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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Dread Empire’s Fall – A Review
by Chris Nuttall
#1 - The Praxis #2 – The Sundering #3 – Conventions of War There are hundreds of talented would-be writers out there – so why did this one get published? I know very little about the publishing industry, but one would expect that they would hardly allow a hardly-proven writer like Walter Jon Williams to write a series without giving them a detailed background to the series first. The series is complete and total tripe, barely superior to the Stars and Stripes books. When compared to David Weber, it is, to quote Blackadder, excrement as compared to cream. The background to the story is simple. Some few thousands of years ago in the past (or our very near future), an alien race called the Shaa conquers earth and adds humanity to their vast empire. At the time of the story, the last of the Shaa is dying…and the empire slips into a civil war for reasons that seem incomprehensible, even within the book itself. The plain fact is that the social system that Walter Jon Williams describes doesn’t work. There are Peers, who run the Empire, and everyone else. The Peers are, as a class, collectively stupid, unimaginative (rather makes you wonder how the rebellion/split ever got off the ground), over-prilevged and completely self-centred. A person who is not a Peer and not very wealthy in the few non-Peer industries has no hope for advancement – and yet at the same time they are permitted posts onboard warships! There is one exception to the rule about stupid Peers and that (by amazing coincidence) is the hero. Garath Martinez is lucky – plain and simple – and he practically walks on water, designs war strategies that a blind child could avoid…and somehow is never quite thanked enough for his work. It is something of a minor miracle that the rebellion (peers on peers) doesn’t succeed; at least the enemy had the imagination to actually rebel! Of course, the rebels are as stupid as the rest of them – and with Martinez on the side of the ‘good’ peers, the rebels don’t stand a chance. It would be possible to believe, perhaps even to enjoy, a rebellion against the Peers. It is not possible to believe what is in effect a civil war between peers – my suspension of disbelief failed about midway through book 1 and never came back. One example comes from one of the heroes leading a resistance movement on an occupied world, unaware that she has a senior officer left who spends the time cowering in a hidden bunker. When the rebellion against the rebels succeeds, the senior comes out of her hole and tries to take command – and her superiors support her! (She gets assassinated, which is perhaps the only incident of a Peer getting what’s coming to them.) I could carry on, listing my many reasons to be dissatisfied with this work. I’m not going to bother (except for noting that the science is rather suspect too) and I’m going to content myself with observing that this book should be thrown out of the library or perhaps sold to OBL, in the hopes it would give him brain fever. Don’t buy this book. Don’t buy this book! Buy Weber’s Insurrection instead – much better and it deals with similar themes.
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