Empress of Forever

So let me preface this by saying that I love Gladstone’s Craft series, this book just fell flat. It looks like science fiction, and has space opera tropes, but it’s actually an alchemaical novel, and not a good one at that.

Vivian Lao is a tech entrepreneur on the run when she’s transported from Earth to a prison station orbiting a giant star, under attack from malevolent robots with scorpion bodies and ken-doll torsos. A monk rescues her, and then she frees an ancient pirate queen from prison, and is off on adventures. See, it turns out the galaxy is “ruled” by the Empress, a supremely powerful being who acts in a kind of wrath of god mode, crushing civilizations that get too advanced. If she doesn’t, an implacable extra-galactic force called the Bleed eats them. The Empress is looking for a real solution to her problem, and it involves Viv. So Viv has to gather a band of unlikely allies, and then they all have to learn The Value of Friendship and the Power of Abrogating The Self.

The whole thing feels unwieldy, not so much characters and plot as a series of explanatory lessons. There are big explosive scenes, but no precision in the bombast. Gladstone has a point, but it’s both obtuse and banal.