Review: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Blurb:
Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.
It was not his war.
On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders.
But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.
Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fighting a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Review:
If you’ve been on the hunt for a memoir written by an intergalactic war criminal, then you’ve come to the right place.
Empire of Silence, in a similar vein to The Kingkiller Chronicle, begins the story of a man who destroyed the sun, killed four billion people, and wiped an entire alien race from the face of the galaxy. All that’s missing is the lute-playing and the student loan payments. If this sounds like “Kingkiller but in space,” then you’re correct, but Empire of Silence more than adequately stands on its own two feet and sets the stage for what is sure to be an epic story.
Written in-universe as the memoir of Hadrian Marlowe, this first volume in the Sun Eater series details the years before the man became infamous throughout the galaxy. Hadrian is the son of a lord who is passed over as heir and replaced instead by his inept younger brother. Instructed instead by his father to join the Chantry, a sect of zealous interrogators, he is instead secreted away with the help of his mother to become a scholiast in the footsteps of his mentor. When he is put in a cryo-sleep on his journey, he fully expects to wake up years later at his intended destination.
Naturally, things do not quite go as planned, and Hadrian finds himself abandoned on a backwater planet with none of his possessions and not a clue of what year it is. For three years, Hadrian is reduced to little more than a beggar and thief, and it is in these softer and more muted moments that Empire of Silence really shines. Ruocchio’s prose and characters carry a lot of weight in this book, that even when the tension is slow to build and events slower to follow, the remarkable characterization of the world through Hadrian’s eyes allows each chapter to be a page turner.
The journey from here, though, at times feels a bit disjointed. Hadrian jumps from street urchin to gladiator to language teacher for a noble family to interrogator over the span of this book, and while each section of the story was enjoyable, the transition from section to section was sometimes abrupt and other times did not take its time to properly marinate. It gives the impression that these could have been a collection of smaller stories, but were mashed together into one narrative. It’s a dense, spaghetti-on-the-wall approach that does not always land.
Though that can be to the plot’s detriment, it helps immensely that Hadrian’s account is supported by remarkable world-building that simultaneously feels expansive and closely intimate. We are aware of the vastness of the galaxy, a supposed alien threat, prejudices and misconceptions, and at the same time we’re allowed to explore the universe on the small level. Ruocchio absolutely excels at displaying the vastness of humanity against the vastness of the universe, and it is thanks to this that no matter how far this universe expands, it never feels overwhelming or overbearing. At its core, this is an epic that manages to remain grounded, which is no small feat.
Though there are missteps along the way, Empire of Silence is an excellent first entry in the Sun Eater series, lifted by deep worldbuilding, wonderful prose, and memorable characters. If you enjoyed Kingkiller, Dune, or Red Rising, you’re going to find a lot to like here. We know where Hadrian is going to wind up in the end – and I for one can’t wait to see how he gets there.
