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
Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 70th Game WISH column:
Have you ever played in a game that has challenged you in some way?
What was the challenge? Do you think you lived up to it? How did it
affect other games you play/have played?
Yes and no. I've never found playing a character to be anywhere near as challenging as running an entire game, so when I think about challenges in combination with role playing games, I skitter away from characters I have played to games I have run. Still, trying to exclude that baggage, yes, there have been challenging characters for me. Unsurprisingly, they're the ones I remember most fondly.
Nereus was an Amber character I remarked on in my old Neverness column (which might some day have its archives put up somewhere else, but I digress....) Nereus was pure, undiluted scheming nastiness. I'm scheming nastiness, too, but Nerueus wouldn't just sit around and think evil thoughts, Nereus would actually go out and do evil things to people who were foolish enough to care for him or trust him-- Nereus had a purpose.
For the brief time that I played him, it was tough to treat those wonderfully evil schemes not as a mental pressure valve, but as actual things to be done. That was a challenge.
Brennan, in House of Cards, is also challenging, but the challenges are subtler. Brennan is the first Amber character I've tried to play as a shade-of-grey character, rather than a pure hero or a pure villain. I don't know, but I don't think I'm succeeding there, just yet. I suppose he might need an opportunity to make a hard choice for a greater purpose.
Brennan is also the first character I've played that ever had a romantic entanglement-- this is an extreme challenge for me, because I as a person am very private about my love life. Even writing up a fictional account for a character is an effort. And worse, the object of Brennan's affections often comes across as unreadable. It's an effort, but it's been a valuable and worthwhile one.
And finally, Brennan is the first time I've really made an effort to play a character who is five hundred years old, but vital and in his prime, expecting to live another five thousand years unless he does something stupid. That's got to give you a much different perspective than a thirty-something guy tapping away at a computer terminal. If someone were to tell me that Brennan sometimes reads like he confuses the concepts of "a month from now" with "twenty years from now," or that he jumps from details to the overarcing concerns without any warning, I'd fall over in shocked happiness.
I don't think it comes through, though.
So much for playing challenges. Running games, though, are entirely different. I can't think of a game I've run in the last twenty years that wasn't a challenge in at least one way. They're all challenging. And there's so many challenges in running a game....
So I'll talk a little about gaming in general while I talk about In Media Res, my Nobilis game. Nobilis is... a vast, vast setting. As vast as Amber, in some way, because they all have the capacity to travel to the ends of the earth and beyond, often with only a moderate effort. My ideal game to run is one that is at least half player directed, if not more. I like having the players come up not only with their own plans, but their own goals and objectives, as well.
The problem with that, though, is that most game worlds worth playing in are very large canvasses, and to an extent, before the game is really in swing, those canvasses appear mostly blank to the players. It's an imposig challenge as players in a GM-designed world, starting from scratch and getting a purpose in life. Sometimes, if all the players are well-coordinated with the GM, and they are all happy wth developed-at-start characters, this can happen.
Often not, though.
The alternative, though, is a string of "adventures," putting the characters through their paces every so often, setting up risks and rewards. This is okay for some games, but it just felt deeply deeply wrong for a setting like Nobilis. The characters are demigods. They should be self-directed, to a degree.
So the challenege in IMR-- and I've thought long and hard about it-- has been to create a background that has a richness to it waiting to be discovered, but also has a compelling enough introduction storyline (or in IMR's case, storylines) to get them out in the world without feeling badgered and beaten and railroaded.
It's certainly not an easy thing to do, but given the feedback I've had from some of my players, I think I'm doing a reasonable job. Another six months and I should know for sure. The first part was sticking the players and their characters with a long-term but vitally important problem to solve. In this case, their Imperator has been gravely wounded and is dying. Something obviously needs to be done about that-- still, to throw the characters into that situation alone can be a little railroading. The only way to get them started would be to throw Plot Coupons at them right and left, and before we're done, the game might lapse into a series of glorified Object Quests.
So there also is a more immediate story going on around them, whether they want it to or not, and that's been drawing them in as well. This gives the players the ability to get their feet wet in the world, so to speak, to stretch their wings and see what's out there. It gives them a chance to see other Nobilis engaged in the art of Nobles-- doing what they do on a day to day basis, and so forth. It also gives me the opportunity to slip a few Plot Coupons into the picture that might be helpful for their overall problem, without it seeming like I'm beating them over the head.
And if in that time, they come up with different approaches to the problem... so much the better.
It has been a definite challenge, but so far I'm quite pleased with the efforts. Every once in a while, I get a game that goes unambiguously right. This is one of those games. It's the result of a previous failure that had me sitting back on my heels wondering what the Hell had gone so horribly wrong. It's taught me a hell of a lot, that's certain.