Monday Review: The Empress Game by Rhonda Mason

It’s been a while since I did the space opera thing.  It used to be an almost exclusively martial sub-genre and I found, once I discovered urban fantasy, I enjoyed the close in stories with character focus rather than the grand, sweeping epics (the same reason I’ve shied away from epic fantasy for almost the same span of time).

If books like The Mirror Empire, Ancillary Justice/Sword, and The Empress Game indicate the new direction of space opera, however, I think I’m ready to get back on the big, honking star cruiser.

You’ll note the aforementioned are all authored by women.  Looks like we are destroying Science Fiction, and in the best possible way.

The Plot: Kayla is the heir to a decimated royal house and protector to her sole surviving brother, a psychically charged teenager.  Desperate to keep him hidden and safe, she becomes a pit fighter on a world that makes Tattoine seem like Fiji.  Picked as a body double/ghost fighter for Isonde, beloved of the future Emperor, to assure Isonde’s win in the Empress Game, a massive tournament to determine the woman who will, in fact, ascend to that title, Kalya finds herself at the heart of enemy territory and allied with a man who may have played a part in her parents/siblings assassinations.

Well, okay, it’s a lot bigger and more subtle than that, but I’m trying to go spoiler free.  The little twists and not so little surprises are what make The Empress Game remarkable and innovative and all of those lovely things in a genre that has been stagnant for decades and I want to leave room for you to discover them for yourselves when you read it.

Because you definitely should.

Like now.  Why aren’t you doing it already?

The Amazeballs:

This is a character driven space opera and the characters are all solidly crafted.  By which I mean they all have individual motivations, quirks of personality, twitches and tics, deeply held beliefs, and the ability to surprise.  They learn and adapt, grow over the course of the book and, I get the impression, will continue to do so over the remainder of the trilogy.

The story starts out as the standard exiled prince/princess yarn but rapidly evolves into something much more intriguing (both in terms of being a new approach and in the sense of involving a metric fuckton of intrigue) which fleshes the story out, world builds without info dumping (with the exception of a few asides that sort of smack the reader upside the head but are over quickly enough not to interrupt the flow too terribly), and allows the novel to operate on both the larger, space opera scale and the smaller “human” (for lack of a better catch-all) one.

The Empress Game is all about the ladies who have, in the epic sci-fi works of ye olde, and not so ye olde, often been relegated to secondary roles, tool roles, and hooker roles.  Miss Mason clearly understands that which I’ve been beating you all over the head with for the last year and change: strong female character does not have to = physical asskicker (thought it certainly can and, when executed well, is pretty fabulous).  Kayla is an asskicker, but that is far from all she is: she is a sister, a survivor, lonely, loving, and very much not an ice queen.  Some of my favorite non-action bits of the book are when she breaks down because it makes her all the more complete and all the more real.  Isonde straight up acknowledges she can’t win the battle royale, but she is an unparalleled political and very much a rock star in her own purview.  And She and Kayla even learn to respect, and maybe even like one another.  Who knew?  Who.  Knew.

It’s a damn fun read.  I had a big week.  A huge week.  Some good, some best possible resolution to a shitty situation which, even with best result, is still super shitty.  I worked late several nights.  I still finished The Empress Game in four days.  Last night, in fact, I stayed up until 0300 finishing the book and ya’ll know how much I value what little sleep I have opportunity to get.  Mason has a very particular skill, which I admire greatly and to which I aspire, to move the action while making certain the reader doesn’t get whiplash, to use the characters’ down moments as breathing points for everyone but to cut them off with something huge and exciting at the perfect moment so as not to mire the flow.

The Nits:

Because, I suppose, we must pick them.

The romantic relationship between Kayla and (redacted) develops over a period of time (I was a little unclear on what the frame was.  Weeks?  Maybe a couple of months) which was good.  While I absolutely believe you can be attracted to someone at first sight, the whole “across a crowded room and together forever thing” makes my stomach churn and the “we hate each other and now we’ve completely forgotten about that because we had the sex” trope is tired and overdone.  There is, however, a LITTLE bit of Stockholm Syndrome inherent in this couple’s thang and it irked me because Kayla’s personality was so strongly established and this is so anti- it.  (Redacted) used Kayla’s brother’s safety as a bargaining chip to manipulate her into doing what he wanted; she forgave him very quickly.  After spending five years with said brother’s safety as her only concern.  Granted, (redacted) did apologize, which is certainly near unprecedented for a male character in this sort of setting and I’m not sure she needed to hold the grudge forever.  But at least make him prove his worthiness by deed instead of simply by word (which he does, but post forgiveness).

There was some weird language stuff that likely only bothered me because I have horrible OCD and it’s one of my things.  I say this not in jest, but as a testament to how good The Empress Game is because I have put books down for less.  There are times I have a visceral anxiety response to the ebb and flow of language, to changes in cadence and style.  No matter how much I respect Temple Grandin, for example, and love listening to her speak in interviews, there’s something about her writing that fucks with my neurotransmitters to the point I had an honest to goodness anxiety attack while going through Animals in Translation and had to put it away.

I’m all for characters having more than one speech pattern.  This is a thing people do.  They speak more formally at work, less formally with friends.  Use certain idiomatic expressions in some company and a lot of four letter words in other.  The difficulty comes, however, when the style shifts within those given frameworks for no apparent reason or when the narration style shifts (first person excluded).  Narration style can be formal or conversational.  Third person narration shouldn’t do that thing without overbearing extenuating circumstances or, at the very least, some sort of visual cue.  Internal monologue is useful and fine and I love it and use it, but indent or italicize or something.  There was a fair bit of narrative switching in The Empress Game and no marking of internal monologue.

I plowed through it because the rest was so fantastic but the cumulative effect was noticed.

Emotional Telling:

There was a lot of it.  I prefer, in both my reading and writing, to see/use a gesture or dialogue to express such things.  I’d rather know how someone expresses anger/love/joy/horniness than be told the person is angry/in love/happy/horny.  It adds depth, subtlety, and alive-ness (what? Totally a word).  Not everyone agrees.  Some people don’t care.  It certainly didn’t keep me from being glued or searching the web frantically to find out when the next installment will be available for my eyeholes.

Conclusion:

Four fingers and two knuckles on the Hand of Glory for The Empress Game.  Up there with Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, and you know how I feel about Breq and her crew.

Definitely looking forward to more, both from Kayla and from Mason.