The Thousand Emperors (2)

Final Days #2

by Gary Gibson

Paperback. Pub Date :2013-08-29 384 English Praise for Gary Relentlessly gripping adventureThe Times To be considered alongside the leading triumvirate of British hard SF Al Reynolds. Peter Hamilton. and Neal AsherGuardian Gibson has certainly proved himself a name to watch SFXMUST HE DIE TO KNOW THE TRUTH Archivist Luc Gabion is dying. slowly. victim of a forced technology implant while on assignment. He brought down a powerful terrorist. but at great cost. and this new tech brings unexpected dangers . Luc must investigate the Thousand Emperors. rulers of the Tian Dis stellar empire. One of their number has been murdered and he needs to find the killer. But the technology he now carries supersedes anything hes encountered. and Luc sees things he knows are forbidden . As the truth emerges. hes in trouble. Any of these leaders could be guilty...

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Action, Science Fiction Fantasy

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2012

About the author

Gary Gibson's first novel, Angel Stations, was published in 2004. Interzone called it "dense and involving, puzzling and perplexing. It's unabashed science fiction, with an almost "Golden Age" feel to it ..."

His second novel was Against Gravity in 2005; the Guardian described it as "building on current trends to produce a convincing picture of the world in 2096."

Stealing Light was first published in 2007, and garnered a wide range of positive reviews. The London Times called it: "A violent, inventive, relentlessly gripping adventure ... intelligently written and thought-provoking".

Stealing Light is the first volume in a four-book space opera, the final volume of which, Marauder, was published in 2013.

To date, Gary has written ten novels, most recently Extinction Game and its sequel, Survival Game.

Reviews

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

FBC Rv

INTRODUCTION: Scottish sf writer Gary Gibson burst onto the scene in 2004 with a very ambitious debut Angel Stations which made me a big time fan. While having some debut flaws like lack of balance and even too much ambition for the relatively limited page count, Angel Stations is not your "average" debut, but a very complex and mature novel that pays several close readings. His second novel, Against Gravity, quite different in tone was another hit with me and then turning his hand to "popular" new space opera on a galactic canvas and with all the associated paraphernalia, Mr. Gibson completed the Shoal trilogy of which its debut Stealing Light was my top sf novel of the year.

While planning a return to the Shoal universe at some point, Gary Gibson developed another fascinating universe, "The Founder Network" one - in the 22/23 rd centuries humanity develops wormhole based ftl, only to find a sophisticated ancient system of wormholes, built by the hypothetical aliens named "Founders", system that goes far away in space and time but comes with potentially major dangers as we learn in Final Days.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: The Thousand Emperors is set in the same universe with Final Days some centuries after the events there and while there are some cool references to it at some point and of course the Founder network and tech is important even indirectly, the book is really a standalone as everything needed is explained.

As structure, the novel is part action adventure, part investigation of the powerful with the attending risks, part sense of wonder all written in the wonderful style that made Gary Gibson one of the top sf authors of today with all 7 books to date read by me the moment I got them, either on publication or occasionally as advanced reading copies.

Most of The Thousand Emperors takes place in Tian Di, a semi paternalistic space empire modeled on the successful semi-democratic Asian states of today like Singapore - led by a council of elders that achieved effective immortality with clones and transcribing personality, protected by an elite force of warriors - the Sandoz - who also benefit by the same treatments.

Separated a few centuries ago from the Western-like Coalition after a successful revolution on its worlds and the severance of the wormholes connecting Tian Di's worlds with the Coalition, Tian Di's people enjoy generally tranquil and prosperous lives but there are some trouble spots and then there is what some perceive as stagnation with science and technology managed by the Council, while the Coalition is rumored to be leaps and bounds ahead.

So despite Joseph "Father" Cheng's wishes - the leader of the Council though not without internal opposition - and even of most of the 85 "inner" members of the Council, there is a seemingly inevitable "reunification" with the Coalition with the first wormhole connecting Tian Di's capital Temur to Darwin the Coalition's capital to be opened soon.

Explaining this better here is an excerpt from the Prologue, which in pure sf tradition is itself a purported "Excerpt from A History of the Tian Di: Volume 1 – From Abandonment to Schism by Javier Maxwell."

"The decades following the Abandonment were hard, lean times, but barely half a century later starships carrying new, retro-engineered transfer gates were already being sent out to reconnect the colonies one to another. It is in this period that the template for the modern political order was laid down.

Although the Western Coalition – by this time, simply the Coalition – had seized political and military control of the colonial governments, the general populations of those worlds had been predominantly drawn from member nations of the former Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Coalition–Sphere relations were already deeply antagonistic prior to the Abandonment, and became more so, inevitably flowering into a full-fledged revolt a century after the Coalition’s takeover. The uprising proved to be bitter and protracted, but ended with several worlds finally achieving autonomy from Coalition rule. These worlds – Da Vinci (now Benares), Newton (now New Samarkand), Franklin (now Temur), Galileo (now Novaya Zvezda), Yue Shijie, and Acamar – became known collectively as the Tian Di, and were ruled from Temur by a council of revolutionary leaders numbering nearly a thousand. Although far from being a democracy, this Temur Council provided much-needed stability in the post-revolutionary period.

While the Tian Di and the Coalition co-existed in relative peace over the next several decades, they rapidly diverged both culturally and technologically. The Coalition first renewed and then stepped up its exploration of the Founder Network, despite increasingly alarmed protests from the Temur Council, whose members were afraid of a repeat of the events leading to the Abandonment. It is undoubted that the Temur Council lacked for effective leadership in the years immediately preceding what we now call the Schism, and the power vacuum following Salomón Lintz’s forced resignation as the Council’s Chairman offered a clear opportunity for a man as ruthlessly determined as Joseph Cheng. Cheng soon swept to power on the wave of a popular coup, and the promise that he would sever all transfer gates linking to the Coalition to prevent any possible repeat of the Abandonment. Cheng soon fulfilled his promise and, within days of becoming Permanent Chairman of the Temur Council, the human race was effectively split in two.

Those few members of the Temur Council who had openly opposed Cheng’s rise to power, including, most prominently, myself and Winchell Antonov, were either imprisoned, forced into exile, or executed on trumped-up charges. It cannot be denied that the period immediately following the Schism was marked by unprecedented peace throughout the Tian Di. The quality of life for our citizens improved by such leaps and bounds that there was, for a long time, little to no demand throughout the Tian Di for moves towards more democratic representation.

The one real exception, of course, was Benares – a world of limited resources, cruelly under-represented within the Council. It was on Benares that Winchell Antonov, having escaped his imprisonment, founded the Black Lotus organization. Antonov is also credited with giving Cheng’ls Council the less than flattering sobriquet The Thousand Emperors."

Coming back to the book itself, the story follows "master archivist" security investigator Luc Gabion whom we see (nominally) leading a Sandoz strike force closing in the last hideout of Winchell Antonov, hideout that was found by Gabion's painstaking investigation of years. The book just explodes from its first "proper" page - after the prologue quoted above - and it just does not stop for over 300 pages that "demand" end to end reading, so absorbing they are.

"‘Gabion.’
Luc turned to see Marroqui stabbing a finger at him from across the hold, his face dimly visible within his helmet.
‘Close your visor, Goddamn it,’ said Marroqui, his voice flat and dull in the cramped confines of the hold. ‘Depressurization in less than thirty seconds. We’re landing.’
Luc reached up and snapped his helmet’s visor into place, ignoring the smirking expressions of the armour-suited Sandoz warriors arrayed in crash couches around him. They were crammed in close to each other, bathed in red light."

There are a lot of nice touches - eg Tian Di seems very "real" reflecting the author's true experiences (meaning doing real work and mingling with the local population not only with the bigwigs in flyby "research" trips...) of living in the east, the sense of wonder is vivid and the action feels mostly "realistic" too with few over the top moments.

There are also a few quieter moments and the characters "have also lives", the lack of which is one the main failings of action-adventure sf...

"Luc arrived back at his apartment without incident and found several messages waiting for him from Eleanor. This time, instead of ignoring them he sent back an immediate response. He had a sudden desperate urge to see her, to hold her in his arms."

The one negative of the book is the lack of ambiguity in the main villains who after a while are quite easy to pinpoint as they almost wear the well known "villain hat", while also being real unsubtle about it as in an emphatic "I am in for me", but I mind this much less in sf than in fantasy and the novel delivers so well in all the other aspects (action, sense of wonder, world building, characters, style...) that this niggle is quite minor.

A top 25 novel of mine for 2012 and another Gary Gibson winner!

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Final Days is one of my favourite SF novels, so much of a favourite is it that I was strangely deterred from reading its successor. I had no need to fear. Gary Gibson is a writer of the highest order and Thousand Emperors didn't just match Final Days, it exceeded it. Strengthening the appeal of them both is that each can be read as stand alone novels and have little to do with one another beyond their links to the hugely intriguing Founders Network. I want much, much more from this universe.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 Stars

Wow The Thousand Emperors is even better than the amazing first book Final Days. Gary Gibson has created a masterpiece science fiction detective noir series. I loved every word and devoured this book. I am short of time for a real review but I will say that this is one of my favorite reads of 2013. I could read books like this every day.

It is simply an action packed science fiction mystery dream. My highest recommendations...

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Thousand Emperors is better than Final Days and hints at great things to come in this series. I liked that both books had good endings and that The Thousand Emperors was not a direct sequel to Final Days.

[“Gideon” Dave Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sequel to Gary Gibson's 2011 novel "Final Days" takes the setting forward a few centuries to explore humanity's reaction to Earth's destruction, with a storyline structured around a murder investigation conducted by protagonist, Luc Gabion (whose surname reminds me of the author's own, perhaps deliberately). After a fairly action-filled opening raid, the story then slows down considerably as the investigation/mystery portion of the story proceed, and finally accelerate violently once the villains and victims are established. Aside from FTL wormhole transportation used in a strict government-controlled way, and ubiquitous non-sentient robots, the everyday technologies Gibson writes for Gabion's world is only very cautiously advanced from our own. He reserves the wider SF ideas and ambitions for a second society, called the Coalition, and resembling Iain M. Bank's Culture, glimpsed briefly in the ending chapters.

With a quick opening lesson excerpted from a fictional history text, Gibson explains the division of society into two separate civilizations representing the opposing approaches to Earth's final disaster. On one side is the fearlessly progressive Coalition, which continue to explore and study the alien Founder's Network of wormholes and artifacts that brought about the cataclysm, and which culturally parallels the Western culture of our own society. In self-imposed isolation from these, we find the worlds of the Tian Di, a strict empire which takes a more conservative position by outlawing such investigation, and which suffers from technological and political stagnation. It is within this Tian Di society that our story unfolds, and though the eyes of a Tian Di commoner character that Gibson progressively acquaints us with his wider story universe, allowing the reader to experience the same surprises and discoveries.

The story's conclusion hints at a future installment to the series which will hopefully be set in the Coalition, and will have a more cosmic, space-opera outlook. Unanswered questions regarding some of the characters from 'Final Days' can be addressed, and perhaps a multi-character perspective can break up the narrative again. Even without these elements from the first book, (not to mention the fascinating acrobatics with time paradoxes), I found 'The Thousand Emperors' to be an enjoyable five-star read, which can incidentally be enjoyed as as a standalone story, apart from the earlier novel.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of action here, and some interesting parts to the worldbuilding, but I finished the book unsatisfied.

Probably largely because near the end we have our hero doing all-out magic as he looks at attacking weapons, wishes they would stop, and sees them all collapse.

Before I forget ... anyone here old enough to remember Gyro Gearloose? And his little assistants with lightbulb heads? Are those not Gibson's mechants?

Hopping in the sack with Zelia was so, so predictable, but I admit that some of the other plot twists involving women more than made up for it.

Did anyone else want to punch out calm, smug, condescending Ambassador Sachs?

Did anyone else wonder why every other character in the book didn't (a) see that Cripps was Mr. Nyah-hah Bwah-hah-hah, and (b) try to take him ourt at all costs?

The library scenes were an acceptable way of setting up a necessary info dump. Although at one point I recall a paragraph that took up most of a page ...

Maybe a bit heavy on private-channel this, blocking that, falsifying this other thing.

Near the end, we touch briefly on the ethics and philosophy of making a copy of a human. Perhaps spoiled by the idea that the Ambassador can make a copy of Luc by touching him for an instant. Is this what USB 5.0 will bring us?

I can't explain why the tech in Reynolds, Asher, Banks works for me and it just doesn't seem quite right here.

And how many nearby explosions does Luc survive, even as people beside him are flayed to ribbons?
Is "Luc" short for "Lucky" ?

Still a pretty good book.

[Riversue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was excellent - action-packed adventure . A great space opera bits. My only quibble might be that the hero seemed to get a few chicks into bed but of course no long term commitment thing - they all die. How convenient. SOmeone should write a female version with a woman doing the same thing. But the story was fun.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sequel to Final Days. There's *very* little connection with that previous book; so it's less a sequel and more a book that appears in the same universe, but a long time later. There's no obvious reason for it being connected to that universe, no follow-up on all the stuff about time travel and no-one having free will from the last book, and so on. But. hey, I guess it doesn't *detract* from the book that it's in the Final Days universe.

Book itself is fine. The murder mystery element is okay. The characters are a bit... difficult to like, which made my connection with the narrative somewhat too distant. But a passable read.

[Shane Kiely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally enjoyable as a book in its own right but slightly disappointing as a sequel to Final Days. There are concepts from that story that are established that never come to fruition this time around as more time is dedicated to resolving this story’s own elements. Similar to its predecessor as much of the writing feels like it’s from a detective story rather than a space opera. I initially thought it was potentially gonna wind up being anticlimactic but there’s an abruptness to the conclusion that winds up suiting the story as established by what’s gone before. Arguably readable as a standalone but I’d say treat its as the conclusion to a series.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars? Though technically the sequel to Final Days, this book took place centuries later, and really involves a different world. It's tied to the original but is otherwise very different. I liked it so much more. The story here was much more focused and interesting, and the development and resolution of the book was much more satisfying and effective. I had a sense from the first volume that Gibson could spin a good yarn but basically failed in volume one. If that mediocre mess of a book was necessary to set up this one, then I forgive it a bit. But realistically this story could be a standalone.

[Vegard · Rating 4 out of 5]

God, ganske frittståande oppfølgar. Gibson er veldig god på plot-twists og å laga alien-sivilisasjonar. Denne kunne kanskje fått 5 stjerner, men 5 stjerner heng høgt. Gibson har fått det før, og eg veit at han kan enda betre enn dette. Personane er litt flate, eg blei liksom ikkje personleg engasjert i nokon av dei – og the bad guys er liksom tvers gjennom vonde. Men men.

[Peter Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book. Well written. I had hoped that book 2 in the "Founder" series would be a continuation of the first book - but it was just set in the same universe - that said, it was a good read - but I feel that there is so much potential in the universe that more books would work.

[Oskari · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Vuoden 2019 eka. Luin vahingos tokan osan nii vähä kusin, mut silti ihan hauska.

[Nick Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than Final Days, not improvement in characters, but in a balance between investigative and action parts. Previous book had focus on more in an action parts.

Things that tickled my imagination in Final Days was the Founder Network and i was curious the know more of them, which i did, but not enough, so please Mr. Gibson, i need a one or more book heavy on Founders stuff. I got sucked in the plot, kept me guessing almost to end, just right amount of twist and turns.

World building was good and keeping mind that this is only 350 or so pages, that's something, you don't necessary need 1000 + pages like Peter F. Hamilton and hundreds of a characters to make it work, though Hamilton is still the master at epic-sci-fi.

Style of writing in sci-fi tends to be sometimes heavy on a technobabble side and all those fancy future stuff overshadow story and characters, for an example like in The Quantum Thief, not in Gibson writing, you get your tech stuff, but they serve the story.

There are some loose ends, like Inimicals and once again Founder Network get's only teasing, come on! I need my Founder trilogy or something! All the Lovecraftian glimpses of an ancient aliens got me going so there is no excuse to not to tell more. Fine book, and i really need to read Shoal trilogy.

[Bruno Di Giandomenico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it! It is a mistery book in a science fiction scenario. The second book in a series, after "the final days", it is vastly better. After the destruction of Earth mankind has split between the Coalition and the Tian Di, a more or less benevolent despotism, whereas little is known at the beginning about the Coalition.
The wormholes between the two branches of marking has been severed and there is no contact between them.
Luc Gabion is a member of the Archives, who are the policemen/ spies / counter terroristic agency of the Tian Di, and he is looking for Winchell Antonov, previously a friend of Father Cheng, the dictator of the Tian Di, and now head of the terroristic Black Lotus.
Among transplanted personalities, wormholes, people living for centuries (reinstantiated memories within cloned bodies) and other futuristic amenities which I shall not try to divulge in order to ruin the book, the plot thickens. A member of the council governing the Tuain Di has been assassinated in a classical closed room situation, which Luc is chosen to investigate, in a rather complex situation. Investigating a member of the aristocracy is never easy.
The plot thickens because it is time for the two halves of mankind to communicate again, via a new wormhole, and the ambassador of the coalition becomes part of the plot.
I understand that the plot seems complicated, but the reading is simply compelling, one of the best novels I have read this year.
Looking forward to other from Mr. Gary Gibson, it is a pity he writes too little.

[Adrian Leaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

A far future detective novel set centuries after Gibson's previous Final Days.
It is only a sequel in the broadest terms, using the collapse of a wormhole network in the previous novel to present a future where humanity has divided into two completely separate factions. One a quasi dictatorship (keen on maintaining the status quo and is obviously stagnating) that is on the verge of civil unrest. The other a much more mysterious and progressive civilisation that in many ways would be barely recognised as human; post human in fact!
The main thrust of the story is a fun murder mystery surrounding Reunification between the two factions, but develops into something far larger in scale.
I enjoyed it more than the previous novel, mainly because it had a better overall focus and the characterisation was much improved. Good world building and interesting BIG ideas were also in evidence.

[Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too bad but not nearly as good as the first in the series. In the first book there was a great deal of world building, conspiracies, cool everyday wearable technology, believable scifi, great characters and a thrilling ride. The idea of time travel allowing access to the past and the future due to the nature of breaking the speed of light is fascinating and understandably dangerous.

In this book, it is a new set of characters, most you never get to know well enough to feel for and a conspiracy that is not really that great. It was still ok, but I really wish it was set immediately after the last book rather than a century or two after. I also felt the action within the story is happening in a different place to where the reader gets its point of view.

If you read the last book, you will naturally read this one but don't expect the same greatness

[Normalene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt much like Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series but set in a different world. The characters were very unique and the plot had many cool tech gadgets that made it work. There is a ruling council who are effectively immortal and filthy rich and worlds that still live in poverty. Science is weird and scary as controls on the council are not enforced so some passages will truly gross you out. When a murder takes place, our hero is tasked to find the killer even if it might be one of the council. But no one tells the truth, not in whole or in part and no one can be trusted, not even the thing in his head. Yeah, you have to read this to find out what happens, it won't be what you expect and there is room left for some sequels so that would be nice.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Different style than the first book in the series. A detective novel with a slow build to a big finish. Unlike the first action packed Final Days. Loved it. Do not have to read the first book to read this. Takes place 100's of years later and only refers to previous characters.

[Darell Trianni · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was disappointed to be honest his other novel are brilliant. I didnt even finish this book through boredom

[Hido · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast-paced, refreshing and well written. The style reminds me of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which is a great thing!

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was moderately entertaining with some interesting technology ideas, but wasn't too exciting - perhaps the plot just wasn't exciting enough, I'm not sure. Worth a read but not fantastic.

[Cristian Iorga · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really good. Hard to put down.

[Terry]

I really like Gary Gibson's style and writing ability.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

We enter a far future with high technology that can download human consciousness to create a facsimile of a dying person, thus prolonging their life in a new body. There are space ships and star battles, intergalactic politics and spies, and a clever plot with enough twists and turns to keep you reading. Even so, a few vital signs are still lacking. Gibson is good with the story, but poor with characterisation - he creates little by way of empathy for his protagonist Luc Gabion, so we are not really concerned about the hero's fate. The violence is needlessly graphic: for example, the torture scene with its descriptions of heinous wounds was almost sickening. Finally, there is virtually no tension. There are plot twists, yes, but despite the fact that Gabion is often chased, and the universe is on the very brink of annihilation, the author fails to build any real suspense: where you expect description to give insight into character thoughts, or political implications, or at least the nearby vista, the text is sparse. The only reason you read to the end is because you wonder about the outcome, not because you absolutely have to know. It reads like a debut - a good early effort but needs improvement in the next instalment: B minus. However, this is not Gibson's first book; according to Wikipedia, it is his seventh novel, which makes it more disappointing. Modern science fiction is mostly awful and because this contains promise, I'd like to see him improving over his career. I might give him another go, but I won't persist if his other books are just like this one.