I really wanted to like this book, but the character writing and overly ambitious plot couldn’t really keep up with a beautifully thought out exercise in world building.
The author excelled at showing us a world at the edge of a galaxy, far from the center of things but filled with all different kinds of people. There are the nobles and the plebes, the church and the imperial empire factions, all interacting in a sort of quasi-Roman system. And then later they take us away from that planet and show us just how wide of a scope we are working with. I was impressed with the sense of scale that is given without too much exposition.
Especially how space travel works, and the travels frozen in their pods allow for some interesting jumps in time, and people from completely different eras having the possibility to meet. This opens up all kinds of interesting avenues – well done!
On the other hand, most of the first third of the movie feels (overly-)inspired from the Dune series by Frank Herbert, and the second third pulled from the movie Gladiator. The point of view of the character, a young noble who finds himself in peril is full of selfish moments that were not fun to read about.
Most of the villains are written in a very heavy-handed way, and so thanks to this it telegraphs the plot and certain developments are not surprising at all. There were problems with length and pacing as well.
All of which made this book a bit of a disappointment for me. This the first of a series, but I doubt that I’ll be coming back to it. The book is filled with references to future events in the series, but they didn’t do enough to entice me to stay with it. Too bad – I really liked the world that this character lived in.
Next I am reading Think Faster, Talk Smarter by Matt Abrahams.
