Heavenly Tyrant review + thoughtspew
I have been excited for this book ever since I read Iron Widow, put a review up on here, and @xiranjayzhao themself graced me with their presence and a reply that suggested Heavenly Tyrant would be a partial Three Kingdoms retelling. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is an 800,000-word Chinese classic novel and is probably my favorite book. I've read it more than ten times. Between that, and the fact that I really like the world and the characters Xiran has made, I was eager to dive into Heavenly Tyrant.
Spoiler (not a real one): did not disappoint. Spoilers from this point on will be real, and unmarked, because I am lazy and because if you're actually reading this I expect you've also finished the book too. If you are reading this review to figure out if you'll like the book, I think you will. Because it's good, and because you're on tumblr.
I have been told there's a saying: "Young men should read Water Margin, old men should read Three Kingdoms." Water Margin is, along with Three Kingdoms, one of the four great Chinese classics, along with Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. The saying is the way it is because Water Margin is about fraternity, nobility, and other positive martial attributes, which young men should emulate, while Three Kingdoms is more about politics, scheming, backstabbing, and pragmatism, which they should not emulate. Heavenly Tyrant feels very much like the Three Kingdoms to Iron Widow's Water Margin.
On that note, I'm not going to go into exhaustive critique here, just reflect on my impressions. I know very little about the editing and publishing process behind this book in particular. I know that Xiran has made references to having to cut the book down in size, and I can see the effects of that requirement. This is not a criticism, just an observation. It is less a partial Three Kingdoms retelling than a Three Kingdoms-flavored science-fantasy romp, and I am totally on board with that.
Example: in another world, where word counts were not an issue, I could see this book sprawling into a true epic, adapting Zhuge Liang's seven northern campaigns into an ongoing and bloody feud between him and Sima Yi in-story as the two of them struggle in support of the old government and Qin Zheng, respectively. The book also mentions Red Cliff a couple times, adapting it here into a hydroelectric dam, and I was excited that we might get a version of the Battle of Red Cliff (Chì bì) with Chrysalises and spirit armor and such. In the end, most of the action of the rebellion takes place off-screen, as the book focuses more on the intricacies and interactions of laborism, governance, classism, sexism, capital, etc. etc. Again, none of this is a critique - I appreciate the direction the novel chose to go in with the amount of words it had.
I also liked the, frankly, nuanced critique of autocratic socialism. The philosopher king model has been a favorite of both actual, real-world nations and regions, as well as fiction, particularly fantasy fiction, for approximately Forever. And it is a very beautiful fantasy of "daddy Bernie will fix everything for us if we can just get him into office." But the book does a very good job of showing how the flaws of the philosopher king - in this case, Qin Zheng - get magnified and expanded into flaws within the government they create. Qin Zheng's return to misogynistic delusion at the end to explain why Zetian would try to kill him is going to have knock-on effects on the government itself, as well as its citizens, until he loses power.
Speaking of Qin Zheng. He's like if you put Qin Shi Huang, Cao Cao, Marx, Lenin, and that one guy in your local kink scene who insists that everyone call him "Master Sir" into a blender. What a delightful piece of shit. The absolute embodiment of "the worst person you know just made a great point." I really enjoyed his dynamic with Zetian. I had concerns going into this about losing the Iron Triangle but her having to deal with Qin Fucking Zheng kept the book tense and interesting, and the sex was hot. Which is not a thing I say often about non-erotica/dark romance/straight-up porn sex.
I was also very amused by Qin Zheng because I, too, have written a Three Kingdoms-but-in-space book, one that will never see the light of day because it's more than ten years old and is bad and would need to be rewritten before I'd let anyone read it these days. But the stand-in for Cao Cao in that book - well, I mean, he is Cao Cao, I just have him go by his style name of Mengde - is beat-for-beat Qin Zheng. More powerful than everyone else, manipulative, arrogant, selfish, and thinks he's the Only One Who Can Save The Galaxy. Also he has a toxic sexual relationship with the female main character and she stabs him in his heart and he lives through it with his space magic. I'm not kidding. The parallels are that spot-on and they are hysterical.
Speaking of Three Kingdoms IN SPACE, I won't say I didn't see the twist of the Heavenly Court being little more than a glorified mining station coming, but it was well-executed and anything that reminds me of Roger Zelazny's magnum opus, Lord of Light, aka my other favorite book, is going to be a green check mark in my book.
I am excited to see how Xiran wraps up these disparate elements in book 3 - Zetian's power struggle with Qin Zheng, the need to resolve the war with the Hunduns, the need to resist the Melians when they arrive to keep the spirit metal flowing, etc. etc. Maybe the publishers will let them really go buck-wild and we will get the 200,000-word sprawling epic that we deserve.
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