#grave empire

[mapas-fantasticos]

Maps of from the novel Grave Empire by Richard Swan (maps by Tim Paul).

[wearethekat]

February Book Reviews: Grave Empire by Richard Swan

Picked this new release up because I thought one of Swan's earlier works (The Justice of Kings) was interesting. In Grave Empire, an overlooked ambassadorial aide assigned to the barely contacted merprople is sent on a diplomatic mission to ask them if a dire prophecy about the end of the world is true. In the far-flung reaches of the empire, sinister forces haunt a military outpost, and a noble obsessed with the occult is studying a mysterious plague spreading from the north.

Take this with a grain of salt, since I've never gotten along with bloated multi-POV fantasy epics. But Grave Empire had painfully slow pacing, mostly due to its three different narrators. I liked Renata and her devotion to her dead-end job working for the most useless office in the Department of State (the Empire hasn't contacted the merprople at all in years). Until she's suddenly relevant to a highest priority mission because the merpeople are one of the last groups studying occult magics that are outlawed in the Empire. I liked her attachment to her sister, if not her lackluster and token romance later in the book.

However! I found it startling that the other two narratives were given equal page space. Soldier Peter reads like one of those cardboard stock characters who appear in one chapter for the sole purpose of being dramatically eaten to establish the monsters. But his chapters just keep going, and he doesn't have much character development or depth, aside from not wanting to get eaten. Likewise, corrupt aristocrat von Oldenburg feels like a one-off villain POV to establish what the bad guys are up to, and to flesh out a plague that Renata doesn't know about or experience personally. The combined effect of reducing the main mission to save the world from psychic destruction down to less than a third of the page space made the experience of reading the book drag, particularly given its weighty six hundred pages.

The just-preindustrial worldbuilding was a nice touch, though. Most fantasy doorstoppers stay safely in the overdone faux medieval. Swan's choice to place the world in a vaguely eighteenth century flavored world, albeit with global politics that feel a touch Victorian, allows the novel to explore interesting themes about power and empire. I liked the endless proxy war with a country professing a different sect of their religion, fought through two groups of converted wolfmen. Swan also has a nice touch with the body horror, and his depiction of the sinister, parasitic Knackerman was especially well done. Still, the stakes of literally the existence of all life on earth are a bit comically lofty, and an ambitious plot to tackle from this sluggish start.

Unless you'd find the early industrial fantasy horror setting particularly appealing, I don't think it's worth the read, given the less than compelling pacing. Not recommended.

[just0nemorepage]

Grave Empire || Richard Swan || The Great Silence #1 || 529 pages Top 3 Genres: Fantasy / Horror / Steampunk

Synopsis: Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.

But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse. 

Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence. 

It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save... 

Publication Date: February 2025. / Average Rating: 4.05. / Number of Ratings: ~4460.

[countingalltheflowers]

where all my bookworms at???

[mongen]

I’m really not fond of Maid-and-Butler scenes, and I REALLY dislike Maid-and-Butler scenes with clunky interjections by additional characters.

I’m reading Grave Empire by Richard Swan, and I’m already not loving the worldbuilding or characters, and the abrupt transition from a man dying of a self afflicted injury to a sex scene was just… bad. Now I’ve gotten to chapter 10, and two characters with the same skill set and similar opinions about the world have decided to review a bunch of info that both of them already know about the world and the state they serve. Every few lines, one of the three other characters present cuts in with their opinions. It illustrates the different ways that the state is viewed, but it does so very lazily. It’s really boring to read “and then they continued, but they got interrupted because person X disagrees with the idea just mentioned, and person Y dislikes person X but person Z is just trying to calm them all down” on loop.

Also, maybe I’m unfairly judging this because of my background in engineering, but I was very put off by the head of the Corps of Engineers essentially saying “why use big word when small word do trick?” Especially since, it even a full page earlier, she said “um, magic is a dumb word for babies, we call it Thaumaturgical Resonance” or whatever.

Moderately annoying book. Might still finish it, but at this point I wouldn’t recommend it.

[lashaan]

Grave Empire by Richard Swan

Title: Grave Empire.Series: The Great Silence #1. Writer(s): Richard Swan. Publisher: Orbit.Format: Paperback.Release Date: February 4, 2025.Pages: 544.Genre(s): Fantasy.ISBN13: 9780316577007. My Overall Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. Author of the Empire of the Wolf trilogy, Richard Swan revisits his fantasy world with a brand-new trilogy set countless years into the future as a…

Grave Empire by Richard Swan

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Grave Empire, by Richard Swan

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Grave Empire, by Richard Swan