Azzaya Tumenbayar Tumenbayar itibaren Calne, Calne, Wiltshire SN11 8HJ, UK
Possibly I've just read too many space operas over the past few years. This wasn't bad in any specific way, just didn't fail to entrance me the way it's evidently done for other readers. I imagine that the desires and difficulties in coming up with new technology and effects in SF like this must be the same for fantasy writers attempting to deal with magic. Unless you get lucky and strike a previously unmined seam of ideas or metaphors, it all suffers from being much the same as the other ten authors published recently. That's got be both annoying and a challenge as a writer. I also wonder if I'm the only one to notice the influence of the Warhammer 40K universe here. The not-quite-dead (or undead in this case) Emperor holding onto to order against perceived chaos, and utilising some pretty horrible methods to do it. The vast military and religious apparatuses. Marines welded into their combat suits, to the point where human and tech are more philosophical questions (borrowing directly from the text). And so on. The possible influences are not screaming, and not boringly derivative, but I did pick up on them myself. For some reason this just didn't seem to have the charm that Leviathan did for me. Possibly it was deliberate, with a whole Empire based on half its population being undead, needing to feel less alive than pseudo-early-20th century Europe; or possibly it just turned out like that anyway. Either way, there feels like there's just something missing. I'll give the sequels in The Succession series a go I suspect, but I'm certainly not going to rush out after them.
The book was very slow to get into, and it took me a long time to get through it, but the ending was well worth reading.