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mnkeemagick 's review for:
Empire of Silence
by Christopher Ruocchio
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I found this book to be a bit of a drag if I'm honest. A friend recommended it, and while I have my issues, they aren't so severe that I won't finish the series out.
**SPOILER REVIEW BELOW**
TLDR: I found this book to be a bit contrived, the world building and backstory are almost direct rip offs of Dune, and a lot of the points have been done better by other authors. The wording is ham fisted and melodramatic in its attempts to be a higher form of prose.
**SPOLIER REVIEW**
To start, I've heard a lot of people say there are homages to a lot of other major literary works throughout, the big 2 being Dune and Name of the Wind. In all honesty, these felt less like honorable references and verge heavily on being rip offs. The first 100 pages could easily have been lifted from the introduction of Dune.
He's the young son of an intergalactic impirial aristocrat whose family focuses on mining rare materials, is trained in hand to hand, blade focused combat to account for the use of personal shields, his mentor is a human super computer necessitated by a heavy restriction on technology, and was initially meant to be given over to a religious order that is adjacent to the state before carving his own path through combat. There are so many things lifted straight from Herbert. They even go so far as to barely change Dune's famous mantra "Fear is the mind killer" to simply "Fear is a poison" for fucks sake.
After his ultimate ousting in the introduction, we fall into the living as a street urchin on a backwater planet, which is where the Kingkiller aspects come in. It's very reminiscent of Kvothe's time as a homeless child, though doesn't rip off to the same degree. Just a lot of beats I've seen before, and better. The prose is mentioned a lot in these comparisons as well, but I honestly found it tedious. Trying to hard to sound profound and flowery rather than that being the natural style, made all the more frustrating by the meta callouts about Hadrian sounding melodramatic.
The story begins to come into its own eventually, branching off into what I feel could have been an alternate universe Dune story taking place in other parts of the universe. Another young noble with a heart of gold and seemingly the only person of any station to recognize and care for the plight of the people and power structures therein as he tries to navigate the world.
One of my biggest quandries is that so many of his post-aristocrat struggles feel manufactured for the plot. He's literally superhuman, grown in a vat with modified genes to make him near perfect. He speaks several languages, has the education of an aristocrat, is one of the best duelists that we see or know of in the galaxy even as a young man, and the best he can do is scrounge for food and beg for money. Until he remembers advice given to him by a wise older man he met as an urchin, again, reminiscent of Kingkiller. There are attempts to make him more grounded, more tangible, but it honestly just falls flat with rhe decisions he makes or the events he lucks himself in to. Things will either go his way or fall to pieces as the plot demands.
I understand not taking on a major role or any very official work as he's hiding from his family, but surely there was something he could have done besides eventually robbing convenience stores until he remembers he's an incredible duelist and joins the coliseum. After all he just kind of shrugs and takes the risk anyway to join the myrmidons. He does it again by flouting his status to try to hustle a ship and that's not even what gets him caught.
Finally, there are a lot of plot threads that either wrap up with seemingly no trouble where there should be, or don't wrap up at all. Maybe there'll be more on it in future installments, but for now we don't know what happened to his original plan, how things progressed to land him in the situation he's in, or any additional information about his family after his disappearance.
There's promise here, but I've honestly seen most of this done better in other works. The primordial alien species that humans are trying to understand is probably the most interesting part and again it isn't new.
I'll be continuing the series at the behest of my friend, who is giving me their copies for free. I wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't recommend against it necessarily. I would probably just borrow it from your local library rather than buying a copy.
**SPOILER REVIEW BELOW**
TLDR: I found this book to be a bit contrived, the world building and backstory are almost direct rip offs of Dune, and a lot of the points have been done better by other authors. The wording is ham fisted and melodramatic in its attempts to be a higher form of prose.
**SPOLIER REVIEW**
To start, I've heard a lot of people say there are homages to a lot of other major literary works throughout, the big 2 being Dune and Name of the Wind. In all honesty, these felt less like honorable references and verge heavily on being rip offs. The first 100 pages could easily have been lifted from the introduction of Dune.
He's the young son of an intergalactic impirial aristocrat whose family focuses on mining rare materials, is trained in hand to hand, blade focused combat to account for the use of personal shields, his mentor is a human super computer necessitated by a heavy restriction on technology, and was initially meant to be given over to a religious order that is adjacent to the state before carving his own path through combat. There are so many things lifted straight from Herbert. They even go so far as to barely change Dune's famous mantra "Fear is the mind killer" to simply "Fear is a poison" for fucks sake.
After his ultimate ousting in the introduction, we fall into the living as a street urchin on a backwater planet, which is where the Kingkiller aspects come in. It's very reminiscent of Kvothe's time as a homeless child, though doesn't rip off to the same degree. Just a lot of beats I've seen before, and better. The prose is mentioned a lot in these comparisons as well, but I honestly found it tedious. Trying to hard to sound profound and flowery rather than that being the natural style, made all the more frustrating by the meta callouts about Hadrian sounding melodramatic.
The story begins to come into its own eventually, branching off into what I feel could have been an alternate universe Dune story taking place in other parts of the universe. Another young noble with a heart of gold and seemingly the only person of any station to recognize and care for the plight of the people and power structures therein as he tries to navigate the world.
One of my biggest quandries is that so many of his post-aristocrat struggles feel manufactured for the plot. He's literally superhuman, grown in a vat with modified genes to make him near perfect. He speaks several languages, has the education of an aristocrat, is one of the best duelists that we see or know of in the galaxy even as a young man, and the best he can do is scrounge for food and beg for money. Until he remembers advice given to him by a wise older man he met as an urchin, again, reminiscent of Kingkiller. There are attempts to make him more grounded, more tangible, but it honestly just falls flat with rhe decisions he makes or the events he lucks himself in to. Things will either go his way or fall to pieces as the plot demands.
I understand not taking on a major role or any very official work as he's hiding from his family, but surely there was something he could have done besides eventually robbing convenience stores until he remembers he's an incredible duelist and joins the coliseum. After all he just kind of shrugs and takes the risk anyway to join the myrmidons. He does it again by flouting his status to try to hustle a ship and that's not even what gets him caught.
Finally, there are a lot of plot threads that either wrap up with seemingly no trouble where there should be, or don't wrap up at all. Maybe there'll be more on it in future installments, but for now we don't know what happened to his original plan, how things progressed to land him in the situation he's in, or any additional information about his family after his disappearance.
There's promise here, but I've honestly seen most of this done better in other works. The primordial alien species that humans are trying to understand is probably the most interesting part and again it isn't new.
I'll be continuing the series at the behest of my friend, who is giving me their copies for free. I wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't recommend against it necessarily. I would probably just borrow it from your local library rather than buying a copy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Torture, Violence, Xenophobia, Blood, Abandonment, Alcohol, Colonisation, Classism