Heavenly Tyrant
Having enjoyed Iron Widow last year, and following a bit of the author’s issues with getting published and getting advances and all that fun stuff, I was really looking forward to the second book of his series.
I probably should have reread book 1 before going into book 2 since its been at least 6 months, but I couldn’t help myself and besides, I was next on queue on Libby. So I jumped right in and boy, was it a bit of a rough ride in the beginning. It basically starts you off right at the end of book 1, with no recap or anything, so I was basically swimming in details I’ve long forgotten. Like who’s the main character, and what was she doing and why was she doing what she’s doing…it gradually came back to me, but this is just a caveat to others that you really probably should reread the first book before jumping into the second book.
In any case, the second book suffers a bit from most sophomore efforts, in that the first book was really tight, really had a good pace and a good sense of action from exposition, and the second book is now bogged down in a lot of exposition and a lot less action. The author’s agenda comes through much more so in this book than the last, equality, unfairness, and all that, and even if the author doesn’t believe in some of these himself, its still a bit of a bog in the middle of the book. The protagonist has unpended the world order and now comes the hard part of holding on to power and perhaps helping their own situations.
The bulk of the second book is dealing with the now resurrected old emperor, whose power level is so high that despite 200 years of being in deep sleep, he’s single handedly capable of beating entire teams of mech handlers by himself. The protagonist, already one of the more powerful in the modern times couldn’t believe his strength and is forced to submit to him.
A lot of changes happen and a lot of exposition as the protagonist, now the empress to the old/new emperor has to live with this power dynamic and also deal with how he wants to bring his world view to fruition.
Then there’s the old shanara trick of “this world isn’t really what it seems, and its really a spaceship!” surprise comes to bear as well. This was well hinted at in the first book, so perhaps its no surprise, but once again, alot of this information comes through via exposition rather than being given to the readers in a fairly digestable format.
All in all, its a solid sophomore effort. I will read book 3, but hope that its a lot less politicking, but I don’t really have that much of a high hope for that.