Empire of Silence

A reader recently emailed me, alerting me to a bad sci-fi epic. I thought it would make good blog fodder. I did not know what I was getting myself into.

Instead of beginning with a description of Empire of Silence’s plot, I’m going to describe its setting. Here are the salient features:

·      Sometime thousands and thousands of years in the future, there’s a big galaxy-spanning human empire

·      This empire is arranged along feudal lines, with Great Houses scheming amongst each other within their spheres of influence while still pledging fealty to the almighty Emperor

·      Significant power is also held in the hands of private mercantile corporations, who exist partially outside the feudal hierarchy of the Empire, and who the noble houses have to play nice with for practical reasons

·      Sometime in the distant past there was a devastating war involving AI, and as such certain types of advanced technology are strictly prohibited by the empire’s dominant religious organisation

·      As a consequence of this, the leaders of the noble houses employ scholars with photographic memories, specially trained to operate as something akin to human computers

·      The noble houses all have stashes of nuclear weapons, which they refer to as “atomics”

·      People use personal belt-worn shields that block high-projectile weapons, with the result that swords and other melee weapons are commonly used for fighting instead of guns and lasers

·      The main character is the son of nobility, first in line to succeed his father, whose family is the primary extractor and exporter of a resource vital to interstellar travel

Now, am I describing the setting of Empire of Silence, or of Dune? That was a trick question, it’s both.

Yes, let’s be fair, there are differences. The specific nature of the Butlerian Jihad Chantry’s technological proscription is different, both in terms of ideology and implementation. The shields aren’t entirely the same as the ones in Dune, in that they can be penetrated by any non-projectile object and not just slow-moving ones. The main character is the son of a planetary lord who is powerful within his home system but of relatively little consequence on the wider Imperial stage, as opposed to being the scion of one of the most important families in the galaxy, and the resource his house mines is uranium for fusion engines instead of Spice (and also isn’t important to the story at all, which frankly makes it weird that this similarity is even in the book to begin with). The guys who are kind of like Mentats aren’t entirely the same as Mentats.

But still. If I’m only a few chapters into your book and I’m thinking “hang on, this seems familiar”, then that’s a problem.

But wait, there’s also the plot! Long-time readers of my ramblings may recognise the following:

Our protagonist is a guy who at some point did a bunch of impressive stuff that earned him multiple badass nicknames, but the one he’s most known for is the one the trilogy is named after. He’s famous all over the galaxy, some people think he’s a hero but others see him as a villain and a murderer. In the book’s framing narrative he’s recounting his life story as a wisened old man, all world-weary and filled with regrets, and he regularly interjects to drop hints about the exciting stuff that’s going to happen really soon, any second now, if you just keep turning the page. That story starts with the protagonist losing everything he has and living as a beggar and a thief on the streets of a large city, after which he manages to gradually finagle his way into the kind of life he had previously dreamed of, albeit in a roundabout manner and after overcoming many obstacles.

Okay, okay. I’m cheating a bit more here than I did when talking about the book’s setting. The differences between Empire of Silence and the first book in the Kingkiller trilogy are much greater than the differences between Empire of Silence and Dune, to the extent that it would take me far too long to list them all…but at the same time, I thought this Goodreads review was pretty spot-on when it describes the main character as “Kvothe Atreides.”

The really exciting part for me is that Empire of Silence doesn’t just borrow the outline of Kvothe’s story; it also borrows most of its flaws. Reading this was almost nostalgic in that regard.

I want to walk a fine line here, because as I’ve said a few times on this blog, I don’t look back with a great deal of pride on my old Kingkiller posts. They were written in a very negative Cinema Sins-esque style that was rampant on the internet at the time, and which I feel has poisoned online media discourse in a really negative way. I’m not going to say I actively contributed to that—my old blog did not have a large readership—but at the very least I was riding in the wake of bigger content creators who have left permanent scars on the online landscape. Also, in those posts I frequently veered from making fun of Patrick Rothfuss’s writing into making fun of Patrick Rothfuss himself, which is not something I feel good about today, especially in light of more recent rumours about his mental health struggles.

…All that said, I don’t actually disagree with any of the criticisms I made about the books themselves, which is part of the reason why I’ve never taken the posts down, even if I don’t link to them these days. I still think they’re bad, I still think they didn’t deserve to be published in their current form or to attain anywhere near the level of financial or critical success they did, and in Empire of Silence I feel like my criticism has somewhat been vindicated, in that here is a book that clearly believes all of the mistakes of the Kingkiller series were features and not bugs.

(Also, in my defence, I’ll point out that as the years have dragged on with no sign of the third book on the horizon, Patrick Rothfuss’s own fans have turned on him far more viciously than I ever did; r/isbook3outyet makes my old blog posts look positively cuddly by comparison).

With all that out of the way, what is Empire of Silence—book one of THE SUN EATER series—about?

Like I said, it’s however many millenia in the future and Earth has long ago been destroyed by the Mericanii (ha), who did a big war after trying to take over the planet with AI. Humanity as a whole, however, is thriving, having spread all across the galaxy. The largest and most powerful human polity is the great Sollan Empire, which claims to carry on the legacy of Earth in the person of the Emperor and the Nobiles—genetically-engineered eugenics supermen—who serve under him in a feudal hierarchy. For the last three hundred years the Empire has been locked in a deadly war with sentient aliens called the Cielcin, but at the beginning of the story our protagonist is far from the frontlines of that conflict.

Said protagonist is Hadrian Marlowe, son of one of the planetary governors of Delos and heir-apparent to his father’s lands and uranium mining business. At least, he’s always assumed he was going to be heir since he’s the firstborn son; as our narrative begins, it gradually dawns on him that his father intends to put his younger brother on the throne, reasoning (not incorrectly) that Hadrian is too much of a whiny little bitch to hold office in the ruthless world of the Empire. Hadrian is instead to be shipped off to become a priest of the Chantry, where he’ll learn how to torture people who play Counter Strike on a PC with anything faster than an RTX 3070 in it.

Hadrian is all like “Nooooo father, I wish to become a Mentat Scholiast and explore the galaxy!” but the elder Marlow is having none of it because Hadrian is too much of a fuck-up to be trusted with any real responsibility, so Hadrian hatches a plot with his teacher and mother to slip away and go to Mentat school instead. It doesn’t work and he ends up penniless on another planet, unable to get a job without alerting his father’s spy network to his whereabouts. Then he becomes a space-gladiator and a bunch of other shit happens, and I assume in one of the later books he blows up a sun while fighting the Cielcin because that’s what the framing narrative keeps hinting at. Presumably this is after he stops being such a whiny little pissant.

My characterisation of Hadrian, I should mention, may not be entirely in line with the book’s intentions, but I’ll talk about that more later.

Despite the (deserved) jokes I’ve made at its expense, I actually quite like Empire of Silence’s setting. Yes, the Sollan Empire uses ancient Roman terminology and cultural concepts for no reason, as all fictional space empires are required to do, but it doesn’t lay it on quite as thick as most examples of this trope, so I’m willing to overlook it.

The thing it really has going for it is an impressively believable sense of scale. A lot of space opera settings claim to be huge galaxy-spanning affairs, but in practice they feel no bigger than Middle Earth or Westeros, the convenience of faster than light travel shrinking them to mundane size. Here, the Empire—not to mention the other human space civilizations that exist alongside it—feels properly vast. Travel time between distant star systems is measured in decades, requiring starfarers to undergo cryogenic sleep. When Hadrian wakes up on the unfamiliar planet that the rest of the book takes place in, he’s never even hard of it and knows nothing about it, despite being as highly educated as it’s possible for someone of his age to be. The war with the Ceilcin has been raging for three hundred years, but for the vast majority of the human population it may as well be a work of fiction, such are the enormous distances separating them from the active combat zones. Star systems can contact each other via quantum entanglement in a way that seems more or less instantaneous, but even if you piss off another Lord via space telegraph enough for them to want to come and fuck with you, it’s going to be years and years before they can actually do anything about it.

Other aspects of the worldbuilding build on this idea. For example, it’s heavily implied that the authority of the Emperor is actually rather tenuous, and the real power keeping the Empire together is the Chantry and their terrifying inquisitors—because the emperor can’t send troops to put down a rebellion with anything approaching speed, whereas every planet in the empire has a heavily-armed Chantry presence authorised to nuke the lord’s palace from orbit at the first sign of disobedience. It’s a small thing, but it felt more believable than a lot of epic-scale sci-fi, which I often find don’t make their vast galaxy-spanning polities seem plausible.

I also like the fact that not only are there multiple human civilizations in the setting with very distinct cultures, but that even the Empire isn’t a monoculture. The planet Hadrian ends up on after his escape attempt fails is very different from the one he was raised on, and he feels distinctly like a stranger in a strange land despite, in galactic terms, not even being that far from home.

It’s a good thing the setting is interesting, because the plot and protagonist don’t pull their weight.

In criticising the story, I’m very tempted to just point to my old critiques of the Kvothe books, because it’s essentially the same problem: this is a novel of wheel-spinning, a glacial narrative that exists purely to set up later, more exciting events. Hadrian does not blow up a sun in this book, doesn’t do any of the mighty deeds that apparently shaped his legend, doesn’t get anywhere close to doing any of them. In fact I’d say that as of the end of the novel, he feels further away from attaining his legendary status than Kvothe did at the end of his first book, and that’s really saying something since The Name of The Wind ended with the exciting story advancement of Kvothe gaining access to a library.

Why is there so much focus on sword fighting and Hadrian being an awesome sword fighter? Because at the end of the book he gets a fancy lightsaber that he will, presumably, do something interesting with in the next book. Why is the whole gladiator sub-plot here? Because at the end of the book he brings his gladiator buddies with him into space where they will, presumably, do something interesting in the next book. Why all the time spent on ancient alien ruins and the weird effect they have on Hadrian? Because, presumably, all of that shit will go somewhere eventually.

Nothing is resolved, nothing goes anywhere. Empire of Silence is a waiting room in novel form, a constantly-updating ticker assuring the reader that if they just hold on a little longer, just a few more chapters, then something really cool and interesting is going to happen. Once you shell out more money for the next volume, of course.

All of this would be frustrating by itself, but it becomes nigh-insufferable when combined with future-Hadrian’s constant interjections to hype up how important the non-events he’s narrating are. The book has him declare some variation of “If you wish to know the genesis of my legend then this, here, is the moment when I was truly born” so many times that it becomes farcical. But maybe it will all make sense in the next book, or the one after that, when we finally learn why any of this shit was important!

I used the term “non-events” just now, and I need to clarify that. Events do occur in this book, there is a plot (although there are also plenty of chapters wherein nothing of particular importance happens). It’s just that you can tell none of them are actually important to the story of this book; they’re only important for setting up things that might happen in later books.

This becomes really clear if you try to chart Hadrian’s character arc, where it becomes apparent that most of the book’s events aren’t relevant to it at all. Hadrian explicitly states that the action he takes to trigger the story’s climax (or as close to a climax as the story has) feels like a return to the state he used to be in before his years of poverty on Emesh and his time in the colosseum. In other words, if he had gotten the chance to do it in chapter two he would have, and thus none of the events we’ve read about in the chapters since have mattered. Hadrian the spoiled princeling would have taken the exact same course of action as Hadrian the poverty-scarred, battle-hardened political prisoner, so why did he need to go through all of those experiences in the first place? Presumably because they’ll become relevant in a future book.

Which brings us to Hadrian himself, as a character. As I subtly alluded to earlier, I find him very annoying. The issues he’s dealing with are eminently relatable and sympathetic, if a bit cliched, but the way he responds to them is so juvenile and whiny that I frequently found myself wishing his asshole dad would just shoot him and be done with it. I get that his acting this way is supposed to stem from his lordly upbringing, which informs a lot of his actions throughout the story, but the book lays it on way too thickly and repetitively, to the point where in any given scenario where Hadrian is trying to get out from under someone’s influence or control—and that’s most of the scenarios he finds himself in—I usually sided with the antagonistic party.

I think I’d find Hadrian’s whinge-fests more tolerable if there weren’t so many of them. The book repeats essentially the same confrontations, with the same dialogue beats, over and over again, just like it repeats everything over and over again. No point can be made with a single scene; if Hadrian has beef with someone or someone has beef with Hadrian, we’ll get multiple different confrontations all communicating that fact (I lost count of how many near-identical confrontations with his father Hadrian has in the early chapters).

And these repetitive scenes aren’t quick: every dialogue exchange takes five times longer than it needs to, in large part because the author is one of those people who feels the need to insert description or character action between every line of dialogue, only here it’s not just “he shook his head and sighed while rolling his eyes and shrugging”, it’s entire paragraphs of (often completely superfluous) description. It drags out the already-slow pacing to the point that in the second half I ended up skimming most of the inter-dialogue description. Doing so did not hamper my understanding of the plot in any way.

By the way, after writing all of this I looked up the second book and discovered that the entire Sun Eater sequence is planned to be seven books long, a fact that made me stare at my screen, slack-jawed, in amazement. The pacing of Empire of Silence was bad enough when I thought it was the first part of a trilogy.