clew's reviews: a book log

Dread Empire's Fall: The Sundering, Walter Jon Williams

The ponderous constructs of the first installment are gathering speed—falling downhill, maybe, like a crate of anvils from Acme Co.

Williams is doing at least one clever, history-minded, contrarian thing with his bag of Space Opera parts. His aristocracy is a dragging bane on its society, wasteful of everything, even the talents of the aristocrats. His main characters, each clawing their way to higher status, are not kindly or enlightened except when it pays. But they aren't melodrama villains either; nor is there a pornographic tone of 'Vicious them! how virtuous us!' to the narrative. Williams lets his aristocracy convict itself without pretending that most people would do better in the same circumstances. This is rather like Anthony Trollope's assessments of character.

It is totally unlike the current trend in SF&F aristocrats, which makes its aristocrats likeable and virtuous by our standards while they prance around in all the unearned advantages of theirs. Elizabeth Moon does some of this, although her society is threatening to break down under it. A. J. Hall, who has written an elegant fanfic crossing Lois McMaster Bujold's characters with the Harry Potter ones, gravely dislikes Elli Quinn for a related reason. If remember Hall's argument correctly, she finds it disgusting that Quinn pitched someone else out of life-support when Miles Vorkosigan needed it. Me, I agree it might have been a morally disgusting action, but not Quinn's fault more than the Vorkosigans'. First, that seems like the usual deal for either a mercenary soldier or a feudal vassal. That's why they guard the hiring general. Like a henhouse rooster, they are to die noisily and valiantly—but first. Second, Miles is by assumption a genius at tactics and strategy, and his survival presumably saves more soldiers than one.¹ Third, to rejoin my original thoughts about depictions of aristocracy, the Vorkosigans have other people do their dirty work all the time. Then they get props not just for getting the work done, but for forgiving the doer. This may be an accurate view of the emotional billing-system of inherited power, but I can't gloss over it nearly as well as Bujold seems to.

In Williams' defense, thinking historically, I should point out that Jeffery Farnol has nice nobles, but he's Edwardian/modern as well as escapist. G. A. Henty characters take advantage of their own enlisted men. Don Quixote laughingly beats up on all slow-footed peasantry, as do the gallant rogues who are lieutenants to Magistrate Bao.

Williams' protagonists fight for unfair advantage but are conscious of it. The smartest one, having finally won a job that lets her commit war profiteering with inside knowledge, thinks to herself that now she really feels like a Peer. That's the true-quill early nineteenth century speaking.

¹ I might disapprove of this application of utilitarianism, but I'd still distinguish between Quinn a Bad Person and Quinn being the sharp end of a value system shared by the Good characters. Should Quinn have whined and suffered more? Ick; like the walrus hiding behind his handkerchief.

ISBN: 0-380-82021-8