784 pages
English language
Published Dec. 31, 2017 by Orion Publishing Group, Limited.
It was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives--even the Emperor himself--against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
This was only okay for me. Tended to drag for long stretches.
I don't hate-read things. If something is annoying me, or boring me (or both, as this book did), I give up. Yet reading this became a weird compulsion I had to pull myself from, because I really, really wanted it to become good. It has promise! The worldbuilding is excellent. But it's just not enough.
I could go on and on and on about every little thing that annoys me in this book (and I partially have in my notes on the kindle edition of this mess), but I'll suffice to say this: What is the fucking point of all this pseudo philosophy if you have nothing to say beyond your own tired genre conventions? I'd take sparse, Sandersonian prose any day over a book full of long-winded purple prose and nothing meaningful to say beyond 'what if my protagonist was actually.... a bad guy?'
But not, you know, …
I don't hate-read things. If something is annoying me, or boring me (or both, as this book did), I give up. Yet reading this became a weird compulsion I had to pull myself from, because I really, really wanted it to become good. It has promise! The worldbuilding is excellent. But it's just not enough.
I could go on and on and on about every little thing that annoys me in this book (and I partially have in my notes on the kindle edition of this mess), but I'll suffice to say this: What is the fucking point of all this pseudo philosophy if you have nothing to say beyond your own tired genre conventions? I'd take sparse, Sandersonian prose any day over a book full of long-winded purple prose and nothing meaningful to say beyond 'what if my protagonist was actually.... a bad guy?'
But not, you know, bad in a way that actually inconveniences him. Or is condemned by the narrative. (Yes, I know he spends several years 'on the streets' living as a poor beggar and a thief, something I would have richly enjoyed if the novel didn't go out of its way to make it clear that Hadrian finds this infinitely preferable to living in the lap of luxury because only in poverty is he, get this, actually free.)
Ultimately, your worldbuilding can be immaculate, but your book will still lack texture if the characters inhabiting it are all dull as dishwater. I could tell immediately who the 'good' and 'bad' guys were. Putting aside the fact that a novel with 'grey' morality should not make characters so obviously, borderline-pantomime good and evil, they also shouldn't be obvious. If a character is nice to Hadrian? They're good. If they aren't? They're bad.
The prose tips its hat again and again to the idea that the main character is melodramatic, and he is, and that's fine. What it doesn't seem to be aware of is that the book is itself a melodrama. The action is meaningless, there is no almost tension, and all the characters are bland cyphers set on a stage to accomplish nothing, say nothing, and achieve nothing. What does this book accomplish, beyond vague science fiction homages, worldbuilding exercises, and (most importantly!) making sure the audience knows the main character is always right?
In retrospect, I think I kept reading this long because I desperately wanted to see a comeuppance; I wanted the promise of the first page, that the hero would become the villain, to be fulfilled. But at over 60% and 400+ pages in, it becomes painfully clear that this book is utterly uninterested in achieving the same moral complexity as its most obvious of influence. Paul Atreides is the dark messiah, a man who enables the murder of billions and weakens the cause of freedom on untold planets. Hadrian Marlowe is an idealistic teenager in a totalitarian universe who never, ever has to learn anything or be wrong. I can't care about what he does, did, or will do, because ultimately he is completely static
