The Killing Of Worlds
Scott Westerfeld, 2003
Two Line Summary: This is the second half of the novel that began in The Risen Empire. It's light, fast-reading space opera with lots of action and fun stuff.
Quick Rating: Well, it's still good clean fun, like the first half of this unfairly bipartite novel, but it's got some serious editting problems and, uh, some serious problems.
The first half of the book is reviewed here:
Now, since my review of the first half of this novel started out with a bitter note on the subject of proper labelling of books, as they relate to series, I feel it only fair to uphold the form here.
Why was this published as two volumes? It's likely from the publication dates that the whole manuscript was complete, and each volume is only three hundred pages or so. Six hundred pages isn't a particularly long book, these days. Nor did the previous volume end at a logical stopping point.
A cynical reader might wonder if he's being manipulated not only into buying a series, through bad labelling, but into a series with an artificially inflated number of volumes, to boot.
That said, there's also a nice bit of structure and symmetry to the two volumes. Both are dominated in the beginning by a high tech battle scene; both grdually arc out into current events in the Imperial Capital and into flashbacks that explain how the major players got to be where they are.
There's a lot of good in this volume (just like the first one) but there's a lot more in this one that's bad, too. Without rehashing too much of the first volume's review, or spoiling it too much, I'll try to summarize both.
The good is that the action sequences are fast paces and relatively smooth-flowing. I usually glaze over in detailed battle sequences, but Westerfeld seems to have a good ear for it. This book opens up with a very long sequence of ship to ship combat pitting our heroes of the Risen Empire against a Rix battlecruiser. The heroes are easily outgunned, but they have more limited victory conditions. There are a few moments of artificial tension, in my opinion, but not too many, and I was kept turning pages to see how things would come out.
Because it was a space battle where inertia and reaction mass counted, much of the tension was of the form where protagonist Captain Laurent Zai would size up the immediate situation, make a decision, watch the difficulty of implementing it... and then we'd all wait to see the results, since the antagonists were doing likewise. A series of desperate gambles on each side, made better because at a tactical level, neither side were fools.
Another good point is that even though this is grand, sweeping space opera it never quite descended into monochromicity, with simple good guys and bad guys. The Risen Empire is not a monolithic block. Its Emperor is not the unchallenged Emperor of many other such vistas, but contends with a Senate that has real authority and real politics. It is, as the fictional historic excerpt from the prlogue notes, fundamentally a class struggle in a society that somewhat makes sense.
Refreshing, in space opera.
On the other hand, the bad points. First and most obvious, the book is really badly editted. Although there's a tragic case of their/there confusion that a copy editor (or a word processor) should have caught rather easily, someone with even a high school science education should have proofread this. Combat lasers, for instance, probably want to be rated in some number of watts, not some number of bits. Certainly not THREE TIMES. Likewise, 522 is not 2 to the 9th power.
These are really jarring errors, and I don't recall anything comparable in the first volume.
Second, through the first volume and much of the second, we're really beaten over the head that the Emperor has a Secret. Yes, it's so important, it's not only Capitalized in the Text, but the Emperor's quasi-religious staff are memetically conditioned to go into spasms of pain when it's brought up. Because, like, the best way to keep attention away from a secret is to have your highest servants start foaming at the mouth every time you mention the words 'Emperor' and 'Secret' in the same sentence....
That's silly, but it's a space opera-ish enough concept that I was ready to run with it. Sadly, the secret-- excuse me, Secret-- once revealed, is far less interesting than what I thought was going on.
And finally... at a larger level, the two books just don't make sense. I cannot make any sense out of the larger plan of the Rix. There doesn't seem to be anything they achieved by their actions that could not have been achieved with less risk and cost in some other perfectly sensible fashion. Not only that, but while the Rix tactics make a certain sense, later revelations cause their overall strategy to make no sense at all-- just none whatsoever.
When I initially put the book down, I was very happy and satisfied with it. The more I think about it, though, the less I like it. The individual scenes are good, but the whole sequence of two books adds up to a big, "Huh?"
I'm probably going to read the next boo
Posted by John Novak at October 28, 2003 09:59 PM