Books I Didn't Finish: Empire In Black And Gold

Recently I have, for some reason, been thinking that it would be fun to get into a huge multi-volume fantasy series. I’m not entirely sure why; for most of my life I’ve had this idea that I should enjoy these kinds of books, even though I never actually have.

Anyway, I eschewed your Games Of Thrones and your Wheels Of Times and instead settled on Empire In Black And Gold, the first volume of incredibly prolific SF/F author Adrian Tchaikovscky’s 10-book(!) Shadows Of The Apt series. I made it more than halfway before giving up. Let’s see what went wrong.

Taking place in a world where humanity has sub-divided into races based on physical and magical insect traits, the book mostly concerns the Lowlands, a region of city-states that’s mostly been in a state of peace ever since the Beetle-kinden, Ant-kinden and Fly-kinden rebelled against the entrenched power of the Moths and Mantises, launching an industrial revolution in the process. But beyond the mountainous borders, the great Wasp empire is systematically gaining ground, using the modern weapons and vehicles churned out by Lowlands factories.

The vast majority of the Lowlander politicians see the Wasps as lucrative business clients and nothing more, but a very few realize that the cities of the Lowlands are going to be next in line for conquest. Stenwold, a master artificer of the great Collegium, has been recruiting agents to spy on the empire’s activities while desperately trying to warn his peers of the looming threat. When word comes that the invasion is imminent, Stenwold sends four young recruits--one of them his own niece--on what’s supposed to be a simple fact-finding mission to the industrial city of Helleron. Needless to say, things quickly go sideways and our heroes end up right in the middle of the Wasp nexus of power.

What we’ve got here is fairly typical of where the fantasy genre has been going for the last decade and change: post-medieval settings, big political clashes of empires and nations, a coating of grimdarkery involving slavery, rape, torture, slaves getting raped and tortured...you know. Modern teeth-clenched, veins-popping, frothing-at-the-mouth, this-ain’t-your-grandpa-Tolkien’s-fantasy fantasy. 

THE AGE OF KINGS IS DEAD AND I HAVE KILLED IT RAWR GRR THE AGE OF MADNESS BLURGEURGLE 

But also it kind of feels like a YA novel at the same time, because everything is YA now. So you’ve got your mousy teenage protagonist who gets shunned by the popular kids at Hogwarts the Collegium and who’s unable to utilize the magic Ancestor Art that comes so naturally to everyone else and whose parentage seems to have some level of ambiguity surrounding it, gosh do you think she might be special in some way? The book features slaves getting crucified with spears and the protagonist almost being raped, but it won’t use the word “sex” to refer to characters having sex, much less describe the act in any detail. 

About that Ancestor Art: this is one of those utterly maddening settings where no one believes in magic, even though about half of the insect kinden Arts are clearly supernatural (the Wasps can shoot fireballs out of their hands) and there are still Moth wizards knocking around who can just straight-up do magic. They’re even in the Collegium. One of them heals a poisoned cut on Stenwold’s arm by shaking bones over it and mumbling, and Che is like “huh that was weird, well still gonna keep not believing in magic while I try to manifest spectral wings from my back.”

This feels like one of those times where the author changed their mind about the direction of the story or the setting mid-first draft, then instead of going back and rewriting the material that already existed they just desperately tried to patch over the contradiction: “Oh shit that doesn’t make sense, hang on so there’s the Ancestor Art which everyone knows about and accepts, but that isn’t magic, the Lowlanders don’t believe in magic, except there’s a huge Dragonfly kingdom directly to their north and they know magic exists, so uh, the Lowlanders are really insular and they don’t really pay attention to anyone in the rest of the world, so--”

It just doesn’t hang together. The story strains itself to the breaking point to justify how the Lowlanders are both an advanced industrial and scientific culture with technology centuries ahead of everyone else, and also a parochial backwater that’s almost totally ignorant of anything happening in the outside world. Since this mindset is the primary driving force of the entire plot, that’s a pretty big issue.

Oh, but there is one other way the story tries to justify all of this, which is racism. 

Insect racism.

You see, the “Apt” races of the Beetle, Ant and Fly-kinden were able to rebel against the old “Inapt” races because they understand how machines and contraptions and technology work, which the Moths and Mantises and such do not. By which I don’t mean that there’s entrenched cultural and societal factors leading to a lower average aptitude in those areas among the other races, I mean they’re literally incapable of doing those things. Che’s Spider-kinden adopted sister, an accomplished duellist who’s deadly with a blade, is unable to aim a crossbow because her mind can’t comprehend the fact that the crossbow’s mechanism makes the bolt go fwoosh when you press the trigger. At one point she tries to pick a lock, but she can’t because she’s incapable of understanding how locks work.

This is obviously a wee bit uncomfortable--having human sub-species with in-built strengths and weaknesses, particularly when it comes to intelligence, is sailing into iffy territory even in a fantasy setting--but mostly it’s just extraordinarily silly in its execution. Not being able to figure out how to pick a lock the first time you try is fair enough--I wouldn’t be able to do that either--but why would you need to understand how a crossbow works to be able to use one? People who don’t understand how guns work can still be taught to fire them accurately.

Speaking of the characters, they certainly are characters, in a book. We’ve got a meek engineer girl, a meek engineer boy, another meek boy but this one’s a wizard and not an engineer, a glamorous duellist, another glamorous duellist who’s also a prince, a Gruff Man, and a ruthless imperial agent who sometimes gets a bit wobbly over the time he had to kill children so you know he’s actually Deep. 

For all that I’ve been complaining about the world-building and characters, the real reason I bailed on Empire In Black And Gold is that I just didn’t find it all that interesting. By the halfway point all of the principle conflicts and interpersonal dramas and plotlines had been established, and none of it grabbed me hard enough to keep me from drifting off to another book.

I’ll give Adrian Tchaikovsky credit for moving the story along a lot faster than most other fantasy authors, but for now my search for a big fantasy series to immerse myself in goes on.