Imperator

As with my last review for this series, I really am getting the impression that each new book may end up being nothing like the last, both in style and content. This book delves deep down into some very dark corridors within the emperor’s mind, falling far more into a literary fiction category than its more commercial fiction predecessors, but in doing so it truly submerges the audience in the events that have led to the brewing war for the Republic.

So this book is entirely from the emperor’s perspective, though with multiple timelines running simultaneously. I’m just going to keep referring to him as the emperor as throughout this book (and his life in general) he has been known by many different names, but emperor is his current title in the most modern timeline. This book takes what has up until this point been an extremely enigmatic character whose backstory and motive have only really been hinted at and fleshes him out completely. We learn why the emperor is doing what he does and, possibly more importantly, how it is that he is able to achieve the outwardly supernatural abilities he brought out at the end of the Book 4. It is a veritable deep-dive into a pivotal character who otherwise was an enigma wrapped in a shadow, wrapped in power armour. As someone who is quickly coming to love this series and the universe within which it is set, this book fills in a lot of niggling story gaps. That said, the writing style does get a little jarring.

This book doesn’t simply have different chapters being from different times in the emperor’s life. It often has them within the same paragraph, maybe even the same sentence. For an extremely complex and intricate narrative, it does a hell of a job to pull this off and still make sense by the end, but oh boy does it get a little confusing in the middle. As it happens, thought, I think the confusion is actually the point. At multiple times throughout the book, the emperor recounts something and later realises that the recounting was incorrect somehow, not so much from him getting it wrong but more like he is remembering multiple parallel universes where things went differently. Again, very confusing, but again, it sort of works perfectly within the narrative of the otherworldly events that happened to the emperor. To pull a coherent narrative out of this timeline mess genuinely goes to show the quality of the writing. It’s often perplexing, but it’s meant to be, though that doesn’t stop you from still scratching your head a time or two.

One of the key parts of the book is explaining how the emperor got his powers and what exactly they are, and I am a big fan of this. Within a fantasy series, I love novel magic systems, and this is sort of one of those but within a sci-fi setting. The emperor’s powers are explained in about as much detail as we as the audience are capable of understanding because the concept itself is based outside of our limited understanding of this universe. It’s like the old adage of explaining the colour red to someone who has been blind all their lives, but Anspach and Cole do a damned good job of it. Another aspect of this book which I enjoyed no end was finally getting an explanation as to who the ‘Savages’ are and what the ‘Savage Wars’ were about. We’ve sort of had hints at who and what they were in the previous books, but now we get a full-blown rundown of who they are and how they became what they were, and honestly, I can’t wait to get stuck into the Savage War spin-off series because wow are they some truly interesting antagonists.

In summation, I felt the book was an absolutely worthwhile addition to the series, but the complex nature of the narrative and mind-twisting tribulations that the narrator himself goes through makes the book a little challenging at times, lacking the non-stop pacing that is present throughout most of the rest of the series.

As for narration, as ever R.C. Bray does an outstanding job. He manages to make one particular character whose entire vocabulary consist of a single word spoken with varying inflections be one of the best characters in the book. Great job.   

Personal Score: 4.0 stars

Professional Score: 4.0 stars

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