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The Risen Empire

The Risen Empire is actually the first half of a larger novel entitled "Succession", the second half being The Killing of Worlds. (I think the publisher decided to break the novel up into two books, due to the vagaries of price points in the book marketplace.)

In the far future, humanity has established several interstellar empires. The Risen Empire was established centuries ago when the Risen Emperor discovered how to bring the dead back to life via an implant. The Emperor and his sister were the first of the Risen, and nobles and distinguished military can become eligible to be raised after their death. The Risen have great wealth and power, but mostly live outside mainstream society. The Emperor nominally shares power with the Senate, which is composed of the living.

The Rix, on the other hand, are not really a power so much as a group of humans who believe that humanity's purpose is to create artificial intelligences and nurture and serve them. The Rix and the Risen are abominations to each other. This novel begins when the Rix invade the Empire planet Legis XV, take the Emperor's sister hostage, and raise an AI (Alexander) in its infosphere.

Captain Laurent Zai commands the one Empire ship at Legis when the Rix strike, and oversees the rescue efforts. In flashback we learn that Zai is secretly the lover of Senator Nara Oxham, who opposes the Risen because their existence has slowed the progress of the Empire and made it vulnerable to groups like the Rix. When the rescue effort goes badly wrong, Zai's life is forfeit, and he and Oxham both end up in unique positions with respect to the Empire and the Rix as the two forces prepare for all-out war.

As my summary indicates, The Risen Empire is full of tantalizing ideas: The Risen and their effect on the Empire's structures; the Rix (whose augmented soldiers I haven't even touched on); the AI Alexander; not to mention different sorts of gravity, Oxham's peculiar talents and affliction, military microships, and so on. There's a lot here to crunch on.

So why did the book have such a slow feel to it? The book opens with a 7-page glide into the rescue effort at Legis, which certainly counts as being in media res, yet at the same time buffers the reader from getting to the real meat of the story.

I think the problem lies in the large cast of characters: Zai, Zai's first officer Katherie Hobbes, Oxham, the Emperor, several soldiers on Zai's ship, Oxham's chief aide, Oxham's semi-sentient house, a Rix soldier, the willing captive of the Rix soldier, Alexander, etc. While many of these characters are interesting on their own merits, it detracts from the central story, which is based around Zai and Oxham and their relationship to each other and to the Empire. Unfortunately I think the book is not so much epic in scope as it is a little too distracted by its various plot threads. And, since this is only the first half of the overall story, there's a lot of activity which ends up mainly being set-up for the payoff in the second volume.

And yet, there is a lot to like here. Oxham's views on the necessity of death in a society are intriguing and well-articulated, and I hope they come to a head in the second half. Zai is caught between the sacrifice required by his social traditions for his failure, and his love for Oxham which makes him want to keep living. (This leads to a particular entertaining tension aboard his ship.) The Rix soldier is a weird but interesting character, being the one heavily-augmented human in the story (hers is unfortunately a good example of a solid piece of storytelling that probably doesn't belong in the middle of Zai and Oxham's larger story).

So grade this one "incomplete" until I read the conclusion. If it gathers the momentum to become a lively and thought-provoking clash of ideas, ideals and characters, then it could end up transcending its flaws. But there are a lot of ways the story and themes can go. Hopefully Westerfield pulled it off.

The Risen Empire

More than half a year later, I finally came back to finish Westerfield's long-novel-in-two-volumes.

The Killing of Worlds opens with the battle between Captain Laurent Zai's ship, the Lynx, and a Rix ship invading the space of Legis XV to communicate the Alexander, the AI the Rix have created there. The Lynx's mandate is to prevent this from happening, and it's an apparent suicide mission as the Rix ship is much larger. But Zai turns out to be a crafty commander, despite knowing that he has an implicit death sentence hanging over him from the Risen Emperor for failing to save the Emperor's sister from the Rix.

Meanwhile, on Home, Zai's lover Senator Nara Oxham is slowly positioning herself as the prime Senatorial adversary to the Emperor, since she knows that if Zai fails then the Emperor has ordered that Legis XV be bombed to destroy its infostructure and hence Alexander.

What neither Zai nor Oxham know - yet - is that events at Legis are partly a sham, and that the Risen Empire with its millions of resurrected dead is built around an essential lie which is bound to come out.

There are many good things about The Killing of Worlds: The Lynx's battle with the Rix ship is an interesting characterization of high-speed combat in space, especially between two mismatched foes. (One could argue that Charles Stross' depiction of space combat in a posthuman universe in Singularity Sky is a deconstruction of the fight here.) Although I usually have trouble with stories which devote so much of their text to the nuts and bolts of combat, Westerfield mostly gets away with it here through simply being inventive and clever, as well as continuously reinforcing in the reader's mind what the stakes are that the characters are playing for.

Even after the combat, the exploration of Alexander and the Rix's evolving outlook towards artificial intelligences is engaging, as is the intermittent examination of Zai and Oxham's brief romance.

My biggest disappointment with the novel as a whole - both books - is that it doesn't really delve into the social nature of the Risen Empire. Rather, the conditioning of those who are "gray" (as Zai is) use the technology which creates the risen as a motivation rather than as something which really substantively permeates the culture. Granted, being risen is mainly reserved for the wealthy or a few special worthies and they mostly keep to themselves, but this mostly feels like a contrivance designed to keep them from having much of an impact on society, whereas I think this idea deserved to be explored more broadly. However, only one character - other than the Emperor (who's not exactly typical) - is one of the risen, and she just fades away towards the end of the novel, even though she and her relationship with a Rix warrior are part of one of the most interesting threads of the story.

And even taking it on its own terms, that's symptomatic of what keeps the novel from fully working: Many elements of the story - especially the character-driven elements - fade into the background once the Emperor's secret is out. The story is a story of how two key characters change the course of history, but the visceral nature of what came before is largely glossed over, and the story fades out before we really see how things are going to change. It's a procedural story, dealing more with the "how" than with the "what", and I was disappointed that the larger ideas were left to the imagination rather than explored.

These two books are a large investment of time, and while there's some good stuff here, I think the whole ends up being less than the sum of its parts. If anything, Westerfield I think ended up being not ambitious enough with his story. A pity.