elysium
Written on Dec 6, 2015
Emperor Mapidere was the first to unite the island kingdoms of Dara under a single banner. But now the emperor is on his deathbed, his people are exhausted by his vast, conscriptive engineering projects and his counsellors conspire only for their own gain.
Even the gods themselves are restless.
A wily, charismatic bandit and the vengeance-sworn son of a deposed duke cross paths as they each lead their own rebellion against the emperor's brutal regime. Together, they will journey to the heart of the empire; witnessing the clash of armies, fleets of silk-draped airships, magical books and shapeshifting gods. Their unlikely friendship will drastically change the balance of power in Dara... but at what price?
THE GRACE OF KINGS is the debut novel by Hugo-, Nebula- and World Fantasy Award-winner Ken Liu and the first in an monumental new epic fantasy series.
Exclusive to The Broken Binding. Signed with digitally sprayed edges. Limited to 300 numbered copies and 52 lettered copies.
- Publish Date 2021 (first published 7 April 2015)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Head of Zeus
- Edition Broken Binding Exclusive
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 640
- Language English
- Special Numbered Signed Sprayed Edges
Reviews
Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Nov 27, 2015
Emperor Mapidere united the various countries of Dara, but his grandiose ways have sewn the seeds of rebellion. The elements for it all fall in place through chicanery and happenstance, but once the revolution has started, the tides change with every new occurrence, and power shifts unpredictably.
I'm a big admirer of Ken Liu. His short fiction is extraordinary, and he's done wonders to bring Chinese speculative fiction to an English-speaking audience. When I saw that he'd written a novel, I snapped it up.
Unfortunately, Liu's considerable skills with short fiction haven't translated very well to the longer format. The Grace of Kings is long, slow, meandering, and often arbitrary. Liu draws on a large cast of characters, and, combined with his low-key style, the result is that we don't feel particularly close to any of them. Kuni Garu, a clever, trickster-type, is fun and interesting, but not particularly sympathetic, and becomes inconsistent toward the end. Mata Zynda, Kuni's athletic, military near-opposite, accomplishes the unusual feat of starting as a well-formed character, and becoming more and more shallow toward the end. The book reads more as a pseudo-historical text than as epic fantasy.
Liu's world is depressingly gender traditional, with dominant men, repressed women, etc. He uses this to build some changes toward the end, but it feels consciously tacked on, rather than an organic story of progress and development. This is also a world of quarreling, interfering gods, and they play the usual role, though Liu occasionally relies on them for ex machina solutions. Hero isolated against overwhelming odds? No problem; a god may come along and swallow them all up. Some of the non-deist solutions (e.g. how to put out a gate fire) are equally non-credible and disappointing. Others, including character motivations, are simplistic.
The prose is generally good, though not as smooth as I would expect from Liu. However, the beginning is very dense, with lots of data in what are effectively infodumps. The overall structure of the story also doesn't hold together as well as it should. While politics and governance are key elements of the concept, much of the result is low on realism, with political systems more broad strokes than credible constructs. Spies who wear uniforms are not spies, but enforcers. Some of the terminology is odd and feels out of place - "commander-in-chief", for example, is accurate, but has a modern tone to it; "mano a mano" doesn't fit a pseudo-Oriental fantasy at all, and gains nothing on "hand to hand". One gets the feeling that Liu just doesn't have that much experience with the epic fantasy sub-genre, and doesn't know how to handle some of the issues that come up.
What does work is a happy departure from the standard medieval European base to a less usual Oriental base. Liu pulls it off nicely, with just enough neologisms mixed with more familiar features. (Though at one, point, I began to wish for something not decorated with shark's teeth.) It's an interesting, intriguing world with a steam-punky feel to it. I just wish there were a better story to go with it. I lost interest in this one about 200 pages (40%) in.
All that said, it's not a bad book. With its unusual world, broad scope, and good prose, it's better than some. However, it is a very disappointing book from a very talented writer. Happily, it wraps up thoroughly enough that it's possible to drop the series here.