Club Review: Because the immortal Emperor can grant a form of eternal life-after-death, creating an elite known as the Risen, he has ruled the eighty worlds unchallenged for sixteen hundred years. He and his sister, the Child Empress-forever a little girl-are worshipped as living gods. No one can touch them.... ...no one but the Rix, machine-augmented humans who worship very different gods: AI compound minds encompassing entire planets. The Rix are cool, relentless fanatics, and their only goal is to propagate such AIs throughout the galaxy. They seek to end, by any means necessary, the Emperor's prolonged rule and supplant it with a cybernetic dynasty of their own. They begin by assaulting the Imperial Palace on Legis XV-and taking hostage the Child Empress. Tasked with her rescue, brilliant tactician Captain Laurent Zai of the Imperial Frigate Lynx is well aware that failure constitutes an Error of Blood. Yet when the mission goes badly wrong, he declines to commit ritual suicide, and instead takes on a suicide mission: stopping the next thrust of the Rix invasion with just his own ship. While combat rages among the stars, the newborn Rix compound mind expands through the global net on Legis XV and works to break the Imperial blockade. And light-years away, Captain Zai's lover, Senator Nara Oxham, suspects that the mind has discovered the Emperor's hidden weakness: a dangerous secret for which he is willing to countenance the killing of worlds.... Includes The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. Jacket art by Stephan Martiniere.
Book Description
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Space Opera I can LOVE.,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Succession (2 in 1) The Risen Empire & The Killing of Worlds (Hardcover)
This is the sort of space opera I can love. Forget Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy, with its sloppy (sometimes indulgent) writing and wooden characters; forget Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, with their climaxes that lead to nothing but futility; forget even Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga -- much though I love the characters and the wit, it doesn't have the breadth of imagination or the sheer scope that Westerfeld captures here.
Succession stars with a bang, throwing the reader into the action head-first in the perspective of a pilot on a desperate reconnoissance mission a couple hours after the Child Empress has been taken hostage. It shifts perspective every few pages, always clearly marked in the book and with enough clues in the first paragraph for the reader to settle into the new perspective seemlessly, and every time the perspective shifts it adds to the tension. As in any great space opera, there is a lot going on -- enemies without and within, unlikely characters thrown together and forced to forge a bond, people you can root for (but, rarer in space opera, no villains -- Westerfeld wisely shows the reader the Rix side of the action as well, and even the Emperor is crafted with an eye towards the sort of real motivations that might drive a person to do horrible things). But of course, no book can maintain that sort of frenetic pace for 500+ pages, and it is actually the slower moments that hold this story's heart. After reaching a breaking point in the battle, it jumps back in time to show us the meeting between Zai and his lover Oxham, called the Mad Senator for reasons I won't spoil (but which I love). Their relationship grows quickly in book-time but is drawn out over the course of the novel in slow, luxuriant snippets for the reader. Oxham is a wonderful character, fully as complex as Zai (and their relationship is hardly as easy as most writers would make it -- they're separated by some pretty strong philosophical differences), and once she is introduced her present-time storyline is just as compelling as the space battle her lover is leading -- political wrangling, after all, is at least as dangerous an occupation as starship captaining, and the stakes are higher because mistakes are always taken out in innocent blood. And just as obviously (well, at least to me, though given how many books I read that simply consist of grim men doing grim things maybe it isn't as obvious to everyone else) Westerfeld finds ways of sneaking in a fair amount of levity. The Emperor's undead cats, Oxham's House, and Alexander were all delightful elements that I won't spoil by explaining here. The entire novel was pitch-perfect, shifting between actions with dire consequences and moments of sheer absurdity with a wonderfully light touch. It does have a couple flaws: though I prefer it to Banks' Culture novels, Banks is a far superior stylist -- Westerfeld's prose succeeds in getting out of the way of the story admirably, but it doesn't soar; and there were a couple of (very minor) elements that took me out of the story because they struck me as anachronisms (a reference to a wax museum? really?). But overall, this is a great book, exactly the sort of book I read science fiction for.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic sci-fi read,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Succession (2 in 1) The Risen Empire & The Killing of Worlds (Hardcover)
Initial battle...wait, 20 CENTimeters? Didn't he mean KILOmeters? What??? Mind boggling once I understood. I was hooked from that point on! And the Battle against the REX? Unbelievable!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
