Empress of Forever

Gave up. This is a mess of a stream of thought fantasy novel in a “futuristic” setting. Most narrative choices are completely unbelievable.

The author begins depicting a near future US society that is nothing more than today’s China. Its main character is a naive paranoid girl, a “genius” tech titan, whose main fear is to be grabbed by CIA and endure torture for helping citizens before FEMA arrives in the wake of a natural catastrophe. Her response to this is to try to control nuclear arsenals and the whole internet infrastructure and save the world as a tirant herself. We’ve already long lost Kansas at this point less than twenty pages in. But we do keep trying. Why? It just cost ten bucks and so many people is saying it’s the book of their lives.

It is a huge problem to write using a “genius” POV when the author himself is just a regular guy and not even a great writer. Also, this persistent POV is utterly boring, reading her, the character’s, inner voice rattle on and on about fear and pride and revenge and sex, and using tech jargon clearly misunderstood. Take a grip. Every time there’s a space battle (or anything worthy) the main character goes to I-whine-introspection, she remembers her past, her ex lovers, her constant anger against the world, while unspecified things are happening. A taste of cultural references: right in the middle of this utter mess she recalls Nick Cage character in “Con Air”. Do millenials, like she apparently is, even know what “Con Air” is?! Nicholas Cage in “Con Air”? Is this for real?!

If you are looking for sci-fi, not the Star Wars kind of “sci-fi” (by the way, Star Wars is way better, at least the one I read), skip this entirely and go for Banks’ Culture Excession, Use of Weapons or Hydrogen Sonata, The Gap sequence, Herbert’s Dune, PK Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, China Mieville or Peter Watts anything. Even the old Foundation is so much better. Even that Metabarons pastiche is better, and does come with pictures.

Two stars because the author manages to pack the story in a single book, instead of going for the obnoxious and greedy trend of writing ten inane books and half a dozen thousand pages to tell a story. But it is a boring ill conceived narrative. Although, if you enjoy reading about an idiotic girl thinking of sex while she runs for her life then, by all means, it’s the right book. Be dazzled. I’ll just return to J. Barzun.

Empress of Forever is a very odd book. While technically sci-fi, the setting is so far far far future that most of the technology is indistinguishable from magic when viewed from our current perspective. More accurately I would described it as a party-based fantasy adventure set in the far future. The work also borrows significantly from the classic Chinese work Journey to the West, especially regarding the character archetypes, and overall the work is almost parable-like. However one classifies Empress of Forever, it is definitely worth a read.

The plot is fairly predictable overall but includes many interesting twists and turns that keep any readers engaged. The middle of the book does become a little tedious but the ending wraps up the plot nicely and there are numerous emotional events scattered throughout. And I should note that Empress of Forever is a standalone book, which has become quite rare in the fantasy/sci fi genre.

The characters begin as archetypes (with significant influence from Journey to the West) but quickly become more fully realized as the plot moves along. While some of the characters are more interesting then others, they are overall a compelling group. While the main character provides most of the POV there are occasional POVs from her companions to provide more insight.

As discussed above, the setting is possibly the most unique part of the book. The main characters are transported through a myriad of fascinating locales on their quest. Unfortunately the galaxy described is long past its prime and even more wonderous sights are only hinted at. The author does quite an impressive job of describing locations from the end of time and the ending sequence especially is not quite like any sci fi setting I’ve read.

It is worth mentioning that this book does feature a female protagonist who becomes romantically involved with other female characters. I assume that is the “political” content that the negative reviews seem enraged over. Viewed as part of the larger work, the main character’s sexual proclivities are much not the focus of the novel and as a reader who simply wanted a good story I did not find it distracting it all.

Overall, I would highly recommend this novel. While certainly not perfect, it provides a very unique and worthwhile experience.

I quit reading half way through and wrote off my $9.99 expenditure as a waste of money. I started reading with some interest but soon the reading became tedious as repetitious descriptions of phantasmagorical events with no continuity or underlying mechanism for their possibility repeated themselves. The main characters existence was never tied back to her meat reality in any significant way to somehow link this fantasy to the cyber-space we experience as the internet and larger “Cloud”.

If you’re big into social justice and progressive politics, you might like it. But if irrelevant political asides every third paragraph grate on you, you won’t. DNF 2%

I sometimes grumble that 5 stars doesn’t give you room for nuance — some books are really 3.5, not 4 or not 3.

This one is a 10. Okay, 5 stars, but you get the idea.

Max Gladstone has brought all the things I loved from the Craft Sequence: his inventive plotting, his philosophy, his cheeky dialog, his flawed characters and added a very deep dive into hard-SF concepts, and good, old-fashion space opera. Wow.

Wow, I say. This book proves — as if you had any doubt — that this is a writer of Big Ideas and Cool Details and for all its size, I wanted more.

Well done, sir. Well done.