books will have different mixes depending on their context, focus and audience.]
I’m not generally a fan of epic fantasy, or books that go on for too long, or books that focus a lot on big battles, or books that overlook women. But I am a fan of books about science and truth, books that take the time to have a king speak to his young cousins the way the king speaks to his in this one, books that portray the invasion of a only-potentially-threatening nation by a coalition of the willing as morally wrong, books that have little tongue-in-cheek moments like Merlin’s constant cursing at the abolition of the metric system or his physical reaction when he has go to swimming with a lot of naked men (hetrosexual female, male body…). I read this in two days, and can’t wait to grab the next two. The second book in the series is By Schism Rent Asunder, and the third, released in hardcover a few months back, is By Heresies Distressed. Great titles, I trust they’ll be great reads. I especially want to know what’s under the Temple and if Weber’s going anywhere with the heterosexual female, male body thing…
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au, Australia’s biggest online bookstore. All their book prices are guaranteed better than Amazon and they do free delivery for orders over $50 (ie why not just buy all three books?).
“Khraazy Zhpyllyng of Phyrsonyl Naamyez”
Love this.
Only a slight exaggeration of the spelling in the book, sadly. But you get used to it.
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