I started drafting a review of Furious Heaven in my head before even reading the book. This being Book Two of a series pitched as “genderbent Alexander the Great … in Space!” and also being approximately Book Thirty of Kate Elliott’s career, I didn’t expect to be surprised. Instead, I could revel in the familiar—female friendships and desire, deeply realized worlds, scenes with characters from the margins peering in to see how power moves and what it discards. I assumed that through Furious Heaven I’d be able to write about some of the other series by Elliott that I love—the planetary romance of the Jaran, the sprawling grim and dark Crown of Stars series, introduced the same year as A Song of Ice and Fire, but already completed. “Look here,” I could write. “Here was some minor detail introduced back in Unconquerable Sun (2020), now newly relevant in an unexpected way, hundreds of pages later.” And all of the above is indeed present in Furious Heaven in various ways. I settled in with a smile when the book opened with Sun (our Alexander analog), sitting with her Companions and “paying close attention to the long-winded discussion of the Sayings of the Elder Sages, which is the sort of evening entertainment a meticulously educated princess like Sun and her royal-academy-trained intimates naturally love best” (p. 1): I was looking forward to Kate Elliott introducing me to this intergalactic empire through an imagined religious tome.
Within the first few pages, however, Sun’s long-winded discussion is interrupted by a lazy Companion uninterested in the Sayings, then by a military trainer, and then Sun’s mother: the Queen-Marshal Eirene, who has a plan for her daughter. After those interruptions, it was a few hundred more pages before I realized that while many of the hallmarks of Kate Elliott’s novels were still present, this was moving much faster than I had expected. At the end of the 722-page novel, I finally found a chance to breathe, and with it the opportunity to reflect on the Greatness of both Alexander and this novel.
Alexander took an existing disciplined army and set of alliances and built upon it to conquer Egypt, the Persian Empire, and continue east. It is one thing to list these various triumphs. It is another to recognize what actually must have been required to accomplish so much. Furious Heaven rarely pauses to breathe because nor can our protagonist, Sun, or her Companions: alliances must be consolidated, feints prepared and executed, battles won, and then troops rallied and injuries treated, so that the ships can advance to the next battle. Amidst this conquest, the mysteries and logistics of interstellar travel unfurl more slowly, and the systems of governance and military tactics are developed, along with the relationships that lead to great victories and carry with them the seeds of betrayal.
In order to show conquest of this magnitude in a far-distant interstellar empire, Furious Heaven shifts between different registers and scales. With a single battle spread across different star systems via a Beacon network, we see ships of different sizes and styles engaging while commanders seek to assess the process of a battle spread across such distances that the speed of light itself is the primary limiting factor contributing to the fog of war. The conflict I am used to in this genre of military sci-fi (my reference points are L. E. Modesitt and David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels) is that between the professional soldiers dedicated to each other and their duty on the one hand and the leadership or bureaucracy that does not understand this duty, and undermines the competent professionals, on the other. Among the Phene (the Persia-analogues and primary antagonists of this novel), this conflict appears; but, among Sun’s military, the queen-marshal herself and most of her key commanders are as dedicated and competent as their soldiers. Instead, Elliott shows, through an accumulation of small moments, how even in such an environment a small misunderstanding can develop into wider fractures.
At a key moment when Sun is consolidating her position following her mother’s assassination [1], Persephone Lee, one of Sun’s Companions, finds herself worried that she will be caught up as a possible traitor. The reader has no doubts, and a page later this is confirmed, but Persephone’s own doubts don’t let her believe this. At this moment, and others, we can see how Sun’s Companions, dedicated to following her and implementing her desperate plans, each have their own weaknesses and ambitions, and the seeds of future conflicts are planted. Hundreds of pages into the next novel, I expect to see the payoff for these moments, and a few others I probably didn’t notice. Other key moments of decision also focus on individual agency: one pilot of a small fighter evades a boarding party to begin a desperate journey; elsewhere, a nail-biting rescue mission is measured against the speed of torpedoes launched through the vacuum of space, and the stakes are not strategic military equipment (already destroyed) but the people who make the military campaign possible: “We are waiting for you, Captain. You took the hammer and thereby saved the rest of us.”
Still, Furious Heaven is also concerned with empire, and not one but two of them: the old, established, and clearly corrupt Phene, and the up-and-coming Chaonian Republic, engaged as it is in its imperial transformation, but also still holding to the ideal that “we citizens have the right to speak our minds even to the queen-marshal” (p. 66). In a review of The Explorers Guild, Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala by Kevin Costner, Jon Baird, and Rick Ross (2015), Aisha Subramanian notes:
the attraction is that empire itself comes with a sort of cosmopolitanism that can be very appealing—this sense of a vast, interconnected network of people and spaces … It’s all rather deceptive, though … images of the empire as a glorious, interconnected, international family are a bit too close to propaganda.
Well, Furious Heaven is indeed vast and interconnected, filled not only with the soldiers and nobles of the two empires, but the various people living on their edges and borders, and the abandoned soldiers left in occupied territory, who are offered a kind of freedom and respond primarily to the inexorable logic of money and documentation: “We will lose our labor permit and have nowhere to go. No way to eat. No means to live. We did not lose our lives honorably in battle. So we accept our circumstances” (p. 322).
Elsewhere, we learn about the slow routes between star systems where the older imperial infrastructure has broken down: “‘There are beacon routes out there, ma’am,’ said the specialist. ‘But they’re all broken up now with dead beacons along the line. You can still make the journey. It’s just there are gaps to cross along the way. Caravans go that way’” (p. 282). Better than many space operas fascinated by the deceptive propaganda of empire, then, Furious Heaven sees how these systems are connected, sometimes by imperial structures—and sometimes by the people and systems trapped between, or left behind by those imperial structures. [2]
For much of its length, though, Furious Heaven is primarily a story of Sun and her Companions and other key commanders. This is a novel well aware that, for a plan to be executed, key people must work together, and often the discipline and motivation of the soldiers and sailors are more important than the particulars of their equipment. In those needs for cooperation, there are moments of small crisis in which romance can kindle or strike sparks, and rivals for the attention of the queen-marshal can distinguish themselves while undercutting others. Elliott excels at characterization and nuanced plot development through these moments, and uses individual and otherwise undistinguished warriors or laborers to see both the destruction wrought by a conquering army and the ways that news of a victory or defeat can be spun and manipulated to build the foundation-story of an empire.
In this, Furious Heaven follows the conquests of the Jaran, or of the Crossroads novels, but carries them into far-flung star systems. But Furious Heaven is inexorably drawn forward by the energy of its protagonist, the unconquerable Queen-Marshal Sun. Her single-minded focus and effectiveness as she challenges the greatest interstellar empire since the collapse of the great Beacon network keeps the book going. The plot of Furious Heaven could not happen without the characters and armies gathered and flung into the stars by their ruler. That plot is ingenious and surprisingly tight, but, equally, the story of conquest—and the sacrifices, triumphs, and cultural interminglings that must take place as the war advances—is in service of the compelling character around whom the rest of the book swirls.
Readers expecting the leisurely exploration of cultures through mealtimes and greetings that punctuates many of Elliott’s other novels, then, may come away surprised and hungry for more time in some of these conquered lands. Those readers will also probably find that the nearly 750 pages flow by more quickly than some of Elliott’s past novels—there simply aren’t all that many places in this book that pause long enough to draw a breath or set it down. At the end—looking back at the star systems traversed and conquered, the battles won, and the soldiers and commanders who contributed to the victories—I found myself surprised and delighted. Furious Heaven is a book about a character, the companions that surround her, the imperial pressures that shape her, and the inevitable gaps between all these different interconnected systems. And yet the entire book fits together into a triumphant whole.
Endnotes
[1] I had forgotten among all the plans and attacks-in-motion, but of course, in order to tell the story of Alexander the Great, Philip must die—just as in the next book I would imagine Sun herself must die. Honestly I’m kind of dreading what it will mean to finish this series with that knowledge hanging over the plot. [return]
[2] Unconquerable Sun, the preceding novel in this series, more directly addresses some of the problems inherent to the concept of “citizenship,” and also makes imperial propaganda—via “Channel Idol,” a news and entertainment streamer—a more central part of the plot, since the events of the novel primarily occur within the Chaonian empire. Furious Heaven continues less directly some of the questions of precarious citizenship raised in Unconquerable Sun, but fortunately more or less leaves behind the interest in the first volume’s rather underdeveloped focus on “Channel Idol.” [return]