Reviews and Comments

I am very late coming to this - my friends have been singing its praises since it was published, and it's only in the last year or so I decided to pick these up and work through them. It's worth, and I'll probably look for some of Abercrombie's other stuff.

I'll confess I'm not a huge fan of stories that revel in darkness or insist on being uncompromising in their portrayal of the frailty and corruption of human beings. I can respect it done well, but it's not something I love.

This is a case of it done well - in fact, I think particularly well. I don't read much fantasy these days, and this impressed me (though I have some criticisms, which I'll come to in a second). Since the modern authors started properly deconstructing the tropes of the classic high fantasy genre, they've become ever more "gritty" and merciless in the treatment of the characters, who are tapestries of strengths and weaknesses rather than caricatures or icons of good or evil.

I guess the most famous of such authors is George RR Martin, but with this trilogy I think Abercrombie beats him. Partly by keeping the story under control so that it hasn't expanded and ultimately beaten him, but also because he makes a very deliberate decision to make none of the point of view characters have a full grasp of the actual power plays that are driving events. The point is to keep the perspective "in the trenches", so to speak, so it is only after the fact that we come to understand what was really going on, as momentous, historic events overturn the established order and a new age begins. Even then, there is only one POV character who might possibly understand, and even he probably doesn't see the full story.

The result is that the story always feels bigger than the characters, but the characters are themselves generally interesting enough that following them for their own small motivations within this bigger narrative that they cannot see, is compelling and satisfying.

While this is for the main very well done, with admirable skill and discipline by Abercrombie, there are a few times when it drags, and when the main events come to a head, we get a good 150 or so pages (maybe more?) of epilogue. That epilogue drags quite badly as a result, and while there is a lot to like in it, it is here that a few actions are taken to be almost mean-spirited in the finishes. Anything positive in the outcome is poisoned and corrupt. Where someone might have really done well, accident or happenstance ensure that it is undone or soured.

What is more, there is a very deliberate "history repeats itself" pattern which is too complete and too pat for the textured, insistence on messy patternlessness that is present in the rest of the story.

Overall, a mostly rollicking good read (until it drags), with excellent (though grim and mostly unpleasant) characters, and certainly one of the better deconstructive takes on the fantasy genre.

I am a big fan of "A Memory Called Empire", which I think is one of the best examples of modern space opera - up there with Ann Leckie and Iain M. Banks.

This is a good sequel, and one that pretty directly leads on from the previous one (the time between them is just a couple of months). The book has many of the strengths of the original - a very personal story that is wound into and transformed by galaxy-spanning implications, because of the way it is bound up in the politics and philosophies of different cultures and inter-stellar civilisations.

The characters are mostly admirable or likeable, and the antagonists have integrity and are themselves respectable for the main. Crucially, this is a discussion of how differences of various kinds are negotiated between individuals and groups of different kinds, and with different forms of power differential. There are no clean lines or easy solutions available to anyone, and this is encountered in ways that are confusing and frustrating in diverse ways for all concerned. It might have been better (though much less interestingly entitled "The Space Between Us").

As an individual book I didn't find this as compelling as the previous one. There are a few reasons for this, mostly to do with the nature of sequels. Whereas the previous book was a single point of view character, and a building of a world from scratch, here we have several new PoV characters, some of whom are new and some known. This of course means less time for development of each. While there is opportuntiy to explore them all more than a single perspective would allow, there's just something about them I found to be a little bit too similar (this is an odd complaint, because there are ways in which they are very different, but it does feel that each speaks in the author's rather than their own voices).

The world building is not as rich as the first too. There is some building out of the great Fleet of the Teixcalaan Empire, but not quite enough for it to really feel like more than a backdrop, as most of the PoV characters are not Fleet. The alien threat similarly are mostly an impetus rather than a main player (much as the rebel One Lightning was in the first).

A romance plays a major role in the plot, and I am rarely invested in romantic plots. Since finishing the book earlier today though, I've come to appreciate just how important and layered that relationship is, and so there is no way that it could be removed or even cut down - the nuances in that relationship are vital to perceiving other aspects of intimacy, power, and difference in other aspects of the story. Nevertheless, my frustrations with one of the characters in particular mean that this just wasn't as compelling as it might be as a main plot of the book.

All in all, still a great space opera, and good story. I will absolutely be looking forward to more from Martine, and will be picking it up when it appears.