Reviews and Comments

I’ve put off reading Addison’s Goblin Emperor a long time; I had heard it was lovely, but also disjointed and inconclusive. It’s taken the book’s inclusion in a list of Becky Chamberesque “novels where people are nice to each other” for me to finally take the plunge, and the only thing I regret is I didn’t do so much earlier.

I can see how people have a hard time adjusting to this novel: the intricate, Elven steampunk world it builds and the high stakes court setting seem to promise things the novel never tries to hold itself to. Instead, we are treated to the story of a young man who, motherless at an early age, despised by his cold and all powerful father who banished him to the shticks at the hands of a violently abusive tutor, finds himself on the throne. Faced with the barely hidden contempt of the court, ridiculed for his mixed ethnic origin, alienated from simple social contact by his exalted position, the new emperor slowly, quietly turns things around by repaying contempt with empathy, hate with forgiveness, coldness with kindness.

If you do not like your Fantasy to suggest people might not be unconditional products of the world they live in; if you prefer characters to have no moral autonomy; if, simply put, the idea that people, even the most powerful ones, might aspire to do better, is one you disagree with, stay away from the Goblin Emperor. I, for one, know that, of the things I heard about the novel, only “lovely” is true, and that is selling it short.

Overy’s monumental, erudite take on current revisionist historical WW II scholarship repositions a conflict traditionally seen as a mostly Western one (with a Pacific sideshow) as but a part of the long death throes of territorial empire post WW I. The breadth and depth of the book is frankly mind blowing, even if some parts suffer a bit from being visibly based on elder, narrower scholarship (like the chapter on popular resistance, which almost entirely glosses over the South and South East Asian anti-Japanese resistance movements that play such an important role in the book’s opening and closing chapters), and some social science methodical rigour would have helped the more psychological analyses, but these are minor niggles that cannot mar a colossal achievement.

Overy never loses track of the grand picture; his views on race, gender and power in the conflict are unflinchingly clear and modern; and his writing is compelling and persuasive, even where he forces you to leave your comfort zone (like he does for me, a German who grew up with the dogma of the quasi-ahistorical character of the Shoah my countrymen inflicted on the Jews, when he contextualises the whole ideology and execution as a part of the last war for empire).

This, I suspect, is the book to read for years hence if you want to understand what happened, not just 1939 to 1945, but 1930 to 1960, and very much so if you want to understand what that period means for today, a time when that recent past throws long shades again.

Stross’ Merchant Princes series, of which the Empire Games trilogy this concludes is a part, is a poster child for this principle: assuming there are parallel Earth timelines in which development of society (and life, at times) wildly varies, what happens when one technologically less advanced line discovers it can travel to a more advanced one? Start with a knight armed with a submachine gun attacking your hapless protagonist, and take it from there until you arrive at transtemporal nuclear powered space battleships parked on the ISS’ lawn.

If you think this sounds like a silly, incoherent mess, you can be forgiven: in the hands of a lesser author, it easily might have been. What saves Stross are his well rounded characters and an ironclad grasp of what plotting individual arcs along the basic workings of society and history means. Add complex, richly textured world building, a healthy dose of cynicism tempered by utopian optimism and some wry humour, and you get something that is not just very readable, but addictive and fun to the very end.

I really wanted to like this: I am a big fan of what Aliette de Bodard does with traditional Vietnamese influences both in her Xuya Universe and her Dominion of the Fallen series, so this one, with its Wǔxíng based magic system (Chinese, not Vietnamese version) looked great, and challenging Western binary gender representation is a bonus. One of my students recently did her graduation film on queer identity in a German-Vietnamese context, queer reclaimed Guanyin and all, so you could say this ticked boxes.

Unluckily, the novel is hamstrung by a meandering plot, shallow characterisation and haphazard world-building, with a magic-reinforced version of Imperial Chinese authority sitting smack in the middle of an otherwise unexplained technological revolution. As a piece of fantastic literature, this is simply not that interesting, I’m sorry to say (how good a novel of queer identity it is, I can’t tell, being as a heterosexual cis guy not qualified to judge; it certainly seems to resonate with some people).

… which is what my father says when he is too polite to tell people he doesn’t like something, but will grant them it was worth making the experience.

I was pointed to this by an /r/AskHistorians thread extolling Glen Cook’s virtues in portraying pre-modern warfare. Like my father, I will grant that reading the novels is not an experience I regret as such. Unlike him, I will come out and say I didn’t particularly relish the experience either.

Yes, this is well written enough; yes, it probably felt very fresh and unconventional in the early eighties; and yes, Cook does have a good understanding of pre-modern warfare both at the battle and at the campaign level. If that is your thing, go for it. Me, I wish Cook also had an idea of the logistics and societal / economic conditions dictating the operations of pre-modern armies, which he obviously has not (the most egregious example being his Mercenary Guild, basically legionnaires operating out of Crusader Knights-like setting, which raises a plethora of questions even before you get to the US Marine Corps-like boot camps and esprit de corps, the nonsensical notion of such a formation fighting on for years without pay or supplies, or the absurdity of a long march overland without foraging). For something that is, by its own admission, “military fantasy”, that is not a good look.

I also take objection to Cook’s portrayal of his “Arabesque” world, with a newly minted religion on a missionary rampage. Yes, fantastic literature is free to do as it will, but this thinly veiled version of Islam is a counterfactual (the rapid spread of Islam in the medieval world was mainly due to it total lack of missionary fervour – for complex reasons mostly related to taxation, but still; the crusaders sat on the other side of the Western / Eastern divide) obviously meant to serve Western audiences’ perceptions of the Islamic world, and that is problematic.