Review:
Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott
| Series: |
Sun Chronicles #2 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
2023 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-86701-0 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
725 |
Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel
to
Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here.
I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book
(grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to
minimize the time between books unless you have a good memory for plot
details.
This is installment two of gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space.
When we last left Sun and her Companions, Elliott had established the
major players in this interstellar balance of power and set off some
opening skirmishes, but the real battles were yet to come. Sun was trying
to build her reputation and power base while carefully staying on the good
side of Queen-Marshal Eirene, her mother and the person credited with
saving the Republic of Chaonia from foreign dominance. The best parts of
the first book weren't Sun herself but wily Persephone, one of her
Companions, whose viewpoint chapters told a more human-level story of
finding her place inside a close-knit pre-existing friendship group.
Furious Heaven turns that all on its head. The details are
spoilers (insofar as a plot closely tracking the life of Alexander the
Great can contain spoilers), but the best parts of the second book are the
chapters about or around Sun.
What I find most impressive about this series so far is Elliott's ability
to write Sun as charismatic in a way that I can believe as a reader. That
was hit and miss at the start of the series, got better towards the end of
Unconquerable Sun, and was wholly effective here. From me, that's
high but perhaps unreliable praise; I typically find people others
describe as charismatic to be some combination of disturbing,
uncomfortable, dangerous, or obviously fake. This is a rare case of
intentionally-written fictional charisma that worked for me.
Elliott does not do this by toning down Sun's ambition. Sun, even more
than her mother, is explicitly trying to gather power and bend the
universe (and the people in it) to her will. She treats people as
resources, even those she's the closest to, and she's ruthless in pursuit
of her goals. But she's also honorable, straightforward, and generous to
the people around her. She doesn't lie about her intentions; she follows
a strict moral code of her own, keeps her friends' secrets, listens
sincerely to their advice, and has the sort of battlefield charisma where
she refuses to ask anyone else to take risks she personally wouldn't take.
And her use of symbolism and spectacle isn't just superficial; she finds
the points of connection between the symbols and her values so that she
can sincerely believe in what she's doing.
I am fascinated by how Elliott shapes the story around her charisma.
Writing an Alexander analogue is difficult; one has to write a tactical
genius with the kind of magnetic attraction that enabled him to lead an
army across the known world, and make this believable to the reader.
Elliott gives Sun good propaganda outlets and makes her astonishingly
decisive (and, of course, uses the power of the author to ensure those
decisions are good ones), but she also shows how Sun is constantly
absorbing information and updating her assumptions to lay the groundwork
for those split-second decisions. Sun uses her Companions like a
foundation and a recovery platform, leaning on them and relying on them to
gather her breath and flesh out her understanding, and then leaping from
them towards her next goal. Elliott writes her as thinking just a tiny
bit faster than the reader, taking actions I was starting to expect but
slightly before I had put together my expectation. It's a subtle but
difficult tightrope to walk as the writer, and it was incredibly effective
for me.
The downside of
Furious Heaven is that, despite kicking the action
into a much higher gear, this book sprawls. There are five viewpoint
characters (Persephone and the Phene Empire character Apama from the first
book, plus two new ones), as well as a few interlude chapters from yet
more viewpoints. Apama's thread, which felt like a minor subplot of the
first book, starts paying off in this book by showing the internal
political details of Sun's enemy. That already means the reader has to
track two largely separate and important stories. Add on a Persephone
side plot about her family and a new plot thread about other political
factions and it's a bit too much. Elliott does a good job avoiding reader
confusion, but she still loses narrative momentum and reader interest due
to the sheer scope.
Persephone's thread in particular was a bit disappointing after being the
highlight of the previous book. She spends a lot of her emotional energy
on tedious and annoying sniping at Jade, which accomplishes little other
than making them both seem immature and out of step with the significance
of what's going on elsewhere.
This is also a middle book of a trilogy, and it shows. It provides a
satisfying increase in intensity and gets the true plot of the trilogy
well underway, but nothing is resolved and a lot of new questions and plot
threads are raised. I had similar problems with
Cold Fire, the middle book of the other Kate Elliott trilogy I've
read, and this book is 200 pages longer. Elliott loves world-building and
huge, complex plots; I have a soft spot for them too, but they mean the
story is full of stuff, and it's hard to maintain the same level of reader
interest across all the complications and viewpoints.
That said, I truly love the world-building. Elliott gives her world
historical layers, with multiple levels of lost technology, lost history,
and fallen empires, and backs it up with enough set pieces and fragments
of invented history that I was enthralled. There are at least five major
factions with different histories, cultures, and approaches to technology,
and although they all share a history, they interpret that history in
fascinatingly different ways. This world feels both lived in and full of
important mysteries.
Elliott also has a knack for backing the ambitions of her characters with
symbolism that defines the shape of that ambition. The title comes from a
(translated) verse of an in-universe song called the Hymn of Leaving,
which is sung at funerals and is about the flight on generation ships from
the now-lost Celestial Empire, the founding myth of this region of space:
Crossing the ocean of stars we leave our home behind us.
We are the spears cast at the furious heaven
And we will burn one by one into ashes
As with the last sparks we vanish.
This memory we carry to our own death which awaits us
And from which none of us will return.
Do not forget. Goodbye forever.
This is not great poetry, but it explains so much about the psychology of
the characters. Sun repeatedly describes herself and her allies as spears
cast at the furious heaven. Her mother's life mission was to make Chaonia
a respected independent power. Hers is much more than that, reaching back
into myth for stories of impossible leaps into space, burning brightly
against the hostile power of the universe itself.
A question about a series like this is why one should want to read about a
gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space, rather than just reading
about Alexander himself. One good (and sufficient) answer is that both
the gender swap and the space parts are inherently interesting. But the
other place that Elliott uses the science fiction background is to give
Sun motives beyond sheer personal ambition.
At a critical moment in the story, just like Alexander, Sun takes a detour
to consult an Oracle. Because this is a science fiction novel, it's a
great SF set piece involving a mysterious AI. But also because this is a
science fiction story, Sun doesn't only ask about her personal ambitions.
I won't spoil the exact questions; I think the moment is better not
knowing what she'll ask. But they're science fiction questions, reader
questions, the kinds of things Elliott has been building curiosity about
for a book and a half by the time we reach that scene. Half the fun of
reading a good epic space opera is learning the mysteries hidden in the
layers of world-building. Aligning the goals of the protagonist with the
goals of the reader is a simple storytelling trick, but oh, so effective.
Structurally, this is not that great of a book. There's a lot of build-up
and only some payoff, and there were several bits I found grating. But I
am thoroughly invested in this universe now. The third book can't come
soon enough.
Followed by
Lady Chaos, which is still being written at the time of
this review.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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