This Brutal Moon is the conclusion of the Kindom Trilogy by Bethany Jacobs. As this is the third book in the series—a series which relies heavily on a dramatic and, at least for me, very surprising, spoiler at the end of the first book—it is not possible to discuss it without revealing details of plot and worldbuilding from the preceding volumes. The spoiler-free version is simply that all three books are very good and I would encourage you to read them. For the rest, read on below.
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The thing about politics in the novel is … it’s just people. However fascinating, complex, grand, and sweeping your political storyline is, the foundation it will always rest on is the characters who enact it, and with whom the reader must spend the time of the plot, moment by moment. It is this, more than anything, that Bethany Jacobs has grasped in the Kindom Trilogy, and never more so than in this final volume.
The first two books—These Burning Stars (2023) and On Vicious Worlds (2024)—follow a multiplanetary world (the Treble) under strain as an oppressed workforce called the Jeveni break free of their strictly delimited place of mining a valuable ore. They escape to a distant world, away from the corrupt and in-fighting noble families who held them in place, and the equally corrupt and in-fighting tripartite ruling structure of the Kindom itself. But getting away does not prove sufficient, and the second volume into the third spends much of its time showing what it actually takes for the Jeveni to get themselves truly free and safe—and what the Kindom will do, whom and quite how many they will hurt, to bring back the Jeveni and reinforce the status quo.
But the series also follows characters more deeply embedded within, or reacting to, the structures of the Kindom itself. Chono has been trained by a high-ranking noble and served faithfully in the priesthood arm, the clerics, until she found doing so compromised her morals and more personal loyalties beyond breaking point. Six trained to be an assassin, but was forced out on the whim of Esek, the same high-ranking noble who trained Chono, and against whom Six dedicates their life. At the end of the first book, they are revealed to have killed and replaced Esek, and are working to use her personal power to disrupt the system, a plan which is ultimately turned towards freeing the Jeveni who are controlled by Esek’s family.
If this sounds like a complex web of interactions, it is, and that isn’t even all of the viewpoint characters. But, for all the complexity crammed into these three five-hundred-page books, in the moment Jacobs always keeps events grounded in the individual, their wants, needs and plans, and their personal connections to the people and ideas that surround them. She understands that the politics of a multi-faction, multi-world polity is complex, when it needs to be, but is also often very simple. There are no grand master plans and evil geniuses. There are interlinked systems all built out of individuals pulling in different directions, driven by geography and culture, by social and religious forces—that is, a natural complexity, rather than one of Machiavellian, deliberate scheming. She also understands that, sometimes, it is dreadfully simple: the grim calculus of survival, and the striving for basic needs.
The politics of the series, then, are constantly viewed through this lens of the individual, even when operating at a grand scale. The decision to resist oppression rather than take a deal to survive is dramatized in small moments of individuals fighting or conversations in which people discuss their reasons for their choices: guilt, blackmail, love; defence of home, a dream, loyalty to those around them; duty to the person holding the next spot in the line. Everything is granular. When viewed that way, the complex becomes comprehensible.
The same is true for her approach to faith, which is inextricably linked to the politics of the peoples of the Treble. One third of the ruling body is the clerisy, which represents the Godfire in its multiple gods. But faith is not, for Jacobs, just about structures: like politics, it is personal. Faith is viewed through different perspectives throughout the trilogy, and having Chono as a viewpoint character, alongside the Jeveni and their faith practices distinct from the rest of the Kindom’s, allows this to shine.
Through Chono, Jacobs shows us both the driving force of personal faith and the conflict that arises from holding to it within a corrupt system. Throughout This Brutal Moon, the toll the conflict has had on Chono begins to really show. She takes actions that go against her sense of honour, for the sake of protecting others. Religion, for her, is both a hardship and a source of comfort, and the exploration of it through the story is one of the greatest strengths in Jacobs’s work. She acknowledges—as many stories struggle to—the distinct but intertwined aspects of religion both as an internal, personal relationship with the divine and with morality, and as a structural force, one which can be used for peace and social cohesion, but also be weaponised by those within power in the Kindom for division. This sits alongside the value of faith in building a better system for the Jeveni. Nothing is ever one thing only. Across it all, for good and for ill, religion is a critical part of the cultural fabric of the Kindom.
This, too, is one of the great strengths of the story, and one that marks it out from other accomplished space operas. While depictions of religion in fantasy and science fiction are hardly uncommon, what is rare are ones that seek to firmly root it in place within the rhythms of daily life. Not the drama of a god real in the world, but the quiet quotidian of ritual that brings meaning to life—a piece of the puzzle that forms the reality of each character. Understanding who Chono is, who Six is, who the key Jeveni players are, who the hacker Jun Ironway is, means understanding their approach to spiritual practice, or their absence or rejection of it, just as much as their ethnic identity or their politics. And none of these can be fully unpicked in any case.
This wouldn’t work were Jacobs not extremely skilled at character study. This was most obvious in the first book—where much of the plot relied on the reader being compelled by the toxic interpersonal relationships of Esek and Chono—but it has continued, in one form or another, all the way through to This Brutal Moon. All the characters have by now had several books of development, and the culmination of the story’s overarching plot is played out in miniature in each of their personal developments. Not everyone gets a good or happy ending, or even a cathartic one, but it is clear how the events of the story have brought each to their final point. And they are all, in some way, compromised by the story they’ve lived through, by the toxic relationships of which they’ve been part.
The characters, like those in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb trilogy (2019-2022), are an inducement to read purely on their own merits. They’ve grown up suited to a corrupt system, and are the people they are because of it, and there’s also something terribly compelling about messy people having messy lives all together. It is nice to love some mess, alongside imbibing the more serious business of a hard-hitting plot in which a corrupt system has been overthrown.
That plot has required violence and hard choices that linger in the souls of those who survive it, alongside guilt about those who didn’t. One cannot fight something so large and all-encompassing and come out unscathed, and freedom has a cost. By emphasising those costs at a personal level, Jacobs once again provides a more emotively immediate window into the consequences at a macro level.
When bringing all this to a close in the final book of a trilogy, there are a lot of plates to keep spinning, let alone bring together into a satisfying (or even just comprehensible) conclusion. And there is a point, around two thirds of the way through the book, where it feels like they may be slipping. The structure moves away from substantial chapters in which significant developments occur for a particular character or geography, opting instead for a run of shorter snippets, between which it chops and changes, refusing to settle—five- and six-page moments that up the pace but interrupts the rhythm. The novel becomes, for a little while, difficult to read and follow. But, just as that threatens to become unmanageable, Jacobs reaches a crescendo of action and comes back to the longer chapter norm, settling back into the flow and signalling the final act of the book—showing once again that she very much knows what she’s doing.
In the end, she brings us to the necessary compromise, to pragmatism and survival. The heroes violently overthrow the corrupt system, but what comes after cannot be easy, and building a new world is a task that takes forever, a constant striving rather than a swift resolution. This Brutal Moon never paints itself as a fairytale or a path to utopia, and it is fitting that this stays true all the way to the conclusion.
This is a book—and a trilogy—that can be characterised in very different ways. On the one hand, I could paint it as the slow-motion car crash of one bright, burning, terrible life—of several sets of people and even a whole culture—trying to escape the gravity of one awful person and her effect on their lives and deaths. I could argue that the Kindom Trilogy is the story of Esek, a person so spectacularly awful that she caused multiplanetary chaos.
But on another, I could say it’s precisely the opposite—a thesis on relationships, and the interaction of connectedness on large scales, fuelled by the multitude of individuals and their decisions within the system. Esek was simply a face, one metonymous example of the toxic relationship that is played out at grand scale across the worlds of the story.
On a third hand—neatly, given the tripartite system of governance that shapes the books—this is a series about genocide, and about oppression and freedom. These individuals offer a window into the suffering of millions, and play out the destructive forces of capitalism, as we know it in the real world, on a larger stage. Theirs is a story that has much to say about many parts of the now—and especially about Palestine, as Jacobs herself highlights in her afterword.
It’s a rich enough, dense enough text to support all these readings and more besides.
Moreover, This Brutal Moon is a fitting end to so equally rich and dense a trilogy, drawing all the multiple threads and character arcs into a satisfying conclusion without succumbing to the chaos that so many moving parts could bring. This concluding novel is a lot, and asks the reader to put in the leg-work to follow it all the way to the end. But it absolutely makes that end worthwhile.