Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) by Richard Swan

I feel like Swan spends more time on the luscious maps at the front of his books and in whiteboarding all of the politics and descriptions of each minute province than he does on the story, and I am okay with that. It’s some in-depth, hard world-building and it really makes the various races and polities, human and otherwise, stick in the brain while reading.

And the plot itself is pretty interesting, too, don’t get me wrong. This is the first book in a sequel series to his prior Empire of the Wolf trilogy, set a few hundred years later than that trilogy and with the medieval setting replaced by a world now deep into the Age of Discovery and nascent industrialization. “What happens to magicks when the people get machines” is an interesting question, answered most successfully, to my tastes, by Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law books. But Swan is setting himself up to at least challenge that opinion, if not overtake it.

The gist is that the afterlife, which in this world is a known-real/existing thing that everybody accepts as such, is… gone. More detail than that would really enter the spoilers realm, but it’s a good hook to hang a trilogy on, I must admit.

Exacerbating things for our heroes is the fact that the first-among-equals polity they hail from, the Sovan Empire, has long since banned magick entirely outside of their military Corps of Engineers. So everybody who really knows how to even attempt to deal with this new aethereal crisis is either a foreigner (and you can guess how Sovans think of less-economically-advanced foreign nations and cultures) or a dissident.

Things go from there, with some truly creepy happenings as the mystery is investigated and whole new races and nations introduced on top of the known settings from the first trilogy. It’s a fun romp.

If there’s a weakness, it’s with the characters. The Empire of the Wolf series was served well by being told entirely from one person’s perspective well after the events actually occurred. While Helena wasn’t the strongest-written character I’ve ever read, her mentor and the actual protagonist of the series, Konrad Vonvalt, was, and her narrating what he accomplished kept things moving and memorable throughout.

Swan has gone for a larger cast and shifting perspectives in this new series, and it works well enough, but isn’t as strong a choice so far as the single-perspective of his prior works. Renata, Kleist and the others are good characters, but need more fleshing out than they get in this intro book. A lot happens to them, but the hows and whys of their reaction to events doesn’t feel entirely natural yet. That said, the multiple perspectives are pretty much demanded by the world-ranging scope of this series. It also allows for more intricate plotting, and in general I felt more engaged with the multiple threads of this book than I did in the prior trilogy which, while good overall, felt plodding at times.

Grave Empire also suffers from First Book in a Series curse, in that it’s largely scene-setting and ends hanging from a cliff. The book is entirely about defining the problem and the stakes that the later books will actually contend with. A hard problem to work around, and there’s enough happening and shocks in the plot to make the book quite entertaining, but you know the whole way through that very little is going to be settled by the end of this first volume.

That said, I’m cool with some thick world-building and scene-setting for a nice long series to come. Swan’s good at that stuff. And the plot feels like it will match the setting as well, which the first trilogy didn’t quite fully pull off. Let’s hope!