Space opera!
To be precise, The Phoenix in Flight, book one of the Exordium series by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge. I’d seen this recommended in conjunction with the Mageworlds books—to be precise, on the web pages of the Mageworlds authors—as “if you like . . . ” And so far, I like very much.
These are all out of print, and a couple of the five volumes are almost legendarily hard to find. With some good luck, I managed to acquire them all over a few months, and now I have the time to read them all at once.
The Phoenix in Flight is precisely what you would want in a big chewy space opera. In the background, there’s thousands of years of history, humanity spread across the stars, and a scattering of mysterious alien races and artifacts; in the story, there’s betrayals and intricate plots and counter-plots, interesting characters with conflicts of oaths and ambiguous loyalties, space battles and daredevil piloting and things blowing up, and of course fighting in palace corridors (including one of the best uses of household systems I’ve seen). Whew. There’s really nothing like good space opera . . .
The characters also get really cool names. Jerrode Eusabian, Avatar of Dol, Lord of Vengeance and the Kingdoms of Dol’jhar, has sworn, well, vengeance on the Panarch of the Thousand Suns, the ruler of this section of the galaxy. And, after twenty years of planning, has killed two of the Panarch’s sons, imprisoned the Panarch, and taken the Emerald Throne. Except that two things have eluded Eusabian’s control: a mysterious alien artifact, and the youngest of the Panarch’s sons.
To be, as they say, continued . . .
Hmmm…
As intriguing as this review sounds the one thing that made me feel like commenting is the word “panarch.” I always thought it was a sui generis creation of Robert Jordan, but I see it used here, did some quick googlization, and see that it pops up in other books (mostly the sf genre). Feeling emboldened, I tried to seek out a historical usage of the title, but alas no.
Yours in triviality
RMB
Hmm, Jordan must have been where I’d first seen it, too, but it’s not that remarkable a word to me, so I didn’t remember . . .
And if these reviews (next one coming soon) sound intriguing, agitate for the books to come back in print (originally published by Tor, I don’t know if they still have the rights), and in the meantime read the Mageworlds books.
Thanks for your kind comments, Kate!
The term “panarch” was lifted from Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao; our use of it dates back to the late 70s when we began writing the series (as a TV mini-series).
We are in the process of getting the rights back from Tor and are looking for a new publisher. One in particular we have our eyes on is Baen (for obvious reasons, I think); if any reader of this hangs out in Baen’s Bar, a plea for reprinting there would certainly help!
Check out the URL I’ve supplied; it leads to the Exordium blog, where we’ve posted the first chapter of our next book, Tides of Men, which is the story of Jaspar Arkad, the founder of the Panarchy.
I hope you’ll also check out my personal blog at http://www.davetrowbridge.com/MT.
I have sworn off reading parts of books until I have the whole thing in front of me. But, I suppose first chapters don’t really count… oh who am I kidding, like I could resist?
*throws up hands and opens link in background*
Baen, hmm? I hate to say that my first thought was, “Oh great, even more garish covers.” But in print is in print…
Just found this page because I just found out that Robert Jordan used the word “panarch” so I was googling that.
Panarchy goes way back to the 1800’s, though it’s current usage in non-fiction really begins in the 1990’s (there’s a wikipedia entry on all that).
Interesting to hear of the Vance connection. Dave hadn’t mentioned that one to me yet. 🙂
I used to use “panarch” as a nick online sometimes, but stopped when it became truly clear to me that panarchy has many leaders, not one.
Alas, no Panarchs 😉