Submitted by boxer_dogs_dance t3_zzxglr in books
This book was originally mentioned to me as fantasy about rebellion. I have in the past enjoyed books like Surrender None by Elizabeth Moon which has a fantasy peasant revolt, or Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is a classic revolution in space.
I am not 100 percent sure why the book is considered fantasy, although the social structure and technology are preindustrial. However, it is 100 percent dystopia. The dominant empire is very controlling and intrusive in enforcing its ideals.
The book stands out in my experience of fantasy, or political thought experiment fiction, by locating the main character as an indigenous islander in a culture that has just been colonized. She is sent to the empire's school, and the many plot twists proceed from there.
This is a very political book with significant reference to the economic structures and relationships that makes societies function. The book has its own voice. However, there were parts of the book that reminded me of Shogun and I Claudius and Dune. The sections about war get into the action like Bernard Cornwell.
I wasn't expecting dystopia. But the book is done well, and I am intrigued by the rest of the trilogy. Someone simply looking for a pleasant escape should look elsewhere. However this book is thoroughly imagined and well written.
Sashcracker t1_j2evfap wrote
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.