Christopher RuocchioReseñas

Interesting mashup

The combination of themes is interesting but sometimes the story gets ahead of itself because of the way that the story is told. Might turn into an interesting series. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

I really wanted to give this 4 stars, and it came so close. The prose is beautiful, and I still really recommend this book, but it can feel like a slog at times. There were points where the language was protracted and overly crafted, turning a moment that could've been a few pages into too many. All of this could've been forgiven if the climax didn't feel so underwhelming. But don't let this put you off. The world is wonderfully crafted, and perhaps Marlowe's journey becomes more fleshed out throughout the series.

This puts the "epic" in "epic space opera".

Way too wordy! I quit in the middle of the book, just could not care about any of the characters. Writing is OK, and world building is OK, but very thin plot. Reads like an compilation of coming of age exploits in a space opera setting.

The very good: the most depth in characters I have seen in a long time. Everybody has reasons for their actions, and those reasons also have reasons. I rarely find that in sff and highly appreciated it.
The good: the author can write a lot of information without info-dumping and creates a complex,extensive world.
The bad: in places, the writing is too overburdened, and often the level of details is overblown. Most characters act exactly as expected.
The very, very bad: it's highly unoriginal. In short,it's Dune fan-fiction written in wanna-be Rothfuss style. And not just inspired, it's actually filled with elements taken directly from Dune,not even properly disguised.
The conclusion: Ruocchio has good potential, but it is not fulfilled in this copy-cat series. I will try him again, when he writes in a different fictional universe, one of his own.

A science fiction anthology that uses lost worlds and alien races long gone and newly found as a basis for the stories. The kickoff story is great and very enjoyable, and I wished for that same feeling with every one of them but as with most anthologies not every story was to my taste. Several play with the Cthulhu mythos and invoke a great feeling of dread in their stories. Overall the stories work well in the framework of the theme and a reader will find something in this collection to their taste and possibly a new writer to read as well.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher

When I first saw this novel mentioned by one of my fellow bloggers I was intrigued by the story but did not follow immediately on the desire to read it, so that when I recently went back to look for it I discovered that the series now amounts to four published novels, with a fifth slated to come out by the end of the year (not to mention a few novellas filling out some narrative corners). It might be enough to cool the enthusiasm of anyone with an already over-bloated TBR, yet I choose to pursue my initial interest in the story, and now I’m certainly glad I did.

The series takes place some 20.000 years in the far future, when humanity has moved out into the stars creating the Sollan Empire, ruled according to a strict class system: Hadrian Marlowe is the protagonist of the saga and at the very start of the novel, written as Hadrian’s memoir, we learn that to remove the menace of the alien Cielcin, with whom humans had been at war for centuries, he destroyed a sun, and in so doing he obliterated both the Cielcin and billions of humans as well. In his youth, as the eldest son of the Marlowe family (lesser nobility from the planet Delos whose uranium mining facilities empowered them with notable financial clout) Hadrian had some difficulties in accepting his role, being gifted with scholarly inclinations and an impulsive character, neither of which sat well with his cold and ruthless father. When an incident threatened his public image, Hadrian was to be replaced as heir by his younger brother Crispin, and sent to the Chantry, the Empire’s religious power worshipping the memory of lost Earth and professing a strict dogma enforced through methods resembling those of the Spanish Inquisition. Trying to evade a fate he found abhorrent, Hadrian ended up on the planet of Emesh, alone, penniless and unable to reveal his identity for fear of being forcibly sent to the Chantry: to survive he entered the brutal gladiatorial games of the Colosso, where a chance encounter with a Cielcin prisoner launched him on the path that would turn him into the man who destroyed a sun…

This is a very compressed synopsis for a novel depicting the early years of a quite eventful life, of which Empire of Silence is only the first part: there is a great deal to parse in this first book of the saga, which proved to be a compelling read despite a few setbacks that can be easily attributed to the novel being a debut work - and as such it’s still a very well crafted one, its problems easily forgiven and forgotten in the engaging tale of Hadrian Marlowe’s journey from riches to rags to… whatever will come along the way. If at times the narrative loses its momentum, stalled by what might feel like an excessive focus on details or inner musings, it’s understandable that the author wanted to give his readers a full immersion in the world he created and let himself be swayed by maybe too much enthusiasm. Still, those moments were not enough to drive me away, because I have to admit that with such a powerful “hook” as the knowledge of Hadrian’s future, the exploration of his past becomes compelling and compulsory.

The world building is fascinating: the empire is ruled by a feudal system that borrows many elements from the Roman Empire, even employing many of its terms and some of its customs like the gladiatorial games in the Colosso, which amuse the nobility and enthrall the populace according to the age-old rule of panem et circenses. The few alien races encountered during humanity’s expansion have been enslaved and are used either as workforce or fodder for the games in the Colosso, any consideration for their rights smothered by the Chantry’s ruthless doctrine and the abject fear they inspire. The ruling classes - or palatines - enjoy genetic enhancements which confer them improved physiques and a longer life-span, the physical differences setting them apart from the rest of the populace just as much as their social station does. It’s an intriguing society we see depicted in this series, one where such technological advancement as genetic engineering go hand in hand with a deep loathing for machines and computers, which is enforced by the Chantry under the stigma of heresy.

The alien Cielcin are presented as equally intriguing, their motives and actions filtered through the wartime propaganda so that readers are left to wonder if they are truly the proverbial monsters or if there is more to their quest than the simple need for expansion: the protracted meetings between Hadrian and a captured Cielcin officer - one of the most harrowing segments of the story, due to the descriptions of callous torture inflicted by Chantry interrogators - seem to lead toward a different interpretation, which of course begs the question about Hadrian’s act of genocide disclosed at the very start of the novel.

As Hadrian describes the background in which his life takes place, he also proceeds in revealing himself with little or no attempt at sugarcoating: he freely shares his triumphs and his mistakes, the impulsive choices which often tend to land him in a situation that’s worse than the one he was trying to escape, his capacity for compassion and the mad urges that put him in danger more than once. There were times when I felt like slapping some sense into him, often forgetting that - at this point in the story - he’s still relatively young and therefore prone to mistakes, not to mention a victim of his upbringing and the cold environment in which he grew up, whose influence we learn by contrast once Hadrian establishes a rapport with his fellow arena fighters:

They cared because they chose to, and they did so with a gruff but quiet indelicacy that propped me up in my despair and whispered that this was what it was to have a family.

Being aware from the beginning of Hadrian’s fate might rob the reading journey of some surprises - we know that any danger he faces will not be a mortal one, for example - but on the other hand we are keenly curious to learn how such an epilogue will come to be, and that is the main attraction of this saga. The first book ends with the start of what promises to be an adventurous voyage of discovery, and while not being a dreaded cliffhanger, it left me anxious to know what kind of challenges the protagonist will face in the next installment. And luckily for me, I will not have to wait long to discover it :-)

Fantasy, myth and imagination are integral parts of the human psyche; to try and reject them even as fictions is the sign of a mind that wants to suppress its true nature in order to appear "better" based on societal norms - hence the opprobrium levelled at Fantasy. What I am saying is that magic, commercialism and fantasy are alike in that the motivation behind them all is to deceive (either for good or evil). Consequently they are shallow - like the facades in a film set - and a common environment for those who wish to profit from deceiving. That is not to say that they can not be entertaining, each, after all, relies upon it's allure. To which I would not count myself immune - I enjoy magician's performances, I smile at chimpanzee removal men playing pianos and I think the Gormenghast trilogy is fantastic. But what they do not have is depth. People are mistaken when they assign intellectual heft to them, they are confectioneries not sustaining rich stews. Take “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” say. Because this has depth, it can not be fantasy. Alice has much to say about childhood experience, education at the time and so on. “Gormenghast” has not depth, it has sophistication, cohesion and complexity, but only as a consequence of its fully realised fantasy. A picture of a naked woman is art or pornography because of its purpose, not because the observer views it as art or pornography. Sorry to be so deluded. What about the 4th installment of the Sun Eater? Almost as good as the other three (but not quite there).

For me Fantasy (Urban or not, Space Opera or not) should be about modern-day fabulation, and not about "rebooting" old stories; like any truly great interpretation of past works, there is something more than just rehashing and feature-spotting. Even genre authors should be challenging this "world-building" novel trope; we are no longer dominated by the Salvatores, Eddings and Jordans with their endless glossaries of fantasy terms. Do we have modern fabulists? Not sure. I'd say Ruocchio, Mieville and Gaiman and suchlike are very much taking the fabulist approach, even if not slavishly rewriting fairytales. Too bad this time round, Roucchio decided to go down the torture porn path…not necessary. Let’s hope the next novel is better than this one.

Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction

3.5 largely due to how long it took me to read this. I had to read this in short spurts because it was too much too read all at once. The characters and world building are excellent. About half way through I started losing interest but forced myself to finish. Not having read Dune I don't understand the comparisons but this is an excellent beginning of a new series.

I read reviews saying this is derivative work, influenced by Dunes, Name of the Wind and other great works to such a degree that you can find paragraphs that seem to be just copied from the other books and only slightly reworded.

Yes, it feels similar. It reminds me of Name of the Wind, and I sure hope it will not end up over promising and under delivering. The hero recounts his own story and mentions great deeds of mouth watering magnitude for the reader that will happen in an ever distant future. Will Ruocchio get stuck trying to put those on paper later on?

It also reminds me of Dunes, but its small bits only and I was still able to enjoy it just fine, despite the the similarities that were indeed a bit too close to plagiarism sometimes.

This is corrected as you advance in the book, and the ending of the this first part feels fresh, fast paced, and interesting enough to make up for the parts that got so many reviewers pointing fingers.

I am eager to start part two.

Better than the first book in the series.

After showing us he can "promise" with the best of them, Ruocchio starts to deliver on those promises made in the first book.

Somewhere in the middle of Howling Dark, he decides he toyed enough with the historical fantasy genre and turns the knob up a few notches, from "some ideas borrowed from other books" almost to an "this I've never read before" level.

Well, maybe not every idea is new, it's hard to be a writer these days, really, every single story was told before, but, as a whole, Howling Dark really feels like "terra incognita". And what and adventure it was to discover it.

He has developed a few new habits that can be a bit annoying, obsessive repetitions of expressions like "why this or that happened I’ll never know" but otherwise his writing is great. Even on the philosophical side a little bit.

I also liked that his hero is not the most righteous, most handsome, most fearless, and by-far-smartest guy in the book.

I liked this book a lot.

On a side note, do you think those Quiet fellows could be the same people that built the Stargate ?

Like all controversial statements when we say “all of SF is crap”, there is an element of truth. The fact is that all really shit fiction is genre fiction, because genres can have a formula, and anything written to a formula is shit. Literary fiction, by definition, cannot follow a formula therefore cannot be absolute barrel-scraping shit. And if something original is written in literary fiction that everyone else then follows, creating a formula, it becomes a genre of its own (see misery lit for a recent example). But so much genre fiction does not follow a formula. SF and Fantasy (to my mind, they're the same thing, just the explanations for things are different), when done right (think Christopher Ruocchio, David Mitchell, Iain M. Banks) are masterpieces, giving spectacular insight into how humans think and respond to situations outside our real life experience. I read literary fiction set in real environments unfamiliar to me (e.g. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Jane Austen) to understand something of how people respond to unusual circumstances. I see no difference in reading things where the circumstance is real or imaginary, so long as the characterisation is real.

The best Space Operas like “Howling Dark” and “Demon in White” are frequently classed as SF but I'm not so sure; the boundary between both seems to be a bit of grey area. There are aspects of the characters' daily lives in Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We' which were physically impossible then as they still are now, but the focus is the themes which drive the narrative. To me, that means the 'impossibility' to the reader of a fantastical future life isn't really that important, whereas the humanity of the story is absolutely central. I hope that I'm neither dismissing SF nor being a snob, but setting, in this sense, is more of a 'prop'. And “Demon in White” has got plenty of Humanity.

SF and heavy metal music are two genres where the people who create it and the people who consume it are just having a bloody good time, and largely don't care a stuff about what the critics think. And the critics really hate that...



SF = Speculative Fiction.

“Within those chilly sepulchers the Cielcin slept, suspended between binary heartbeats like wights awaiting the blood moon to rise again and walk and drink the blood of men.”



In “Howling Dark” by Christopher Ruocchio



"’SF's no good,’ they bellow till we're deaf.

‘But this looks good.’ – "Well then, it's not SF."



In “Relapse 18” (eFanzine) by Robert Conquest, circa 1962





So, what else is new?

Is Ruocchio’s “Howling Dark” SF or is it something else?

Let’s get this out of the way first. I’ve read a few idiots bitching about the use of stream-of-consciousness in this novel. Yes, I know, these nincompoops are not used to reading SF more complicated than “The Hunger Games”… Ruocchio is doing it in a different way: maybe a "stream of pre-consciousness" or “sub-verbal stream-of-consciousness”, i.e., before thought becomes articulate speech. In this kind of stream-of-consciousness one must read “faster”, almost skimming, to get the meaning, rather than trying to think about every word and its place and function in the sentence. In some ways this is exactly the opposite of stream-of-consciousness.

One of the sad facts is that SF has not always attracted the best writers (nor the best of readers…). But then, what is a "best writer" or a “best reader” come to that? Like art and music, beauty is a notion experienced by the beholder. It may sound a bit extreme, but I cannot tolerate even a single sentence by Terry Pratchett, but I can wallow for days on end in the writing of Virginia Woolf. And there are those who think Wolff just drifts and rambles, while Pratchett is incisive and poignant.

Unfortunately, we tend to be guided by things like “The Penguin Book of English Literature” (or anything similar), which in turn informs school, college, and university curricula. Popularity is a sure sign of a deficit of aesthetic value (a “big slice of the market” bespeaks the values of the salesperson, not those of the literary artist).

Search and replacing door with airlock does not make you a science fiction writer. The problem with the themes of science and technology is that these days, people simply do not find them important to their lives. It's not as if they have radically changed the readers’ lives and provide the only realistic solutions to the looming and numerous problems of the future.

Just cast an eye over the authors of Science Fiction and the low quality will be apparent. Here's a short list of these “hacks”: George Orwell (“1984”); Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”); Rex Warner (“The Aerodrome”); Yevgeny Zamyatin (“We”); Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (“Roadside Picnic”); JG Ballard (“The Drowned World”); HG Wells (“The War of the Worlds”); Octavia Butler (“Kindred”); Kazuo Ishiguro (“Never Let Me Go”); L.P. Hartley (“Facial Justice”); Christopher Priest (“The Gradual”, “The Adjacent”, etc.) E.M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”); Kurt Vonnegut (“Harrison Bergeron”); Christopher Ruocchio (“The Empire of Silence”, “Howling Dark”). I could go on. It's terrible that people should read such trash instead of the literary masters…Why does “Howling Dark” belong in this August category you might say? Ah, that would be telling (apart from I said in the first paragraph of this post)…go read it please because nothing I’d say would make the book justice in a SFional context. And forget what some idiots are saying about it.

Snobbery (or anti-snobbery) in literature is as much a nuisance as it is in catering. Some people seem to think books are only good if they are incomprehensibly written and contain no story (like “The Hunger Games” which is utter crap). And then we have books like the “Howling Dark”. Unfortunately the common SF reader likes to read uncritically, i.e., stuff that reproduces lots of old tropes and historical systems without thinking much about them.





SF = Speculative Fiction.

DNF @ 100 pages. Too derivative, dull, and clichéd.

Star Destroyers
Author: Tony Daniel(editor), Christopher Ruocchio(editor), various authors
Publisher: Baen Books
Publishing Date: 2018
Pgs: 468
Dewey: PBK F STAT
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
Heavy steel in space. Ships of the Line. Destroyers. Dreadnoughts. Super weapons. From the oceans of Earth to the icy seas of Europa and the distant lights farthest from the sky, warships and their crew carry out their duties facing the enemy wherever they may encounter them. Hurling steel and plasma and laser light across the medium of space, warfare among the stars.
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Genre:
Space Opera
Science Fiction
Militaria
War

Why this book:
It's about space battleships and fleet action. It's my kind of stuff. Things blow up.
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Superweapon by David Drake

The Feel:
First jump out of the gate and they are sitting at a Court of Inquiry, without lawyers or a reading of rights. Those surveyors are going to be lucky to walk out of this, monumental, historic find or not.

Favorite Character:
The giant ship is already a character in the story just from its description in the inquiry.

Least Favorite Character:
Both Balthaus and Rice. Disrespect will surely get them everywhere as Kearny slowly loses his mind trying to keep them all out of prison for just doing their jobs, but not up to Defense’s standards. Even though out in the void, the Survey Service doesn’t report to the Defense Department.

...course I don’t like any of the stuffed shirts questioning them at that Court of Inquiry either.

Hmm Moments:
Wonder if Tadeko ran fast enough to stop The Shield coming online. Wonder if The Shield would decide that instead of running and hiding it does what it's designed for and starts killing the people that sent it out into space, proactively protecting itself. All fun and games until your killing machines turn on you.

Wisdom:
Intelligence is intelligence whether it’s organic or artificial. Selling it short is a sure way to end up surprised in bad ways.

Juxtaposition:
Like the jux of the Earthlings with the ancient aliens and what could happen, what would happen, what can happen.
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A Sudden Stop by Steve White

Favorite Concept:
A British Empire that flourished beyond the modern era. A world where the American Revolution had a very different outcome. An Earth where various nation-states have interstellar navies and space battleships. That’s good worldbuilding.

The Sigh:
And the helmsman/cyberpunk hero is a racist. ~isms when you are dealing with fictional species is one thing, probably not a good thing, but it’s one thing. It’s quite another when you are speaking about humans and using racial epithets that are actually in use. Rubs the wrong way and grates on the sense of the reader. And then, the excuse of “it’s what they call themselves”. Nope, not flying.

Juxtaposition:
After the great worldbuilding, the main character meets an old friend and their conversation takes a cudgel to that worldbuilding I was so enamored of earlier. They clear blue sky in their first acquaintance starts debating 100s of years of alternate history, racial relations, and the Declaration of Independence.
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Pacing:
The story hits a roadblock when the main character engages in a conversational flashback on the entire history of the alternate history British Empire and its relations to its North American subjects, rebels, and whether/when slavery ended. It’s a roadblock that stops down the nascent story’s flow. If that’s the story that White wanted to tell, then that’s the story he should’ve told.

There are a couple points where the story flow has all the life sucked out of it. Almost to the degree that I’m thinking of giving up on this story and moving on to the next.

Last Page Sound:
Meh, there was potential, largely wasted. Disappointed. The story had a good hook. The worldbuilding was great.

Author Assessment:
I expected better from the guy who has been writing the Starfire series. I’ve got the next in that series on request from the library. I hope it lives up to it’s past. We’ll see. I was looking forward to reading the series associated with this short. I’m out now.

Editorial Assessment:
An editor should have questioned if that was really necessary.
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Another Solution by Mark L Van Name

Meh / PFFT Moments:
Another solution is about the most un-space-battleship story and the history of space battleship stories. I guess it belongs in the collection but stuff doesn't blow up. More an A. I. or Tech-Gone-Wild story or a Foolish-Humans-Thinking-Their-The-Smartest story.

The Sigh:
Not about this short, but more about the whole collection. I've noticed that I'm about a fifth of the way through the book and I'm not getting flush-the-missile-racks and cannon fire and standing-on-the-burning-deck type stories which is kind of what I wanted.
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The Magnolia Incident by Mike Kupari

Hmm Moments:
I love letters home from the front stories. And this one was well written.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
The fight is 95% off screen.

Wisdom:
The fear of annihilation makes Man seek security at the expense of freedom. That is nationalist barbarism.
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A Helping Hand by Jody Lynn Nye

The Feel:
I love the alien ocean trope. Especially when I like the submarine/starship similarity genre too.
Favorite Character:
The Deeps. Alien whales who look like giant bacteria with solid bodies.

Least Favorite Character:
Samwa the alien who they are there to rescue who doesn’t want to be rescued. He has good reason for what he does. But he’s going to get all of them killed and worsen an already hot war.

Hmm Moments:
I like the dive and hide and run and strike aspects. The sitting duck aspect of it is maddening...and I’m not inside the submarine in an alien ocean being depth charged to hell and gone.

The Unexpected:
This one has that “Captain there be whales here” feel. I love that.

Missed Opportunity:
I wanted Nurys and the Colorado to blow hell out of all of them. At least she got that mothership.

Last Page Sound:
Favorite of the collection, so far.

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
Seems like all out war between the Lits, the Glicks, Humans and the Turuchs is a foregone conclusion in this universe.
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Boomers by J. R. Dunn

Favorite Concept:
Commando ship boarding party, nice.

Hmm Moments:
US vs USSR in space. Well...US vs derelict Soviet spacecraft with nuclear weapons onboard post fall of Communism. ...with some KGB deadender crews wanting to bring back the glory of the Fatherland. Flashback-ish.

A runaway impulse vessel that was supposed to be one place but was halfway across the system from its intended destination.

Of course, it’s the KGB.
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Hate in the Darkness by Michael Z Williamson

The Feel:
This one has an odd feel to it. The command and control of the Freehold ship is odd...un-Navy like.

Least Favorite Character:
Metzger. Mr I-have-to-eat/I-have-to-sleep after a whole 30 seconds or page and a half of action. Meh.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
The bridge crew conversations on both the aggressor and the defenders ships were a bit too cardboard for me.

Editorial Assessment:
An editor should have stood a bit closer to this story.
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The Stars are Silent by Gray Rinehart

Hmm Moments:
So, the Tigris got her ass kicked by the Kellador in a surprise attack.

Their orbit is going to betray them a long time before they get a chance to fix their C-Drive. They’re in trouble. And an invasion force is emerging beyond the star that is hiding them, for the moment. Damn. That’s good stuff.

WTF Moments:
Ambush or full on invasion. The crew of the injured Tigris looks to be in for hell.

Last Page Sound:
Favorite story so far.

Things I’d Like to See:
Wish we got more of this story.

The new skipper recovered from his shellshock. And the ongoing war against the Kellador.
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Excerpts from Two Lives by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Juxtaposition:
Love story...tragedy...death.

The Unexpected:
Didn’t see that coming.
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Icebreaker by Dave Bara

Favorite Character:
Ramos is Ahad. You don’t realize that until halfway through.

Hmm Moments:
An overmatched sub hunt in the seas of Europa. Nice.

Questions I’m Left With:
You are left with a pretty big question at the end of this one.
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Try Not to Kill Us All by Joelle Presby

Favorite Concept:
Humans building their next level civilization on recycled bits of alien tech and material left behind is wholly within character. The aliens trying to recycle anything left behind so that no aliens get ahold of said tech makes sense too. The two ideals crashing into each other makes for good drama.

Hmm Moments:
That’s good worldbuilding. The human cultists worshipping aliens makes total sense, knowing humans. I’m looking at you Ancient Astronaut Theorists.

With as badassed as they built the cleaners up to be, these people should probably hit the gas and get the hell out of that system. But intelligence isn’t humanity’s strongest attribute in most sci fi stories.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
With only 5 stories to go to the end of the collection, yes, stuff has blown up. But there hasn’t been very much ship-to-ship combat. And no fleet action to speak of.

Last Page Sound:
I liked this one. Well done.
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Skipjack by Susan R Matthews

Hmm Moments:
Something is off about the Skipjack’s crew. Even beyond their happy gas environment.

Last Page Sound:
That’s sneaky and wonderful and tragic. Warriors with honor subservient to faceless nobodies without honor and the onrushing end where the nobodies got fooled.
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Homecoming by Robert Buettner

Favorite Quote:
“I know what it means. I’m a drunk, not illiterate.” Greatness.

Favorite Concept:
Referring to the brass as chair commandos is great.

Last Page Sound:
That’s a good story.

Questions I’m Left With:
No mention of what happened to and with the Wiechesian Separatists both on the ship and back on the Ice Age world the refugees had escaped.
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Not Made for Us by Christoper Ruocchio

Favorite Concept:
Deep sleep soldiers going hotspot to hotspot putting down insurrection and invading and such in a Roman-esque setting amongst the stars.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
The joining up that Carax did, purportedly for his wife and son doesn’t wash when placed in context to his being a popsicle out of time and touch with that family he left behind. Them probably being long dead as he cold sleeps his way through the years between battles.

Juxtaposition:
Aren’t a soldier’s enemies always demons when they are described in the heat of battle? Heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, angels and demons...all comes down to who survives and who writes the history.

Get Off My Lawn:
I don’t know...the whole life is life motif when they’d just found a human who’d been cooked and put on the dinner table. I don’t know about that peace gesture Carax was engaging in before the other centurions caught up and saved his ass.
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A Tale of the Great Trek War Aboard the Starship Persistence by Brendan DuBois

Favorite Concept:
Mutiny and generational war between members of the crew, tribal, bringing the conflicts of earth with them into the stars and the distant future. Humans being humans.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
That doesn't belong in a book called Star Destroyers. Sigh

The Unexpected:
Oh geez, that's what TREK is? Damn.

Get Off My Lawn:
That's what they're killing each other over? Really?
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Meh / PFFT Moments:
Considering that this was called Star Destroyers there needed to be more stuff blowing up and ship to ship fighting.

Last Page Sound:
There were good shorts peppered throughout this collection. Some were meh. But mostly there were good. Some, even, great.

I like the collection. By and large it wasn't about star destroyers. There were ships in every story. Some good. Some great. Some meh
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Some interesting takes on life on destroyers in space.½

"As I had loved drawing ever since I was a child. As I grew up, however, I realized there was something singular about the process. A photograph might capture the facts of an object's appearance, colors and details rendered perfectly at higher resolution than any human eye could appreciate. [...] But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthetize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing. The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be: Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will - to the human observer - always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperfom a machine. The photograph captures captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal - or in the vermillion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtly imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both. Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty."

In "The Empire of Silence" by Christopher Ruocchio

As I wrote elsewhere, the SF market nowadays is saturated with crap far beyond anything humanity has ever seen. For casual SF readers who do not have time in selecting their next read, this is likely not a big deal. But for long-time SF “connoisseurs” like yours truly, it represents a number of challenges. One of these is finding books that are not exactly the same as another book, but which hold a large number of elements or devices in common. The market for Space Opera the past ten years, for example, seems to have had not only its surface filled out, but all its anal interstices filled in as well. Is it still impossible to be novel in a Space-Opera-setting nowadays? After having read “The Empire of Silence” I believe it is possible. With this afterthought in mind, what then does Christopher Ruocchio have to add with “The Empire of Silence” to SF? Answer: everything. It’s not for nothing that Ruocchio chooses the name Hadrian for the novel’s main character... As with Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian”, Ruocchio depicts a Hadrian in the first person, but here not addressing his adopted grandson (in Yourcenar’s novel, Hadrian’s grandson is a descendant of power, and discusses his past with a passionate approach and a confessional force that makes the Roman pontifical for we are an intimate man). Here Hadrian addresses and attempts at defying is father the real power. “The Empire of Silence” lengthens our personality and makes us as readers different. And our life can only thank Ruocchio for transmuting fictional printed lives in a sea of ​​words lived and relived. Through Hadrian's voice, countless others speak, and the memorialistic portrait of his personality, human par excellence, is also the portrait of a SFional era, in rigorous historical reconstruction. His narrative philosophically associates sociological and psychological dimensions. The imperial policy conducted by Ruocchio’s Empire in the vast territories that it conquered inspires lingering considerations to Hadrian, here and there with strange resonances in our own historical conjuncture, such as the pretended civilizing mission of a people towards others, seen as barbarians. Today's distinctions and the ideal of peace distinguish this SFional Hadrian, although a peace based on imperial rule.

The musicality of Ruocchio's writing makes each line an electrical wire that holds the senses to the book, whether in the deep touch of details or in moments of comprehensive design of environments and people, that is, “history” (the story is told in retrospect), in the image of human memory.

Ruocchio does not indulge in experimentalism of language or construction: a linear narrative of facts and episodes in the character's life, profusely enlivened by his rich thought, this “Empire of Silence” is unlikely to be an example of formal searching, at least in the sense of asking for unexpected novels in this day and age of crappy SF.

Along with Clarke’s “Piranesi”, Ruoccho’s “The Empire of Silence” belongs to the best SF I read in 2020.





SF = Speculative Fiction.

The exploration of space is a dangerous thing, it really doesn't want man there. The second biggest enemy is man himself. Some classic stories included.½

Really, 3.5* rounded up.

Do you remember that time that you read Dune for the 6th or 12th time and thought, "Hey! Wouldn't it be great to write fan fiction and mix up some of the elements in it, change all the names, and make it longer, more convoluted, and make Paul rebel against his family? Maybe just put him in House Corrino first, throw out the godlike abilities but keep 80% of the other worldbuilding under a thin shroud?"

Yeah. Me too.

And that's exactly what kept me from precisely enjoying this the way I wanted to. It was too close to the original. If I wanted a confluence of events exactly like the original, I think the original is STILL BRILLIANT.

This one reads in a more modern style with a first-person PoV. A huge stretch of the beginning just FEELS like Dune. And then, after it diverges, we have all the important scenes from Dune, such as playing with your opponent, extra gladiator stuff with Russel Crowe, and even a mad dash of what Patrick Rothfuss is known for. I guess I would have enjoyed this more had there been a lot LESS nods to Dune. Fear mantra? Floating Fat Man? Benighted race with a religious secret allowing total dominance of the universe?

Well, no, we haven't gotten THERE yet. That'll be in another huge honker of a book.

Whereas Dune conquered the known galaxy in ONE BOOK.

I guess the case could be made that this is for a new generation, blah, blah, blah, but there's just a bit too much imitation for my taste. Let's just write in the Dune universe instead. Or cut out all the homages, fly on the strength of your own tale.

There's something here. It might be a bonafide epic... eventually. But it's pulling on a few too many shirts right now.

Genuinely just do not care about this book. The first 20% is pretty much a filthy copy of dune, and a less intelligent one at that. Instead of subtle philosophy. It was just blatant in your face verbatim quotes from philosophers that felt more like the author trying to show of his knowledge more than anything else.