Fantasy can be a violent genre, replete with blood, guts, and gore. The gratuitous use of violence without more than a moment’s reflection has its place and its audience, of course, but I find my personal preference has shifted away from those types of stories. Little wonder I read throught Richard Swan’s debut in three sittings over two days.
Justice of Kings is not a work that portrays violence without contemplating the full weight of what perpetrating it does to a person. Nor does it treat the enactment of justice in a cavalier way. Richard Swan shows a deep engagement with the questions of law and jurisprudence, mapping the ideal form of both before creating scenarios which see justice placed well outside the bounds of the law of the land. At its core, this is a novel preoccupied with querying the relationship between justice, the law, and retribution.
Justice of Kings‘s narrative is that of the moral and ethical decline of its main character, Sir Konrad Vonvalt, one of the [Sovan] Emperor’s Justices. Like many of my favourite fantasy series, this one has more than a hint of tragedy to it; indeed, Vonvalt’s tragic flaw brings about one error of judgment after the next. By the time he recognises the path he’s on, these errors have multiplied, turning into a landslide whose effects spread out far beyond what at first glance seems like a fairly limited scope. This is owed to a kind of naivety within Vonvalt, who, I quote, “had embraced the ways of the Sovans with the zeal of the convert, and though he was no fool, I knew that as a consequence of his adolescence – for the man had only been fifteen years old when he had gone to war – the very kernel of his worldview was softer and more vulnerable than any would believe.”
The world Vonvalt and his retainers inhabit is covered in muck and soggy with blood. The narrative is told from the first-person point of view of one of his two retainers, Helena Sedanka. The somewhat rebellious protege of Vonvalt, Helena is an unreliable narrator through and through. The narrative is told through the voice of an older, wiser Helena who often provides value judgments and commentary on her own actions, as well as a great deal of foreboding as to the fate of Vonvalt, the other retainer Bresinger, even the Empire of the Wolf at large. This is a widely succesful storytelling strategy, and though I cannot speak to whether Swan will deliver on every promise contained within these pages by the end of the trilogy, I love his handling of it over these four-hundred pages.
As for Helena, she is a spitfire and written well; the hot temper of her youth is tampered by the more experienced voice which provides both context and reflection of those choices I might have otherwise found off-putting. To see her struggle to discover her identity and eventually set a concrete path before herself is a joy. Helena grows a great deal throughout the narrative and more and more takes up the role of foil to Vonvalt. Where his moral certainty begins to diminish, hers calcifies, creating fresh new possibilities for conflict by novel’s end.
There is much beyond the characters to commend. The worldbuilding of the Empire borrows from Imperial Rome and the fanaticism of the Crusades; the notion of civilising influence over many barbarious peoples is touched on, in a way that suggests the very concept will be problematised further throughout the next two books. The magic of the world is violent, harsh, even eldritch. This is a low magic setting, which makes those rare occasions when Vonvalt uses his Voice (a sort of violent “Jedi Mind Trick” that Justices may use to force someone to tell the truth despite themselves) alarming to all who witness it. Other displays of this world’s magic are rarer, still, and more disturbing. The use of necromancy is downright disquieting for the characters, and I can see why.
As a detective novel, The Justice of Kings sets up an engaging series of mysteries that tie together to reveal the frailty of the social fabric that envelops our cast of characters. The idea of Empire, large and powerful and held together by its venerable institutions, becomes feeble when those institutions are cracking at their very foundations. It’s a sobering lesson for the characters, and not without its relevance outside the novel, too.
I return to the question of violence. Taking a human life, even the life of someone monstrous and intent on hurting Helena, is not an act she treats brazenly. She recognizes this:
Of course it was easy to assume that these two soldiers were soulless automatons, but for all they deserved death and hate, they experienced emotion as keenly as I did, and had probably been close friends. It made the second man reckless with anger…
I very much appreciate that this fantasy novel, unlike so many others, has a Table of Contents at the beginning. This might well be a pet peeve of mine, but I dislike that most fantasy novels skip on that – as someone who occasionally works with SFF novels in academia, navigation is made so much easier when publishers put these in. I also enjoyed the epigraphs that open each chapter–they tie thematically to each chapter, providing foreshadowing that kept me guessing about the ways in which one would connect with the other. Epigraphs can be a powerful worldbuilding tool, and Swan uses them well in that fashion.
You’ll enjoy this book if:
- You hate lawyers: the ones in this book do not have a great time; - You love lawyers: the ones in this book are really badass; - You are indifferent to lawyers: there are a bunch of other characters and they do things, too! Prob’ly. - Oh, and y’know, it’s a really bloody good fantasy novel examining the questions of what is right and what is wrong in a complex moral framework that might deepen your own understanding of justice.
I adored reading the interview at the back of my paperback edition of The Justice. Swan’s responses to several engaging questions are erudite and show a deep love and understanding of the fantasy genre. I look forward to digging into The Tyranny of Faith!...more
The sequel to 2021’s Shards of the Earth was among my most-awaited sci-fi titles of this year. When I read Shards I fell in love with its characters, a mishmash of memorable scoundrels who made for one of my favourite found families in sci-fi; I fell in love with its world, which recalled the same sense of awe I felt at fourteen-fifteen, when I was experiencing the video game Mass Effect for the first time; I fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s prose, an affliction that befalls me whenever I pick one of the man’s books. Little wonder that I take my leave of Eyes of the Void as eager as can be to see what the third book brings both the characters and the world.
We left Idris Telemmier, the Partheni angel Solace, and the rest of the crew of the Vulture God in an interesting spot; having managed to save Barlenhof, one of the capital worlds of humanity’s decentralized Hugh government, from being turned into one of the horrific crystalline sculptures that the enigmatic, near-unstoppable Architects leave behind. Eyes of the Void picks up half a year later, with tensions between Hugh and the Partheni steadily increasing; for his part, Idris is trying to make a difference in a Partheni project that means more to him than most anything else. The Architects have not been idle, either—several planets, both in Hugh space and across the borders of humanity’s far more advanced neighbours, the Essiel, have been approached by the moon-sized life-forms and transformed. It’s not long before a crisis forces the Vulture God’s crew, their Partheni allies, and whacky Hiver scientist Trine to plunge themselves into what might be the most dangerous spot in the galaxy.
It’s difficult to pin down any one character who stole the show for me—but I’ll try. Honour-bound yet cutthroat Scilla lawyer Kris Almier shows, better than she ever did in Shards that she is as deadly with the point of a blade as she is with legal arcana. Not that she doesn’t show off those truly impressive lawyer skills yet again; Kris reminds me of my best friend when she flexes those law muscles she spent five years in law school for. Idris and Solace are, as ever, the most precious babies and if you look at them wrong I will murder you; but there are a pair of Tothiat madwomen, an even crazier Essiel, and bloody Ollie in her Scorpion being genuinely delighted to perpetrate slaughters on a massive scale. You can’t help but love Ollie, can you?
Eyes of the Void answers a number of the questions baked into this universe of Tchaikovsky’s from the beginning of Shards, while dangling some truly massive carrots to those of us who can’t get enough out of it. The overarching mystery of the Architects, the nature of unspace, the Essiel’s bizarre techno-mysticism—I want to inhabit the universe and learn its every nook and cranny, pronto!
And let’s not forget that while the series might cast the Architects in the role of supreme threat—at least for now—Tchaikovksy has always done human villains who shine with a particularly evil glint. Many of our protagonists have a strongly defined moral code that the antagonists are all too happy to overstep – ethical issues are baked into so many of the secondary conflicts the Vulture God and everyone’s favourite Hugh spy face. The causes for mental anguish for a pair of our central characters by the close of this novel—delectable! I can hardly keep from slurping the pages! …which is totally a normal human thing that humans do with human books.
What I’m trying to say here is, if you haven’t put Eyes of the Void in your online basket at your favourite local book retailer—I don’t want to be your friend. Go away and come back with a copy of Tchaikovsky’s book, you weirdo. This is good science fiction, brilliant space opera fun, and written with the customary sharpness you’ll have come to expect by Tchaikovsky if you’ve picked anything of his before. I read The Doors of Eden some three years ago and I can’t stop yearning for more ever since. Get!
Oh, and of course, a quote to finish is all too necessary to make sure this review finishes on a strong point:
“There is a theory,” Trine said softly, “that when the Architects reshape a planet, all the sentient people on that planet are…taken into some special place. Some unspace repository of people. That the Architects are somehow preserving people from their excesses…It dates to an early period of the war. The start of the Polyaspora, when people wanted very much to believe that ninety per cent of everyone they knew weren’t dead. It isn’t a very good theory, in fact. Indeed, on the purely physical level, it’s manifestly unprovable. But I understand why people would want it to be true. Because it’s hard, when you’re not finished with someone. Like a book with the final chapters deleted. You want to believe there’s an intact copy out there, somehow.” (287)
Brilliant, isn’t it? Read this one, Reader.
Thanks for reading this, the third post in my #SummerofSequels ! I’ll be back soon with another post about Eyes of the Void, a sequel to last year’s TROPE CHECK, which you can find on my blog. ...more
Endings are damnably hard to nail—especially whIf you'd like to watch a video version of my review, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/mdM4S80F-7c
Endings are damnably hard to nail—especially when the kind we’re talking about is the culmination not just of a trilogy but of disparate elements woven throughout an entire fifteen-book oeuvre. I cannot judge too well on the latter, having read only half of Mark Lawrence’s novels; but gun pressed to my head, I’ll tell you right now, The Girl and the Moon is as fine a conclusion to a trilogy as any I’ve read.
Its greatest weakness is that I wish I could spend more time with all these characters; I wish I could witness them do more, grow even further, experience new trials and tribulations and be tortured by Lawrence in yet more unspeakable ways—and that’s what an excellent novel does, isn’t it? You wish you could keep readin+g well after the covers have closed, hoping beyond hope that the magic blossoms once more in some second, third, fifth trilogy featuring the same characters. But that’s another one of the markings of a great work: it leaves you wanting for more. Mark Lawrence is proficient at this—reading his Impossible Times trilogy proved as much, and having begun the Book of the Ancestor trilogy, I’m willing to bet that one will make me cry my eyes out and want more in one fell swoop.
Thank the gods I read Red Sister before The Girl and the Moon, too—just that first part of the Ancestor trilogy gave me so much more context about the world than I otherwise would have. The prior books in the Book of the Ice introduced Abeth’s vast icy surface. The unforgiving, frigid wasteland of a planet supports life as we would recognize it only across a fifty-mile-wide Corridor, kept open by the eponymous moon, an artificial device preciously close to falling out of the sky—an event that’ll hail the apocalypse for all the Corridor’s denizens. Yaz’s heart-wrenching, beautiful adventure sees its climactic finale here, as the struggle against Seus for the heart of the moon turns well and truly desperate. Yaz, Quina, Erris, Theus, Ice&Fire Boy, Mali and as-many-delightful-murder-y-Nuns-as-Mark-Lawrence-could-have-thrown-in-here-without-raising-everyone’s-eyebrows have their work cut out for them as enemies come rearing their ugly heads. Nowhere is safe: not the Convent of Sweet Mercy, not the Imperial Capital of Verity and its Academy and certainly not the path to the Ark of the Missing. The last holds the key to shoring up the Moon’s defences, and it’s Yaz and her party’s aim to frustrate Seus’s attempts to bring the artificial body down from the skies.
Characters are drawn together, torn apart by cruel fate, and faced with some remarkable tests of their skills and wits—seeing Yaz overcome so much, her final confrontations, the losses along the way and the suffering she had to endure…only an Ichta could do it all.
I was thrilled by the connective tissue between Moon and Red Sister; realizing that a major character in the former is one of the most memorable characters in the latter was a thrill, and another few cameos made me cheer out loud. I also drew some information from Yaz and her friends’ perspectives that is helping along with a smorgasbord of interesting ideas, which I will share with you—or won’t—some far-off day.
I finished The Girl and the Moon a few weeks ago but have been holding on writing this review because past experience with the final parts of a trilogy have taught me caution. Sometimes you get overexcited, end up singing the praises of a book without accounting for its weaknesses. “No,” I thought, “better to let it lie in the crevices of my mind, see if anything shifty crawls out—and not just my usual kind of shifty, that’s accounted for.”* Well, reader, I think back on The Girl and the Moon and can find no flaws in it, nothing that took away from my enjoyment of a journey finished alongside characters who are as real as any I’ve read about. More so, even. A stellar example of Mark Lawrence’s capacity to stick a landing, The Girl and the Moon cements the Book of the Ice as another must-read trilogy in the great and mighty Fantasy Canon™.
*I do a lot of internal monologing like that. My mind is not a happy place, at all....more
Originally published over at my blog, The Grimoire Reliquary.You can find a video version of this review on my YouTube channel here.
The blogosphere hOriginally published over at my blog, The Grimoire Reliquary.You can find a video version of this review on my YouTube channel here.
The blogosphere has been abuzz with talk of Travis Baldree’s debut, Legends & Lattes, and for good reason. Slice of life stories are character-driven to their core—no wonder, then, that Baldree’s novel is such a gripping read. The foremost of the ‘legends’ the title refers to is Viv, your typical high-level Orc adventurer, prone to bursts of violence with her big-ass sword, is tired of the lifestyle and has been for some time:
After twenty-two years of adventuring, Viv had reached her limit of blood and mud and bullshit. An orc’s life was strength and violence and a sudden, sharp end—but she’d be damned if she’d let hers finish that way. It was time for something new.
Viv’s voice is compelling from the first paragraph; her dream of building something that will last after a lifetime of dismantling monsters is relatable and her hard work is as rewarding as the friends she makes along the way. And what friends those are! Cal, short for “Calamity”: a hob construction worker of few words and plenty of “Hm”s; Tandri, a succubus sick of being judged by her demonic blood alone, bursting with overlooked talents; Thimble, an absolute genius ratman baker whose recipes will make you run to the closes bakery without a moment’s hesitation; Hemington, a snotty student who isn’t all bad; a bard whose future promises rockstar fandom; a bit of a cockney git with a tophat; a friendly old neighbour; and a surprisingly nice elderly lady running a community-oriented business. There’s also an elf…but we don’t talk about the elf.
The world is the standard backdrop you’d expect of a D&D campaign; adventurers, tech that slides between the medieval and the Victorian with plenty of description of gnomish coffee-making machinery to boot. None of it is the focus; the focus is the building of something, the coming together of individuals as they create a community centre. It’s spectacular fun, I promise you this, and satisfying beyond what it has any right to be. Like any good D&D-adjacent world, it covers the ground necessary to create a sense of verisimilitude.
I love how committed Baldree is to the vision of an adventurer turning a new leaf—it would’ve been easy for Viv to pick up her great-sword and solve any number of annoying issues that pop up throughout Legends’ 300 pages but that moment never materializes. Not that it wouldn’t have been satisfying on at least one account…but it would’ve made for a different book, a book less involved in the fundamentally communitarian project Baldree delivers, and weaker for it. No matter how hard the times, Viv’s pledge to stay true to herself and the new life she is building is the kind of resolve to aspire to. So does the steadfast support she is shown by her closest friends, new and old; the partnership that develops between her and Tandri is the kind of healthy, positive friendship that revolves around support and tasting tasty treats like in the following paragraph, describing their first bite of chocolate:
Viv and Tandri each snapped off a small piece. Viv sniffed hers. The earthy smell was slightly sweet—almost coffee-like. She put the fragment on her tongue, and when she closed her lips, it melted, spreading throughout her mouth. She tasted dark bitterness, but with subtler flavors of vanilla, citrus, and in the far back, a hint of something that reminded her of wine. It was bold, both creamy and harsh, but alluring. Honestly, Viv doubted you could eat very much of it. That bitterness would overwhelm you. But the old spice-seller was right. The kid was a genius, and she couldn’t wait to see what he had planned.
You should read Legends & Lattes if:
Cute slow-burn romances speaks to your soul; You’re looking for the comfiest comfort read ever; You’ve always thought the fantasy aesthetic could do with more of an aroma of freshly ground coffee beans and cinnamon buns; You’ve grown tired of blood and guts and despair and are looking for works that capture the sense of community in the most beautiful ways; You never saw orcs as warriors so much as baristas and café shop owners; And more, prob’ly! I leave you with one last quote; you could easily take to heart and apply it to your own life in times when stagnation seems inevitable: “Things don’t have to stay as what they started out as.” Ain’t that the truth?...more