clever prologue, cast as an excerpt from a future history book, brings the new reader up to date (and refreshes the memory of those lucky enough to have climbed onboard earlier) on the events that occurred in The Risen Empire, the first book in Westerfeld's Succession series. A polity of 80 worlds, ruled by the Undead Emperor (some 1,600 years old, and counting), is at war with the Rix, the human minions of their godlike AIs, known as compound minds. On the forefront of the war is Capt. Laurent Zai, whose ship, the Lynx, is in the star system of Legis, dealing with a compound mind takeover of that human world. Back at Home, the center of the Empire, Zai's lover, Senator Nara Oxham, walks a tightrope between loyalty to the emperor and her constituents and to Zai and the possibility of rebellion. Meanwhile, on Legis, the last Rix warrior surviving from the initial assault, an augmented woman named Herd, seeks to help the newborn AI named Alexander escape the clutches of the Empire.
As the action of the current book begins, Zai is awaiting the arrival of a huge Rix battleship that outclasses his frigate entirely. Nearly the first half of the book is taken up with the ensuing battle. Through a dramatic chain of feints, counterfeints, brute attacks and daring maneuvers, Zai and crew manage to disable the enemy ship enough to trap Alexander on Legis, at the cost of scores of dead humans and a crippled Lynx. But just as it seems that they can rest, Zai and company—including his indispensable executive officer, Katherie Hobbes—discover the Rix backup plan. Entering the Legis space is a planetoid-sized object of incredibly small mass, a construct whose like has never before been seen. The Rix have devised a protean mass of quantum material that can function as a substrate for a compound mind, replacing the planetary web of computers in which such AIs normally live. This particular cloud of devilish supersand is coming to pick up Alexander. This marks a dramatic new turn in the war, and Zai is determined not to let the Rix win such a victory.
In the Emperor's court, Nara must deal with the Machiavellian politics of the Undead, with the help of her longtime advisor Roger Niles and her mutant empathetic skills. In regular FTL contact with Zai, she learns of battlefront developments and as a pair they begin to piece together scattered bits of information that threaten to plunge the Empire into civil war. Through flashbacks, we learn more of how Zai and Nara bonded so quickly as lovers, the two damaged personalities finding in each other the perfect match.
When Zai's triumph over the space-going cloud, now bearing the Alexander personality, proves to have unexpected consequences, Nara is forced to engage in an act the Emperor deems treachery. Her only hope for surviving the imperial inquisition is to broadcast the secrets she and Zai have discovered—even at the risk of initiating a galaxywide conflict.
A Cordwainer Smith for the 21st century
Scott Westerfeld's major achievement in this series to date (the current book ends with the Lynx preparing to return to Home at sublight speeds and the Empire just starting to seethe) has been to create a poetry of forces and physics, a romance of infrastructure and technology, a ballad of science and engineering. His finely machined prose succeeds in rendering large-scale space battles and individual heroic actions (such as the superhuman exploits of Herd) into a heady ballet for the reader's mental stage. Disdaining the kind of nebulous E.E. Smith passages about "lancing rays" and "coruscating shields," (a convention that passed intact and unchanged into Star Trek and Star Wars iconography), Westerfeld digs deep down into the nitty-gritty of actual physics and biology and chemistry—some of it necessarily extrapolated—and delivers vivid, engaging descriptions of technology in action. Consider the passages that describe the damage to the Lynx when a handful of "flockers," smart pebbles, tear through the ship. The fact that Westerfeld can captivate the reader for over 100 pages of battle is no small testament to his skills.
But this is not to say he neglects his characters. Zai, Oxham and the rest all acquire more rotundity and solidity in this second installment. And Westerfeld can introduce a new character in one chapter and kill him off heroically a few pages later, yet still make you empathize with the character's essential humanity. Perhaps the most intriguing development in this volume is the change in Herd, from unquestioning, unemotional warrior to someone who loves and can weep over the death of her beloved. This is not to say Herd forgets her warrior training. The scene in which she plummets in freefall for 80 kilometers to land in a snowbank engineered to cushion her enormous momentum is pure thrills.
Westerfeld also succeeds in rendering his far-future political and cultural setup into something gloriously strange, akin to Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality.
There's a slight imbalance felt in the structure of the book. The first two-thirds is essentially one sustained episode, occupying only a day or three, while the last third has tons of wide-ranging changes crammed into it. But this is a minor quibble, and will undoubtedly be balanced by the third book to come.
