My wife and kids got me a copy of book one of the Sun Eater series on a recommendation from an employee at Barnes and Noble for Father's Day. It's called "Empire of Silence" and was written by Christopher Ruocchio. I understand this was his debut book and it's a pretty epic and engaging space opera weighing in at near six-hundred pages.
The book pulled me in pretty steadily but really grabbed me about halfway through. I literally read the last half of the book in a day. I was bored and stressed, too, so there's that...but the fact that I did that is still a pretty strong accolade for its quality. And, for what it's worth, I went ahead and ordered the next volume of the series, "Howling Dark," from Amazon when I was only about a third of the way through the book. I'll read it soon.
The main character, Hadrian Marlowe, is likeable and it's easy to get vested in his strife and in his successes. It almost seemed to me, at times, that there were too many obstacles to what he was trying to do....machinations on the part of the author to keep the story going...to pack more in...but, in retrospect, I don't feel like any of it was extraneous. There's a ton of content in this book, but the ins-and-outs of the series of events actually build character for its characters and depth to the story which is the whole point after all.
About halfway through the book or so, Hadrian meets a lady named Valka who he steadily falls in love with. The prose around that meeting and around the later events that drew them closer is quite touching. It's difficult to write about love in a fresh and unique way since it has been written about by so many authors over so many years. Ruocchio pulls it off with style, though.
The scope of "Empire of Silence" is pretty daunting, but in a good way. I would never admonish a book for being long...so long as it is good, more book is a good thing. The series must be well over three-thousand pages, though...perhaps more than four thousand? I'm not sure. The author is setting the table for a lot of events, and I'm interested to see where he goes with this. I was surprised more than once throughout the course of this volume, I must say. That's a good thing. It helps keep the reader pulled in.
Hadrian has a falling out with his father, who is a noble, in part due to succession, but, more directly, due to Hadrian's not being who his father had hoped for him to be. Hadrian was being himself, and his father wanted someone different. This creates tensions with Hadrian's younger brother, Crispin, which resonates throughout much of the novel. Rather than comply with his father's planned retribution against Hadrian, Hadrian escapes his home planet with a bunch of rogue spacefaring folk who, due to a series of events not entirely disclosed, end up not making the trip all of the way to their destination and dump him in the streets of a random world on the way, Emesh.
On this world, Hadrian struggles in the streets for a number of years and ultimately ends up having to enlist himself in the Colosso...a colosseum-like battle arena where he can earn money for fighting. He had designs to buy a ship and escape once again from his circumstances, though it never materializes in the way that he hoped.
I'd be remiss for not sharing some excerpts from the prose, which is excellent throughout. Here's one quote: "A world is large, a solar system larger still. However close the war truly was, Emesh was unscarred. Strange, the way the larger world casts its shadow on our own, our moments fleeting and small when measured against the roaring thrust of time."
And one more quote I particularly liked is as follows: "No. Stories are not subject to Time, Ever-Fleeting. They transcend time. They are eternal. In Classical English, the word 'present' means both 'now' and gift.' How the ancients survived such confusion I will never know, but there is beauty in such vagaries. Each moment, as it passes, is precious and so is separate from the moments that follow or precede it."
There is a several-hundred-years-old war going on between a spacefaring alien species, the Cielcin. Due to his tutoring as a youth, Hadrian is one of few who is largely adept at speaking their language, which positions him well, later in the book, to be instrumental in intervening in what appeared to be another vicious attack on the planet he was trapped on. He ends up having to serve as a mouthpiece for the Chantry, a religious organization centered on the original home planet of humanity yet specializes in suppression and torture. The dynamics of his relationship with the nobles on Emesh, Valka, and his peers from the Colosso are riveting and complex. This gives the narrative a lot of life and freshness.
Ultimately, Valka is most interested in an alien species that created monuments on a number of planets but did not appear to leave any other traces of their previous presence. They are called The Quiet, as a result. The Cielcin were coming to Emesh to pray rather than to invade, and this sets Hadrian up to be instrumental in further exploring the role of the Quiet...just who they are and why they appear to be absent.
The book closes with Hadrian and others being tasked with investigating, further, the existence of an assumed-to-be mythological world called Vorgossos. One of the Cielcin that had been captured noted that they had previously contacted humans there, which lead credibility to its actual existence. Again, I'm intrigued and looking forward to starting the second volume of this series soon. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys space opera books.