We start with a story that the main character (and sole point of view), Hadrian Marlowe, is recounting: his life story after he has achieved the notoriety of being named “Sun Eater”, due to his having destroyed a sun, killing millions of enemy aliens. But that story is not part of this book (presumably we won’t get to that until the final volume of the series). Instead, we hear about Hadrian’s early days, as a son of a planetary ruler within a galactic empire. Unfortunately, the “galactic” part is not too important (yet) because much of the science fiction in this book is decorative. It doesn’t really rely on scientific ideas to tell the story of a dissatisfied rich young man who wants to escape his terribly unloving father and his father’s self-serving plans. As a result, there is some space travel but this is no space opera. We only use spaceships to get Hadrian from one imperial planet to another. I’m not even really sure why that was needed for the story, as the two planets seem very similar. Both are ruled by futuristic Roman-based aristocracies with their patrician rulers, and bothfeature gladiatorial coliseums for entertainment of the spoiled wealthy. What are the chances, right? The main alien enemy, the Cielcin, also didn’t seem very alien. They may have pale skin, they’re tall, and they have horns, but they’re fellow humanoids (and Hadrian can even speak their language, so they can communicate). Compared to other exotic sci-fi aliens, including Andy Weir’s “Rocky” (IYKYK), the Cielcin seem more like mere foreigners — galactic “out of towners” — rather than inscrutable extraplanetary beings.

Noble houses ruling a galactic empire, and their main scion having to struggle with his own identity, also sounds a lot like Dune. They use genetic manipulation to “grow” our main character; fights are often single hand-to-hand combat with personal shields for defence from attacks. Their empire even frowns upon “thinking machines”! Throw in a few giant worms and space nuns and we may have a plagiarism case to argue.

The first-person perspective might be considered a strength of this book, but to me it was a weakness due to the fact that we are only given Hadrian’s perspective and experience everything and everyone in his thoughts (and his language). I don’t know whether the language used is the choice of author Christopher Ruocchio imagining words that a character like Hadrian would actually use. Or is this the author’s own language and his using Hadrian’s thoughts as a mask and mouthpiece for himself. Unfortunately, I found his way of describing most things to be overwrought, like a child discovering “big words” for the first time and wanting to use them as much as possible. It also resembled the heightened emotions of teenagers who feel like everything is intense, glorious, tragic, and all-round melodramatic. Unfortunately I didn’t write down any quotes to prove my point partly because they came up so frequently (but also because I was listening to the audiobook and it was difficult to memorize lines as I was walking). One example that stood out to me was admittedly a pretty intense scene, but after already going through a lot of high-key questioning of an alien prisoner, lots of aggressive exchange, Hadrian asks an important question. It took a moment for it to respond, but it was really quick and not even a new paragraph, but Hadrian recalls “There was silence for a moment, terrible as the death of stars”. That simile was out of proportion and huge. It begged in me the question, If this is how you characterize something relatively simple, what imagery will you have left for the major, epic moments presumably still to come? And I wasn’t looking forward to reading volume after volume of this. I’m hoping the writing gets better as we go.

My other gripe is about the audiobook narrator. He had a great voice, with a nice British accent. I found him easy to understand. Unfortunately, with the already pretentious prose described above, it distracted me repeatedly that the narrator mispronounced a number of words. They were not insignificant ones, especially in this story, and they seemed to draw attention to Ruocchio’s having a bigger vocabulary than the narrator. So when he pronounced “plebeian” (a word that comes up a lot) as “pleb-bian” rather than “pluh-bee-an”, that bothered me. Each time he mispronounced words like “ululate” or “stymie” (or in one of the appendices the word “demesne” came up many times) it felt like Ruocchio was trying to sound literate by using these big words, but the narrator was failing him by mispronouncing them. It subconsciously suggested that Ruocchio’s writing was not sophisticated enough to be using those words.

All complaints aside, I don’t think this book was terrible. I just wish that it had been much better: fresher, more interesting, better written, and more engaging. I can see exciting things to come, and there are hints in this book of some potentially fascinating story elements that could be explored. There is so much positive hype out there for this story and I want to experience more of that enjoyment. Hopefully the next volumes will be even better. (3 out of 5)

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