Book completed
Mar. 6th, 2023 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeEmpire of Silence, by Christopher Ruocchio. I hadn't heard of this author until he was recommended by a friend of a friend, at that Western-themed birthday party we went to back in November, and then when I got the first book in his series from the library it was dauntingly long. Well, I've been reading lots of 600+ page books in 2023 so far, and now I've read this one too, and I plan to get the next one in the series from the library, because it was great.
Some 16,000 years in the future, humanity lives on a great many planets, but the core religion for those in the Empire is the eventual return to our now-ruined Earth. Hadrian Marlowe is telling his story - his father decides he's not brutal enough to inherit the family's aristocratic power, so he's going to send Hadrian off to be a priest in that Earth religion, but it operates through torture and propaganda, while Hadrian wants to be an explorer and scholar. Naturally he runs away, but his plans go jarringly awry.
Hadrian is telling us this story from much later in his life (aristocrats are genetically designed to live for hundreds of years), and he hints at the reputation he's going to gain as someone who's been a major disruptor of the system. He's obviously a good person, though he's quite a young adult and makes some mistakes - but he learns from them. He's also a great storyteller, and he's got a great story to tell. This first book in the series is a pleasure to read, and if you like science fiction where the science that's actually addressed is mostly social science*, I definitely recommend it.
* Archaeology and I suppose linguistics are addressed explicitly, but my own field of worldviews and their psychology is a major underlying theme.
Some 16,000 years in the future, humanity lives on a great many planets, but the core religion for those in the Empire is the eventual return to our now-ruined Earth. Hadrian Marlowe is telling his story - his father decides he's not brutal enough to inherit the family's aristocratic power, so he's going to send Hadrian off to be a priest in that Earth religion, but it operates through torture and propaganda, while Hadrian wants to be an explorer and scholar. Naturally he runs away, but his plans go jarringly awry.
Hadrian is telling us this story from much later in his life (aristocrats are genetically designed to live for hundreds of years), and he hints at the reputation he's going to gain as someone who's been a major disruptor of the system. He's obviously a good person, though he's quite a young adult and makes some mistakes - but he learns from them. He's also a great storyteller, and he's got a great story to tell. This first book in the series is a pleasure to read, and if you like science fiction where the science that's actually addressed is mostly social science*, I definitely recommend it.
* Archaeology and I suppose linguistics are addressed explicitly, but my own field of worldviews and their psychology is a major underlying theme.