Empire in Black and Gold (Shadows of the Apt 1)
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Pyr, 2010
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 978-1-61614-192-9
612 pages; $16.00

The Shadows of the Apt is one of those series that has a bit of everything. The racial set-up seems to come from New Weird territory; the denizens of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s world are many different races, each with the characteristics of a different insect. Thus, the Beetle-kinden (each race is a “kinden”) are the engineers of the world; the Ant-kinden are excellent soldiers because they share a single mind under battlefield conditions; and the Butterfly-kinden are extremely beautiful, rare and magical. Then there are the steampunk elements, such as the heliocopters and the “automotives,” which travel on four legs, just like those doomed war machines in “The Empire Strikes Back”; one wonders how a society that clearly has gears has failed to invent the wheel. There is also straightforward fantasy storytelling, which involves an empire attempting to broaden its boundary and enslave even more species than are already under its iron rule.

It ought not to work. The book should fall of its own weight. But somehow, everything comes together in one great big comfortable mess and captures the reader.

The real key, I think, is that the characters are so vividly drawn that the reader falls in love with them. Stenwold Maker is an elderly Beetle who saw the city of Myna fall to the Wasp-kinden – that is, to the Empire – in his youth, and has spent his life trying to make certain his own race does not fall into slavery before the rapidly advancing war machine. He has made speech upon speech to the legislature, taught history at the university and attempted to sway young minds to his cause, and, more to the point, maintained a network of spies in countries and cities closer to the borders of the Empire so as to be warned long in advance of a Wasp attack on his own people.

But Stenwold isn’t so parochial as that. Collegium, from whence he hails, is known for being open to all species, and even to accept (with considerable reservations) half-breeds. One of his students is Totho, a cross between an Ant and a Beetle, and especially gifted at mechanical engineering. Tynisa is his ward; she is a beautiful and treacherous Spider-kinden. His niece, Cheerwell or Che, is of full Beetle blood but has never been able to access her Ancestor Art – apparently a sort of maturation that allows one certain abilities that are inherent to one’s race, such as the ability to sprout wings and fly (yes, that’s literal). The fourth in Stenwold’s band is Salma, a prince among the Dragonfly-kinden. Each has a distinctive personality, with his or her own special interests, worries and, ultimately, plot: the group is divided up this way and then that, with the threads of the story traveling across many lands and involving many more characters.

Thalric is one of the most interesting characters in the book, though he is of a type: the member of the Empire who is starting to doubt his role as the dutiful servant and merciless soldier and spy. He claims to value the Empire above all else, but putting children to the sword doesn’t sit well with him, and he isn’t too certain about slavery, either. Although he’s a fairly standard character for an Empire-based fantasy, his depth of insight is compelling.

The story itself is pretty standard: there’s an Evil Empire that must be fought, but no one with political power in the main characters’ world will recognize the threat. The good guys must find a way to make the threat obvious to their compatriots, and must prevent the war from finding their homeland before their politicians wise up. Skullduggery, treachery, negotiation, and political shenanigans predominate. There are also the mandatory confrontations between bad guys and good guys in both a threatening situation that fails to ignite and in a peaceful setting where the enemies are revealed as just folks – and each comes to have a grudging respect and even a degree of admiration for his or her adversary – before the ultimate battle that ends the book.

In addition to a conventional plot, there are some serious world-building problems here, despite the generally interesting milieu. I’ve already talked about how odd the absence of a wheel is in this culture; this becomes even more confusing with early talk of a railroad connecting two large cities – an engine that runs on a track can only have wheels and not legs, true? More than that, the weapons of war are strange. Why, in a society that can plant explosives at the front gate of a city, and that has grenades, and that has nail guns apparently working on a pneumatic system, are there no machine guns, cannons or similar weapons? If you have explosives, you have gunpowder or the equivalent, don’t you? Why, then, would you rely primarily on swords and other sharp edges, and engage in primarily hand-to-hand combat rather than the more distant wars more common to 20th century Earth? Rapiers seem to appear because they are more romantic than guns, and for no other reason.

Fundamentally, though, this is a good beginning for an epic fantasy that promises all the pleasures one usually finds in such books. This series offers nothing too unusual or too challenging, but pleasant, even compelling reading for fans who can never get enough of thick books full of battles and love affairs. (One odd point, though: Amazon lists this book as having over 600 pages, while the page number on the last page of the book I have in hand is 415.) I have the second book in the series, Dragonfly Falling, already in hand, perfect for a rainy fall afternoon.