Sashcracker t1_j2evfap wrote on December 31, 2022 at 7:18 PM

I've just about finished it myself and I'd recommend it but have some mixed feelings.

Pros: It sharply portrays the brutality of empire with far more accuracy than most fantasy. There are the massacres, unequal treaties, disease, and boarding schools to eradicate local culture, yet the underlying driving force of the empire is the economics. The Masquerade isn't doing these things as the "dark lord's bidding" but to secure markets and strategic interests. And ultimately it's the cheap goods and bank loans that buy compliance from local elites.

It's almost as good in portraying armies, including the rebels, as hungry and vicious, living off the peasantry while dying of disease. The battles, like in real life, are a culmination of months of maneuver and logistics.

This all gives the main characters their hard decisions and internal conflicts. Do you fight for position within the empire or risk it all and rebel, plunging the land you want to save into war and famine? Do you rally the local nobility against the empire or rally the peasants those nobles exploit? Do the peasants back the nobles who directly exploit them but share a culture or back the empire that gives them some alternative but tears apart their traditions? No one has easy answers and there's a bitter thought in the back of their minds that even if they win a rebellion, the life they lived before being conquered is gone and irretrievable.

Cons: Despite all this, every main character is an imperial bureaucrat or local noble. The broad mass of people who's lives have been overturned remain firmly in the background. Occasionally they cheer this or that lord, but mostly they fight and die with their loyalty bought and sold in courtly intrigues. In real life the local social crises caused by imperialism saw bandit kings, religious movements, and other opposition erupt outside the local elites. As disorganized as these often were the local population weren't just pawns to be sacrificed. They had their own conceptions that nobles ignored at their peril.

A minor spoiler here, is that the empire itself ends up being a front for an illuminati style conspiracy which just undermines the rest of the book's emphasis on clashing economic systems and mass social upheaval. Instead the cryptarchy is somehow above it all. Thankfully they only play a very minor part in the book and can be ignored.

boxer_dogs_dance OP t1_j2eykgf wrote on December 31, 2022 at 7:40 PM

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. The only thing I would add and the reason I stressed dystopian fiction is that some of the behavior and requirements of the empire are culturally specific, arbitrary and intrusive in ways that remind me of the Handmaid's tale, or Mao's cultural revolution. It is an abusive eugenicist government that also fosters economic prosperity.

Sashcracker t1_j2fw0fa wrote on December 31, 2022 at 11:47 PM

I think the direct inspiration for the Masquerade policies is closer than you might think. In its origins the author draws from the French Revolution that swept aside a decadent and cruel nobility, was quickly at war with all of Europe, and sought to rationalize society (that's where we get things like the metric system). The bureaucratic exam system is drawn from imperial China. But the Masquerade's actions are drawn more from British imperialism. The US, Britain, Australia, Canada had very influential eugenics movements that included migration controls, forced sterilization of convicts and under slavery forced breeding. They used boarding schools to "civilize" indigenous populations that included horrendous abuse and the calculated destruction of local culture.

This is part of the underlying tension of both real history and the book. On the one hand there's technological progress, the universalizing impact of imperialism. All of a sudden, disparate people are united with a common language, their horizons are expanded to all corners of the globe, but it's brought about through the brutal destruction of everything they once cherished, against their wishes, and done for someone else's profit.

Baru Cormorant isn't so much about a possible dystopia but the actual foundations of the modern world. Putting it in a fantasy setting just let's us explore the ideas with less of the raw pain history can carry.

boxer_dogs_dance OP t1_j2fwyng wrote on December 31, 2022 at 11:54 PM

Thank you. I knew most of that, but the genital mutilation and a few other things were extra special. The book seems deeply and widely sourced and I appreciated the perspective of the colonized. Another recent book that provides an often unseen perspective is the Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It's now in my top five books ever.