Review: Empress of Forever

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Max Gladstone is best known for his Hugo Award-nominated fantasy series The Craft Sequence. It's a series with truly unique world-building, strong female characters, and complex conceptual underpinnings (philosophy, religion, law, commerce, social justice, etc.) His latest novel, The Empress of Forever is a standalone (probably, maybe) that is more science fiction in genre, though gods and commerce remain a theme. While it's being marketed, perhaps to make it sound more accessible, as a feminist Guardians of the Galaxy, the book is far more Becky Chambers and Yoon Ha Lee meet William Gibson in tone and complexity. And I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Viv Liao is a tech genius billionaire who has seemed like she is careening off the rails. After abandoning her own gathering in Saint Kitts she connects with her friend Magda in Boston, having hatched plans that involve a massive server farm and well...let's just say plans go awry. Viv ends up far from home both spatially and temporally, in the Universe of someone called the Empress of Forever, who Viv both should avoid and seek out if she wants answers about how what happened to her happened and what it all means. (Especially about Viv, but hey, tech, in general, is an open question here.) Along the way, Viv both rescues and is rescued by a monk of the Mirrorfaith named Hong, a thoroughly smashing space pirate named Zanj (Tyrant Zanj, Pirate Queen Zanj, Gatherer of the Suicide Queens Zanj, can you tell I love Zanj?), and pilot-wannabe daughter of the Ornclan Chieftan, Xiara. Then Viv manages to negotiate a deal with the fifth partner in this madcap group, Gray, one of the Grayframe, an entity described as "a virus of metal-- endlessly hungry and transforming all he touches to himself, a self-optimizer seeking only his own self-pleasure" who sort of used to serve the Empress, before complications arose. Clearly, Gray is an important asset. Or so Viv hopes. Eventually, Viv's showdown with the Empress is revelatory, and leads this reader to question whether this is really a space opera? Yeah there are ships and space and universes, but um... Maybe it's a tech opera or a quantum entanglement opera? Whatever it is, it's what I bought in paper and audiobook on release day, because it's thought-provoking, imaginative, and has left me wanting so much MORE ZANJ!

Please Tor, MORE ZANJ. Need. Moar.

Look for my buddy read discussion of The Empress of Forever with my pal Alex of Alex Can Read (even though she's on hiatus) early next week.


I received a paper review copy from Tor in exchange for an honest review.

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