So, I just finished reading The Elitist Supremacy, book 1 of The Elites and the Rogues series, by Niranjan. This one isn’t SPSFC related, although the author is a Friend of the Competition.

In short (*pause for laughter*), The Elitist Supremacy is a sci-fi espionage thriller with some nice interweaving of future tech and future history with human storylines. What does that mean? Well, in the distant future of 2936, people are still very much people. And having a bunch of new toys to play with doesn’t change that. It just changes the way the same old primitive dance is performed. It is nothing if not a story about the lengths people will go to in protection of those they love, whether that is a child, a partner, or … well, themselves.

Warning: There may be random spoilers throughout the rest of this review, mainly because I just don’t know how to discuss half of what happened here without spoiling something.

In 2241 an execution goes awry, and from that interesting opening we jump forward 695 years to find that humanity has gone interplanetary and is now ruled by “the State” (or “Cynfor”), and the “Elites” at its core. The Elites, led by the shadowy Cesar Thaxter, are immortals and practically indestructible, because of the thing we sort of saw happening in the prologue. It’s actually a pretty cool concept, there’s no shortage of them in this book. A lot of these immortals are sealed up in stasis prison, but the ruling class is basically above the law. And there is a Resistance, with more Elites (or “Rogues”, hence the name of the series) at its core.

This is the set-up, and a lot of the book is dedicated to establishing this in preparation for the rest of the series. The story in this book is a little bit all-over-the-place as a result, as we skip from group to group and planet to planet getting all our pieces in position. The Resistance is looking to find a safe base of operations out from under the all-seeing and all-knowing technocracy of the State, and there is a lot of manoeuvring to allow that to happen. Against this backdrop, the very human stories of love and trauma unfold quite nicely in their simplicity. Families torn apart and brought together, political and corporate intrigue, and some good old-fashioned technobabble and action sequences keep it all bubbling along nicely and give the world (worlds) good depth and texture.

Where I really had trouble was the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like the two main guys – Alexander Selwood and (by the end) Nolan Patrick – are compelling and I knew where they stood and who they were. They have backstories that demand exploration, as one would expect from (at least in Alexander’s case) immortals whose origins (or family origins, in Nolan’s case) are scattered through almost seven hundred years of future history, but they were put together well enough to make me want to explore that.

Other than those two, there was one character I was expecting to be used more. There’s this kid, Paige, with a little bit of a neurodivergent superpower that enables her to tell when someone is good or bad. That was a really interesting hook and made me remember the character … but then she appeared like one time after her intro in chapters 5 to 7, to deliver a little exposition about aliens which was the only time that was mentioned, and that was it. And yeah, I have notes about that. But okay.

The rest of the characters and their relationships, motivations and interwoven stories are extremely convoluted and it’s not helped by a lot of them having what I felt were very generic names and (if even mentioned at all) appearances. And that a lot of them have different names and identities at different points in history, as one would expect from shadowy immortals. This is at once an excellent part of the story, and a frustratingly confusing element. Sometimes it is treated as a plot revelation (to reader and characters alike), and at other times it is hard to tell if it has just appeared that way because that’s how the story is structured.

I’m just going to list a bunch of characters and the relationships I think I figured out, and put it in spoilertext in case you don’t want to know.

Marvin Griffel (2241) is Lucas Hendricks, the man who invented the immortality drug in the first place and father of Niek.Gerald Lane (2241) a hacker, is Alexander Selwood, the dude being executed at the start and is now looking after Marvin’s / Lucas’s kid Niek.Mason Davis (old world, former head of Elites) is John Patrick, Nolan’s father. Are the children of Elites also Elites? I am not sure if that was ever covered, but Niek and Nolan would qualify.Cesar Thaxter is the big bad, one of the initial Elites who started the whole thing and now runs the State. Alexander / Marvin went to him and told him about the immortality drug back in the old world.Shayla Lambert is kind of Alexander’s girlfriend for a minute there but she’s not in it long.David Flett, his (sick) wife Ellen, and their daughter Paige – the one I thought was going to be more of a thing in the story. Flett might have more to do but I was kind of at a loss about him.Kaylee Ashton is hired as a tutor for Paige. Also not really a thing. Colin Blythe is her uncle but so what? Her parents had died and she’d stolen come money from her uncle so she could get away. May also end up being more of a thing later.Carmine? No, that’s just Sergio’s car.George Savin is a rising star reporter / journalist who sniffs around at the main plot for the duration of the book, and has a thing with Alexander / Marvin late in the story.Nolan Patrick is Alexander’s assistant, he has a twin brother Dylan (a painter) and a younger sister Ashley, their dad is Mason / John, their mother Aria.Raul Beltram is also a character. His fiancé Isabel Duran is described physically (a lot of the female characters are, the males not so much for some reason) but we don’t get much insight into their story.Niek Hendricks – now Niek, I also liked. He didn’t have a huge role either but his story – as son of one character (Marvin / Lucas) required to live as ward to another character (first Ruben “uncle Ruben” Dekker, but he was a creep and Niek ended up with Alexander / Marvin) and conflicted over his place in things and with political and legal savvy beyond his years – was an interesting one. My dumb arse at least understood it.Elliott Houghton is legal counsel for McManus Corp – not really important.Sergio Martinez (67) and his assistant Kaya Richards. Sergio dies. He turns out to be Felipe Diaz, the son of Pablo Diaz, an “executed traitor” of the past … now, as to whether Pablo was an Elite and whether this means elderly and infirm Sergio (who, as stated, later dies) is evidence that Elites’ offspring don’t inherit immortality, I can’t say. I also didn’t really follow the death and whether it was actually meant to be a murder mystery or part of the plot.Then there’s Zain Baako, Amir Rahal (characterised as the son Sergio never had), Ania (head of tech security), Eva Costas (Resistance), Davu and Niki (Resistance?), the Ansari brothers Ibrahim and Hassan (Elite Defenders?) Valeria Chernova (head of Enforcers, Investigators and Defenders, also an Elite), Saito? Toshi? His dead wife Misaki, because of Mason / John?…

Dear God. So, anyway, that’s a lot, is what I’m saying. And there should maybe be some better way of contextualising it all. If not a dramatis personae, or some more memorable names or character quirks or descriptions, I don’t know. All I know is I remembered Alexander because he was the main character, and Nolan because he had interesting characteristics and was connected to the main story, and Paige and Niek because they had stuff going on, and all the rest were kind of a blur.

I liked the future history as laid out, and the technological advances we get to see. The teleportation tech, stasis tech, the A.I.s and the Nishati dimension (which was kind of related to the teleportation, teleportation had existed before but since Nishati was discovered teleportation had improved), Zhidium and DNA tracking, teleportation blockers and the various weapons they’d come up with to battle Elites … it was all very cool, and I think it should have been forefronted more. Especially as the Elites (I am using this as a shorthand for all the assorted immortal characters) had a first-hand connection to a lot of those developments and discoveries. There’s so much potential to explore there!

Oh yeah, and speaking of the A.I. assistants (the Sentients), they all have very normal names and are sometimes easy to confuse with people in the way they are referred to and talked about – again, a potentially cool idea that risked being frustrating and confusing at times. April, Miley, Quinn, June, I think Martin might also be one but it’s only mentioned once in the first chapter … Niek says he thought all Sentients were named April at one point. And the Sentients have bots, and manage teleportation and other conveniences. There’s a lot to unpack there too.

The setting is also endlessly fascinating, with interplanetary civilisation apparently made possible by teleportation but not really fully info-dumped in a way probably only I would have wanted to see. There’s Ignis, a hot and inhospitable planet with habitats … we don’t get a really good idea of what most of these worlds are like and how the systems are set up, is it a local group of systems or spread across the galaxy? Multiple galaxies? Like I say, farther systems and aliens are mentioned one time and that’s it. The Nishati dimension is used for the transportation of stuff, but the characters are planning some use of the technology that could mess Ignis up, but also aid in their transport of habitat materials and water or whatever to make the planet profitable … it’s difficult to track. There are other planets mentioned as well. Ytres, Nizhoni, Aeras, Hafi, Prith … and Earth is mentioned once in passing, as the origin world but there isn’t any clue as to whether it is now gone or where these all relate to each other.

Our setup ends on a cliffhanger as Thaxter calls Nolan and they start to make a deal about Nolan’s father. I’ve gone on way too long here, let’s take a look at the meters real quick.

Sex-o-meter

George and Alexander have one tasteful off-screen doink and that’s about it. Aside from that, and a lot of flirting and mooning and amusingly awkward don’t-they-realise-I’m-gay discomfort from Nolan, this is a pretty tame one.

I’m not sorry.

One mutually bristly yet warmly comforting cologne-scented firm-bicep’d man-kiss out of a possible five for The Elitist Supremacy.

Gore-o-meter

No gore to speak of. The spikes are a bit nasty (especially in the final scenes), the Elites are immortal so they can take a bit of damage but we don’t see much of it, and all in all I’m giving this one a mere half a flesh-gobbet out of a possible five.

WTF-o-meter

There is some good old-fashioned espionage-mystery in here, and the fuzzy line between “past” (still the future, for us) and “present” (distant future) is fascinating and I hope it’s further explored in the rest of the trilogy. And the Nishati dimension and of course the aliens are great WTF fodder. There’s just not enough of it to feed a growing boy, that’s all. A “concept of WTF as a kind of food stuffed into a nose-bag for readers to chew on” out of a possible “aliens walk into an exposition scene in a secret room in Nishati and say ‘what the fuck are you upright apes doing in our cloud storage’ in alien at the expositioning characters” for this one, if you follow my convoluted grammatical logic. And if you don’t, tough.

My Final Verdict

I didn’t spot a character named Garth in here. But I had a good time reading it and it left me thinking about a lot of stuff, so even if the character tangle left me feeling dumb, I came away with a positive vibe. Give it a try, maybe! Three stars, I say.