Empire of Silence: The Sun Eater: Book One

My original review was three stars. A re-read brought it up to four. If you're on the fence of buying this, take my advice: buy it. Having seen the shape of the whole, I can see it in the first book, the calls forward and the mistakes and misconceptions of young Hadrian Marlowe. He doesn't know where he's going, and there's a naivete here that only truly comes through the second time reading it. "Holy Moses," I said to myself, "that's how he met Bassander Lin?" Good stuff.

This book was great. The characters were excellently written, and the world well expanded. It did have parallels with Dune, but if you want something grounded that is well in the future, it's probably hard not to follow similar lines. I admit this does feel like a book 1 - an opening to something bigger. I would not feel satisfied if the story stopped here. I think the memoire style it is written in lends itself well to this fact though, giving you glimpses of the future to flag important moments and characters and also maintaining interest. That said, I was never bored nor wanting more while I was reading it. I simply enjoyed being led through the story by our protagonist.

He's very frustrating and ridiculously dumb at times. This could have been much shorter if the author had just gotten on with it. Still, it's a valid story and better written than many.