Empress of Forever
Ratings20
Average rating3.5
“A classic space opera...a universe we’ve never seen before.” —Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author From Hugo Award finalist Max Gladstone comes a smart, swashbuckling, wildly imaginative adventure; the saga of a rag-tag team of brilliant misfits, dangerous renegades, and enhanced outlaws in a war-torn future. A wildly successful innovator to rival Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, Vivian Liao is prone to radical thinking, quick decision-making, and reckless action. On the eve of her greatest achievement, she tries to outrun people who are trying to steal her success. In the chilly darkness of a Boston server farm, Viv sets her ultimate plan into motion. A terrifying instant later, Vivian Liao is catapulted through space and time to a far future where she confronts a destiny stranger and more deadly than she could ever imagine. The end of time is ruled by an ancient, powerful Empress who blesses or blasts entire planets with a single thought. Rebellion is literally impossible to consider--until Vivian Liao arrives. Trapped between the Pride—a ravening horde of sentient machines—and a fanatical sect of warrior monks who call themselves the Mirrorfaith, Viv must rally a strange group of allies to confront the Empress and find a way back to the world and life she left behind. A magnificent work of vivid imagination and universe-spanning action, Empress of Forever is a feminist Guardians of the Galaxy crossed with Star Wars and spiced with the sensibility and spirit of Iain M. Banks and William Gibson.
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Another book where the major voice is the main character psychoanalyzing herself. There's slightly more excuse for it here that in many books but still it means whenever you're in danger of empathizing with her she steps in and does it for you. Combine that with merely ok worldbuilding that throws too much ultratech around for you to care about any of it and at 80% I check out because I have stuff I could reread that is much better.
This is a very imaginative book and it pushes boundaries between sci-fi and fantasy. I think it's a fantasy disguised as sci-fi. There are cool elements like the order of the cyborg monks, the pilots of Orn, The Cloud and Zang, the Pirate Queen (who was my favorite character).??
There were some downsides that kept me from enjoying it more, like:
- the overuse of metaphors/imagery: descriptions were too abstract most of the time for my brain to picture locations and even character appearance.
- some incomprehensible action scenes: I had difficulty visualizing and understanding what was happening.??
- there were no clear rules for the world: what were the limits of space travel? how things and people could change sizes and shapes???
- I couldn't see a sense of threat in the story. Nobody seemed to be in real danger because everyone was so overpowerful, including The Empress.??
- Characters' motivations were unclear to me: what were their goals?
??- What happened in the end?? Did Earth exist? Was it all a simulation?? What happened to the Empress of the future??
- Why the Empress created Viv simulation???
- Who created The Cloud??
- Who were The Bleed????
So, I feel like I should have been enjoying more than I have. The premise was cool, but I felt it was overdone and got lost in the abstract world.
