Furious Heaven

As a teenager, I vowed never to read another book that said "epic" on the cover. I was tired of stories that stacked cliffhanger on cliffhanger, accumulating points of view without resolution. I read Kate Elliott's Furious Heaven, the sequel to Unconquerable Sun, without knowing the final cover design, so I don't know whether reading it violated my vow. But I can report that Furious Heaven is a rare thing: a sprawling, multistranded story about galactic conquest that reaches a satisfying resolution in two volumes. There could be a sequel--and indeed, it seems that Elliott is planning one--but there doesn't have to be. That's a difficult balance to strike!

Furious Heaven begins with a hefty dose of dynastic plotting. Princess Sun, the story's Alexander the Great equivalent, is her mother's most likely heir, but her succession is not inevitable, and plenty of people both within and outside the Republic of Chaonia would love to introduce some chaos. Sun's new Companion, the brash Persephone, is impatient with politics, but she's more embedded in systems of privilege than she recognizes. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Apama at Sabao, who wanted to be an ordinary fighter pilot, is stuck dancing attendance on her father, one of the cabal of people with two literal faces that rules her empire. Apama's father wields power in a way that's most terrifying for its boringness--he doesn't need to posture villainously when he can simply command.

There's a point in Furious Heaven where Sun concludes that sustained aggression is safer than standing still. I tore through the book's second half in a rush, caught up in Sun's momentum. Elliott does a phenomenal job of conveying both the strategic logic and its contingency on tiny circumstance. Sun is successful despite and because of the risks she takes.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)