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The Great Silence #2
Steel Gods
Not yet published
Expected 31 Mar 26INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BECKONS. SPIRITUAL CATASTROPHE LOOMS.
AND THE EMPIRE OF THE WOLF TEETERS ON THE BRINK
The true horror of the Great Silence has been revealed. As nation after nation succumbs to the mind-plague and Sova scrambles to enlist help from across the globe, Ambassador Renata Rainer has been given a simple task: save the world.
While she travels to the Principality of Casimir to enlist the help of the Empire's oldest enemy, Lieutenant Peter Kleist returns to the haunted forests of the New East to search for ancient answers - and finally confront the terrible fate that awaits him. In their wake, a task force of engineers, soldiers, and arcane experts will try and unpick the final secrets of the Great Silence - on both sides of the mortal plane.
But time is running out. Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg has returned to the capital, armed with a terrible vision and enough madness to see it through. Those who stand in his way face a simple choice: join the revolution, or die.
As the world tips towards chaos, all paths converge on the Eye of the Sea, where the fabric of reality wears thin - and where the Empire of the Wolf must confront the most terrible enemy it has ever known.
Steel Gods is the second novel in the Great Silence trilogy from Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Swan - a dark flintlock fantasy filled with epic adventure, arcane mysteries and creeping dread
Praise for the series
'Dazzling and immersive epic fantasy' Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'An absolute treat . . . crammed with imagination, horror, epic scale, and characters I simply could not put down' Grimdark Magazine
'A truly remarkable page-turning, flintlock fantasy horror' Fantasy Hive
The Great Silence
Grave Empire
Steel Gods
The Empire of the Wolf
The Justice of Kings
The Tyranny of Faith
The Trials of Empire
AND THE EMPIRE OF THE WOLF TEETERS ON THE BRINK
The true horror of the Great Silence has been revealed. As nation after nation succumbs to the mind-plague and Sova scrambles to enlist help from across the globe, Ambassador Renata Rainer has been given a simple task: save the world.
While she travels to the Principality of Casimir to enlist the help of the Empire's oldest enemy, Lieutenant Peter Kleist returns to the haunted forests of the New East to search for ancient answers - and finally confront the terrible fate that awaits him. In their wake, a task force of engineers, soldiers, and arcane experts will try and unpick the final secrets of the Great Silence - on both sides of the mortal plane.
But time is running out. Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg has returned to the capital, armed with a terrible vision and enough madness to see it through. Those who stand in his way face a simple choice: join the revolution, or die.
As the world tips towards chaos, all paths converge on the Eye of the Sea, where the fabric of reality wears thin - and where the Empire of the Wolf must confront the most terrible enemy it has ever known.
Steel Gods is the second novel in the Great Silence trilogy from Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Swan - a dark flintlock fantasy filled with epic adventure, arcane mysteries and creeping dread
Praise for the series
'Dazzling and immersive epic fantasy' Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'An absolute treat . . . crammed with imagination, horror, epic scale, and characters I simply could not put down' Grimdark Magazine
'A truly remarkable page-turning, flintlock fantasy horror' Fantasy Hive
The Great Silence
Grave Empire
Steel Gods
The Empire of the Wolf
The Justice of Kings
The Tyranny of Faith
The Trials of Empire
448 pages, Paperback
Expected publication March 31, 2026
2255 people want to read
About the author
Richard Swan
18 books1,723 followersRichard Swan is a critically acclaimed British genre writer. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Empire of the Wolf and Great Silence trilogies, as well as fiction for Black Library and Grimdark Magazine. His work has been translated into ten languages.
Richard is a qualified lawyer, and before writing full time spent ten years litigating multimillion pound commercial disputes in London. He currently lives in Sydney with his wife and three young sons.
For updates follow him at stonetemplelibrary.com.
Richard is a qualified lawyer, and before writing full time spent ten years litigating multimillion pound commercial disputes in London. He currently lives in Sydney with his wife and three young sons.
For updates follow him at stonetemplelibrary.com.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
Want to read
July 11, 2025eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
and also
PETERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
there's absolutely nothing coherent coming out of my mouth after seeing the majesty that is this book cover
supremely ready for "creeping dread" 2.0
let's fkin gooooooooo
and also
PETERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
there's absolutely nothing coherent coming out of my mouth after seeing the majesty that is this book cover
supremely ready for "creeping dread" 2.0
let's fkin gooooooooo
Want to read
July 16, 2025Can’t wait to get my hands on this book!
Want to read
August 22, 2025It seems that every century or so a mad man with a vision and access to demonic powers will march on Sovan capital.
Want to read
October 1, 2025Loved book one, even more than I enjoyed the original trilogy. I can't wait for book two, look at that cover;) !
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
There is a kind of fantasy novel that arrives disguised as spectacle – cannonsmoke and salt spray, empires and insurgents, monsters the size of weather – and then, once you have given it your attention, begins to behave like something else entirely: a meditation on administration, belief, and the terrifying ease with which a society can persuade itself that cruelty is merely procedure. “Steel Gods” is that kind of book. It has the outward velocity of a naval campaign and the inward gravity of a theological argument, and it is hard to think of another recent epic that marries its page-turning appetite to such stern philosophical intent.
Swan’s world is not simply built; it is managed. The reader moves through an ecosystem of treaties and fleets, ecclesiastical hierarchies and mercantile appetites, magical doctrines and the moral loopholes they enable. Nations posture and bargain; churches refine their liturgies like weapons; “certainty” is sold as a civic virtue and “chaos” as the name of evil. This is fantasy that understands, with an almost sociological chill, that the real engine of history is not the sword but the committee – and that the committee will happily borrow the sword when it needs to.
The novel’s central anxieties are announced early and kept in view: who gets to define salvation, what power looks like when it can launder itself through ritual, and how quickly a civilization will embrace metaphysical disaster if the paperwork is convincing enough. These are large, unglamorous questions, and Swan has the confidence to keep them unglamorous. He does not romanticize faith or sneer at it. Instead he stages faith as a human technology – consoling, coercive, sincere, cynical, and, in the wrong hands, catastrophically scalable.
If the book sometimes feels like it is dragging its chain-mail through the corridors of a chancery, that is part of its effect. In Swan’s imagination, apocalypse is not a comet streaking toward a hillside. It is a multi-step process. It is a meeting in a hospital chamber. It is a conversation about the “precise nature of the sacrament.” It is a man deciding, between sips of water and opiates, that he will “seize the organs of government” and call the public blood ceremony something respectable. There is a particular horror in watching a villain with an injured hand and a splitting skull still think in bullet points.
Lamprecht von Oldenburg – or the fractured, avataric version of him that haunts the book’s later movements – is not a charmer. He is worse. He is managerial. He is petulant in the way of people who believe the world owes them compliance. His obscenity is not merely personal; it is systemic, expressed as an entitlement to rearrange institutions around his appetites. He is the kind of tyrant who does not only want obedience – he wants consecration. He wants the state to mirror his interior life so perfectly that even morality becomes a logistical detail.
And yet Swan’s novel is not only, or even primarily, his villain’s showcase. The book’s emotional center is more dispersed, carried by characters who move through catastrophe with varying degrees of agency and astonishment: Renata Rainer, diplomat in the most literal sense, navigating a war that is also an argument about metaphysics; Jason Laine, a naval captain whose competence becomes a kind of secular prayer; the onmyoji Kaito Kuroda, conduit and cost; Sina and the wounded Stygion polity, forced into the humiliating realization that even ancient fortresses can be outmoded overnight. Around them move thralls and vacants, politicized bodies made into ammunition – and Swan is careful, in his bleakest passages, never to let the reader forget that the great moral crisis of the book is what happens when personhood becomes a resource.
The climactic sequence at Maka – the Jade Sea churning with men-o’-war, mind-rotted soldiers, Stygion defenders, and the horrific improvisation of underwater explosives – is the sort of set piece that many fantasy writers attempt and few sustain. Swan sustains it not only through choreography, though the choreography is superb, but through consequence. Every explosion changes the strategic field. Every magical intervention has a cost. Even the language of command – shouted, signed, telepathically blasted – becomes part of the novel’s argument about what it means to direct human life at scale.
When the breach opens in the roof of Maka and the contingency awakens – I’Vakatawa, the slumbering guardian of the Eye of the Sea – the moment lands with genuine mythic awe. But Swan immediately complicates awe with dread: the guardian itself must be warded, or it can become the instrument of the very catastrophe it exists to prevent. Safeguards, the novel suggests, are never neutral. A system designed to protect can be turned, with enough pressure, into a system designed to destroy. It is an insight that resonates uncomfortably in a world where our own “contingencies” – political, technological, epidemiological – often reveal their sharp edges only when activated.
The leviathan battle that follows could have been mere spectacle, a flex of imaginative musculature. Instead it reads like an indictment of hubris. The kraken is not evil in the moral sense; it is vacant, turned by forces that outrun intention. Stygio’s arrival, too, is not the clean comfort of deus ex machina but the exhausted appearance of a power that is both necessary and destabilizing. Even divinity here is subject to logistics: bodies hauled onto beaches, lungs forced to relearn breath, fleets reduced to salvage. Swan is unusually attentive to the aftermath of myth – to the paperwork, the burning piles of dead, the lack of a “formal command structure,” the way survival immediately becomes administration.
If all of this sounds severe, it is. But the novel is also funny in a harsh, human way. Laine’s vocabulary of blasphemy is a kind of music, the sailor’s liturgy of complaint. Characters swear not to relieve tension but to acknowledge it – language as ballast. Swan’s humor is rarely cute and never winking. It is the humor of people trying to remain themselves in circumstances designed to erase them.
The book’s prose suits its ambitions. It is richly textured without becoming florid, and it has a gift for the tactile: the sting of spray, the press of depth, the creak of ships, the wet nightmare of the “Temple of the Divine Mouth.” Swan’s sentences often carry the weight of a world that is, by design, overcrowded with meaning – political meaning, theological meaning, bodily meaning. He trusts the reader to keep up, and he does not soften his metaphysical vocabulary for accessibility. There are times when this density becomes a kind of drag, especially when multiple factions and doctrines converge in rapid sequence, but it also creates the novel’s distinctive authority. The reader is not being told a story by an entertainer; the reader is being briefed by a historian of an invented catastrophe.
What makes “Steel Gods” feel particularly contemporary is not a one-to-one allegory but a set of shared pressures. Swan’s empires are obsessed with stability, and their obsession has a familiar ring. “Certainty,” as one regent puts it, is safety, taxes, temple attendance, permitted speech – a definition that is less comforting than it sounds, because it frames civic life as a series of transactions overseen by institutions that reserve the right to redefine “undue reprisal.” Chaos becomes a moral category used to justify control. Public health becomes a metaphor for political purity. War is treated not only as violence but as contagion. Even the language of “consumption” – blood as sacrament, flesh as symbol – echoes the way modern politics so often turns the body into a battleground for meaning.
The novel also understands, with grim clarity, the seductions of emergency. Once the world is on fire, almost anything can be framed as necessary. In Swan’s hands, catastrophe is not merely what happens to characters – it is what characters learn to use. That feels relevant in an era when crises pile upon crises and every institution insists it alone can manage the fallout, so long as you hand it a little more authority, a little more privacy, a little more time.
For readers looking to place Swan’s achievement among peers, the kinships are suggestive. There is something of “The Traitor Baru Cormorant” in the way institutions are treated as predatory organisms, something of “The First Law” in the refusal of moral comfort, something of “The Black Company” in the grime and fatalism of soldiers doing their jobs at the edge of comprehension. The nautical terror and baroque strangeness may remind some of “The Scar,” while the looming metaphysical architecture – the sense that reality has seams and those seams can be pried open – nods toward the ambitious cosmologies of “Malazan Book of the Fallen.” Yet Swan’s voice remains his own: more legalistic than many of these, more interested in the machinery of legitimacy. If other fantasies ask who wins the throne, “Steel Gods” asks what the throne does to everyone who believes in it.
Still, the book is not perfect, and its imperfections are, in a way, the price of its seriousness. The novel can be emotionally cool. Swan is so adept at handling systems that some characters occasionally feel like emissaries of ideas rather than fully unpredictable people. Renata, for all her vivid fear and courage, sometimes functions as the reader’s witness rather than as a figure whose interior life surprises us. Von Oldenburg’s mind is rendered with lurid intensity, but that very intensity can flatten him into an embodiment of appetites – repellent, fascinating, but rarely tendered the kind of psychological nuance that might make him even more frightening. (Monsters are scariest when they are also plausible.) And in the late movements, when the narrative splinters outward – to the Fort at the End of Time, to chessboard interludes of cosmic observation, to the epilogue’s bleak couriered failure – some readers may feel the story’s momentum briefly dissipate into mythic tableau.
But these are not failures of craft so much as symptoms of ambition. Swan is doing something difficult: writing an epic that wants both to entertain and to condemn, to deliver the dopamine of battle while keeping the reader’s conscience awake. When the novel turns to its epilogue and lets a small creature – a red-faced godwit – become the bearer of tragic irony, it is not merely showing off a literary trick. It is underlining the book’s bleakest thesis: history is often determined by banal breakdowns. The message goes undelivered. The right person is already dead. The system is too loud to hear its own warning.
The final image of Olwin, the Spear, and Yelena’s gold-faced revelation is the kind of ending that reconfigures what came before. In a genre that often closes with restoration, Swan closes with escalation – not because he is addicted to sequel bait, but because his moral imagination does not permit easy closure. If the afterlife is real, why do we keep destroying one another? The epigraph asks the question plainly, and the narrative answers it with a kind of bitter tenderness: because certainty is profitable, because chaos is useful, because institutions are hungry, because people are afraid, because power loves the shape of ritual.
The highest praise one can give “Steel Gods” is that it leaves the reader not only impressed but implicated. It is an epic that refuses to be merely an escape hatch. It wants to be a mirror – warped, briny, full of monstrous silhouettes – held up to a civilization that keeps insisting it is rational even as it prepares, with careful spiritual preparations, to do something unforgivable.
For all its density, for all its occasional emotional remove, it is a major work – bristling with intelligence, saturated with dread, and written with the confidence of a novelist who believes fantasy can carry the full weight of the real. My rating: 89 out of 100.
Swan’s world is not simply built; it is managed. The reader moves through an ecosystem of treaties and fleets, ecclesiastical hierarchies and mercantile appetites, magical doctrines and the moral loopholes they enable. Nations posture and bargain; churches refine their liturgies like weapons; “certainty” is sold as a civic virtue and “chaos” as the name of evil. This is fantasy that understands, with an almost sociological chill, that the real engine of history is not the sword but the committee – and that the committee will happily borrow the sword when it needs to.
The novel’s central anxieties are announced early and kept in view: who gets to define salvation, what power looks like when it can launder itself through ritual, and how quickly a civilization will embrace metaphysical disaster if the paperwork is convincing enough. These are large, unglamorous questions, and Swan has the confidence to keep them unglamorous. He does not romanticize faith or sneer at it. Instead he stages faith as a human technology – consoling, coercive, sincere, cynical, and, in the wrong hands, catastrophically scalable.
If the book sometimes feels like it is dragging its chain-mail through the corridors of a chancery, that is part of its effect. In Swan’s imagination, apocalypse is not a comet streaking toward a hillside. It is a multi-step process. It is a meeting in a hospital chamber. It is a conversation about the “precise nature of the sacrament.” It is a man deciding, between sips of water and opiates, that he will “seize the organs of government” and call the public blood ceremony something respectable. There is a particular horror in watching a villain with an injured hand and a splitting skull still think in bullet points.
Lamprecht von Oldenburg – or the fractured, avataric version of him that haunts the book’s later movements – is not a charmer. He is worse. He is managerial. He is petulant in the way of people who believe the world owes them compliance. His obscenity is not merely personal; it is systemic, expressed as an entitlement to rearrange institutions around his appetites. He is the kind of tyrant who does not only want obedience – he wants consecration. He wants the state to mirror his interior life so perfectly that even morality becomes a logistical detail.
And yet Swan’s novel is not only, or even primarily, his villain’s showcase. The book’s emotional center is more dispersed, carried by characters who move through catastrophe with varying degrees of agency and astonishment: Renata Rainer, diplomat in the most literal sense, navigating a war that is also an argument about metaphysics; Jason Laine, a naval captain whose competence becomes a kind of secular prayer; the onmyoji Kaito Kuroda, conduit and cost; Sina and the wounded Stygion polity, forced into the humiliating realization that even ancient fortresses can be outmoded overnight. Around them move thralls and vacants, politicized bodies made into ammunition – and Swan is careful, in his bleakest passages, never to let the reader forget that the great moral crisis of the book is what happens when personhood becomes a resource.
The climactic sequence at Maka – the Jade Sea churning with men-o’-war, mind-rotted soldiers, Stygion defenders, and the horrific improvisation of underwater explosives – is the sort of set piece that many fantasy writers attempt and few sustain. Swan sustains it not only through choreography, though the choreography is superb, but through consequence. Every explosion changes the strategic field. Every magical intervention has a cost. Even the language of command – shouted, signed, telepathically blasted – becomes part of the novel’s argument about what it means to direct human life at scale.
When the breach opens in the roof of Maka and the contingency awakens – I’Vakatawa, the slumbering guardian of the Eye of the Sea – the moment lands with genuine mythic awe. But Swan immediately complicates awe with dread: the guardian itself must be warded, or it can become the instrument of the very catastrophe it exists to prevent. Safeguards, the novel suggests, are never neutral. A system designed to protect can be turned, with enough pressure, into a system designed to destroy. It is an insight that resonates uncomfortably in a world where our own “contingencies” – political, technological, epidemiological – often reveal their sharp edges only when activated.
The leviathan battle that follows could have been mere spectacle, a flex of imaginative musculature. Instead it reads like an indictment of hubris. The kraken is not evil in the moral sense; it is vacant, turned by forces that outrun intention. Stygio’s arrival, too, is not the clean comfort of deus ex machina but the exhausted appearance of a power that is both necessary and destabilizing. Even divinity here is subject to logistics: bodies hauled onto beaches, lungs forced to relearn breath, fleets reduced to salvage. Swan is unusually attentive to the aftermath of myth – to the paperwork, the burning piles of dead, the lack of a “formal command structure,” the way survival immediately becomes administration.
If all of this sounds severe, it is. But the novel is also funny in a harsh, human way. Laine’s vocabulary of blasphemy is a kind of music, the sailor’s liturgy of complaint. Characters swear not to relieve tension but to acknowledge it – language as ballast. Swan’s humor is rarely cute and never winking. It is the humor of people trying to remain themselves in circumstances designed to erase them.
The book’s prose suits its ambitions. It is richly textured without becoming florid, and it has a gift for the tactile: the sting of spray, the press of depth, the creak of ships, the wet nightmare of the “Temple of the Divine Mouth.” Swan’s sentences often carry the weight of a world that is, by design, overcrowded with meaning – political meaning, theological meaning, bodily meaning. He trusts the reader to keep up, and he does not soften his metaphysical vocabulary for accessibility. There are times when this density becomes a kind of drag, especially when multiple factions and doctrines converge in rapid sequence, but it also creates the novel’s distinctive authority. The reader is not being told a story by an entertainer; the reader is being briefed by a historian of an invented catastrophe.
What makes “Steel Gods” feel particularly contemporary is not a one-to-one allegory but a set of shared pressures. Swan’s empires are obsessed with stability, and their obsession has a familiar ring. “Certainty,” as one regent puts it, is safety, taxes, temple attendance, permitted speech – a definition that is less comforting than it sounds, because it frames civic life as a series of transactions overseen by institutions that reserve the right to redefine “undue reprisal.” Chaos becomes a moral category used to justify control. Public health becomes a metaphor for political purity. War is treated not only as violence but as contagion. Even the language of “consumption” – blood as sacrament, flesh as symbol – echoes the way modern politics so often turns the body into a battleground for meaning.
The novel also understands, with grim clarity, the seductions of emergency. Once the world is on fire, almost anything can be framed as necessary. In Swan’s hands, catastrophe is not merely what happens to characters – it is what characters learn to use. That feels relevant in an era when crises pile upon crises and every institution insists it alone can manage the fallout, so long as you hand it a little more authority, a little more privacy, a little more time.
For readers looking to place Swan’s achievement among peers, the kinships are suggestive. There is something of “The Traitor Baru Cormorant” in the way institutions are treated as predatory organisms, something of “The First Law” in the refusal of moral comfort, something of “The Black Company” in the grime and fatalism of soldiers doing their jobs at the edge of comprehension. The nautical terror and baroque strangeness may remind some of “The Scar,” while the looming metaphysical architecture – the sense that reality has seams and those seams can be pried open – nods toward the ambitious cosmologies of “Malazan Book of the Fallen.” Yet Swan’s voice remains his own: more legalistic than many of these, more interested in the machinery of legitimacy. If other fantasies ask who wins the throne, “Steel Gods” asks what the throne does to everyone who believes in it.
Still, the book is not perfect, and its imperfections are, in a way, the price of its seriousness. The novel can be emotionally cool. Swan is so adept at handling systems that some characters occasionally feel like emissaries of ideas rather than fully unpredictable people. Renata, for all her vivid fear and courage, sometimes functions as the reader’s witness rather than as a figure whose interior life surprises us. Von Oldenburg’s mind is rendered with lurid intensity, but that very intensity can flatten him into an embodiment of appetites – repellent, fascinating, but rarely tendered the kind of psychological nuance that might make him even more frightening. (Monsters are scariest when they are also plausible.) And in the late movements, when the narrative splinters outward – to the Fort at the End of Time, to chessboard interludes of cosmic observation, to the epilogue’s bleak couriered failure – some readers may feel the story’s momentum briefly dissipate into mythic tableau.
But these are not failures of craft so much as symptoms of ambition. Swan is doing something difficult: writing an epic that wants both to entertain and to condemn, to deliver the dopamine of battle while keeping the reader’s conscience awake. When the novel turns to its epilogue and lets a small creature – a red-faced godwit – become the bearer of tragic irony, it is not merely showing off a literary trick. It is underlining the book’s bleakest thesis: history is often determined by banal breakdowns. The message goes undelivered. The right person is already dead. The system is too loud to hear its own warning.
The final image of Olwin, the Spear, and Yelena’s gold-faced revelation is the kind of ending that reconfigures what came before. In a genre that often closes with restoration, Swan closes with escalation – not because he is addicted to sequel bait, but because his moral imagination does not permit easy closure. If the afterlife is real, why do we keep destroying one another? The epigraph asks the question plainly, and the narrative answers it with a kind of bitter tenderness: because certainty is profitable, because chaos is useful, because institutions are hungry, because people are afraid, because power loves the shape of ritual.
The highest praise one can give “Steel Gods” is that it leaves the reader not only impressed but implicated. It is an epic that refuses to be merely an escape hatch. It wants to be a mirror – warped, briny, full of monstrous silhouettes – held up to a civilization that keeps insisting it is rational even as it prepares, with careful spiritual preparations, to do something unforgivable.
For all its density, for all its occasional emotional remove, it is a major work – bristling with intelligence, saturated with dread, and written with the confidence of a novelist who believes fantasy can carry the full weight of the real. My rating: 89 out of 100.
upcoming
July 11, 2025Added to TBR immediately and I'm also very intrigued by the coochie-shaped squids?? Either Way...im READY
January 15, 2026
Thank you to Orbit and Netgalley for providing the e-ARC of Steel Gods.
Steel Gods builds upon the conflicts introduced in Grave Empire, presenting elevated stakes, expanded world-building, and a multifaceted cast of characters contending with war, power dynamics, and evolving alliances. The narrative broadens its scope by exploring regions beyond Sova, particularly highlighting tensions with Casimir and the Stygion, resulting in world-building that feels more expansive than Richard Swan’s previous works.
The story is characterized by intricate political intrigue and conflict, underscored by larger forces at play. Increased emphasis is placed on the development of the afterlife and spiritual domains, as well as the role of the gods in influencing events. Swan demonstrates his expertise in integrating eldritch horror into the fantasy genre, especially as entities from the afterlife encroach upon the living realm.
While action was present in Grave Empire, it primarily served as preparation for future developments. In contrast, Steel Gods features several dynamic battle sequences, predominantly naval engagements. Although some of the technical terminology may challenge general readers, the battles are clearly depicted and reflect the depth of research undertaken by Swan.
Character development is a notable strength of Steel Gods. Whereas Grave Empire focused more on the world itself, Steel Gods provides deeper insight into the cast, examining their motivations and biases to further enrich the world-building. Lamprecht von Oldenburg emerges as a compelling antagonist whose behavioral parallels to real-world figures enhance his complexity.
Overall, Steel Gods is a strong successor to Grave Empire, elevating narrative sophistication, character exploration, and thematic resonance. I highly recommended this installment for fans of the series and look forward to reading the final installment.
Steel Gods builds upon the conflicts introduced in Grave Empire, presenting elevated stakes, expanded world-building, and a multifaceted cast of characters contending with war, power dynamics, and evolving alliances. The narrative broadens its scope by exploring regions beyond Sova, particularly highlighting tensions with Casimir and the Stygion, resulting in world-building that feels more expansive than Richard Swan’s previous works.
The story is characterized by intricate political intrigue and conflict, underscored by larger forces at play. Increased emphasis is placed on the development of the afterlife and spiritual domains, as well as the role of the gods in influencing events. Swan demonstrates his expertise in integrating eldritch horror into the fantasy genre, especially as entities from the afterlife encroach upon the living realm.
While action was present in Grave Empire, it primarily served as preparation for future developments. In contrast, Steel Gods features several dynamic battle sequences, predominantly naval engagements. Although some of the technical terminology may challenge general readers, the battles are clearly depicted and reflect the depth of research undertaken by Swan.
Character development is a notable strength of Steel Gods. Whereas Grave Empire focused more on the world itself, Steel Gods provides deeper insight into the cast, examining their motivations and biases to further enrich the world-building. Lamprecht von Oldenburg emerges as a compelling antagonist whose behavioral parallels to real-world figures enhance his complexity.
Overall, Steel Gods is a strong successor to Grave Empire, elevating narrative sophistication, character exploration, and thematic resonance. I highly recommended this installment for fans of the series and look forward to reading the final installment.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
oh. man.
it's been some time since i read grave empire and also before i picked this one up i didn't even know that these were set in the same universe/timeline as justice of kings, which is still on my tbr. all that to say that at the beginning of this i had Extremely little idea of what was going on besides the extreme basics. once i got going, though, this one really enthralled me.
(ha.)
steel gods is less about the mystery and more about the despair (although there is still some mystery with new character captain jason laine and whoever the hell he's got on his ship.) swan does an excellent job building up the narrative tension, both when the protagonists split up without the full picture and when we get a glimpse into the sadistic, insane, corrupted mind of von oldenburg. towards the end some of the gore gets /gory/ (like scp body horror gory) but it somehow never feels over the top for just what in the shit is happening in von oldenburg's head.
the action in this is excellent, too. the big battles (three, if i'm counting right) are fast-paced but not too confusing (save for a few lines where swan goes a bit overboard with the naval terminology) and the disaster scenes are incredible in their desolation. even when characters get transported from place to place or plane to plane, none of it is particularly confusing (which is more than you can say for their in-universe experience.)
i'm very appreciative of how easy it was to keep the characters straight, somehow, despite again retaining little to none of the details of the first book and knowing the grand scope of this one. they were distinct, memorable, and easy to get attached to.
all in all an excellent second entry. dying to know what happens next
thanks to netgalley and orbit for the e-arc!
it's been some time since i read grave empire and also before i picked this one up i didn't even know that these were set in the same universe/timeline as justice of kings, which is still on my tbr. all that to say that at the beginning of this i had Extremely little idea of what was going on besides the extreme basics. once i got going, though, this one really enthralled me.
(ha.)
steel gods is less about the mystery and more about the despair (although there is still some mystery with new character captain jason laine and whoever the hell he's got on his ship.) swan does an excellent job building up the narrative tension, both when the protagonists split up without the full picture and when we get a glimpse into the sadistic, insane, corrupted mind of von oldenburg. towards the end some of the gore gets /gory/ (like scp body horror gory) but it somehow never feels over the top for just what in the shit is happening in von oldenburg's head.
the action in this is excellent, too. the big battles (three, if i'm counting right) are fast-paced but not too confusing (save for a few lines where swan goes a bit overboard with the naval terminology) and the disaster scenes are incredible in their desolation. even when characters get transported from place to place or plane to plane, none of it is particularly confusing (which is more than you can say for their in-universe experience.)
i'm very appreciative of how easy it was to keep the characters straight, somehow, despite again retaining little to none of the details of the first book and knowing the grand scope of this one. they were distinct, memorable, and easy to get attached to.
all in all an excellent second entry. dying to know what happens next
thanks to netgalley and orbit for the e-arc!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to Netgalley and Orbit for the ARC!
Steel Gods picks off right where Grave Empire left off, plus a fun new POV. I don't want to get too much into the plot for spoiler reasons.
If you've read Grave Empire, you should know what to expect here. Great characters, interesting plot, and a little bit of witty banter thrown in from time to time.
I think I enjoyed this on par with my enjoyment of Grave Empire. I think the plot of this one is faster paced, which I liked, but honestly some of the supernatural stuff got a little complicated and confusing for me at points. It was just a lot of little moving parts with the after life and the Vorr, and they were constantly making new discoveries and it just got to be a lot. That was probably the ONLY thing I didn't enjoy about this book. Everything else was fantastic.
I felt like we really got to grow closer to our main characters. I love Renata, Lyzander, Peter, Olwin, and our new POV character Laine. I felt like I got to know all of them even better than the first book and I really enjoyed that. I am already chomping at the bit for book 3. I am so invested in these characters and them saving their world.
I also loved to hate Von Oldenburg and his descent into madness. I think a lot of what he was actually doing was the crazy spirit stuff that just kinda confused me, and I think a large part of that is because he's simply insane.
Overall, fantastic second book! If you enjoyed the first you will absolutely enjoy this too!
Steel Gods picks off right where Grave Empire left off, plus a fun new POV. I don't want to get too much into the plot for spoiler reasons.
If you've read Grave Empire, you should know what to expect here. Great characters, interesting plot, and a little bit of witty banter thrown in from time to time.
I think I enjoyed this on par with my enjoyment of Grave Empire. I think the plot of this one is faster paced, which I liked, but honestly some of the supernatural stuff got a little complicated and confusing for me at points. It was just a lot of little moving parts with the after life and the Vorr, and they were constantly making new discoveries and it just got to be a lot. That was probably the ONLY thing I didn't enjoy about this book. Everything else was fantastic.
I felt like we really got to grow closer to our main characters. I love Renata, Lyzander, Peter, Olwin, and our new POV character Laine. I felt like I got to know all of them even better than the first book and I really enjoyed that. I am already chomping at the bit for book 3. I am so invested in these characters and them saving their world.
I also loved to hate Von Oldenburg and his descent into madness. I think a lot of what he was actually doing was the crazy spirit stuff that just kinda confused me, and I think a large part of that is because he's simply insane.
Overall, fantastic second book! If you enjoyed the first you will absolutely enjoy this too!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The second book the Great Silence triology continues to follow Renata, Lyzander, Glaser, and Ozolinsh in their mission to prevent the Vorr from consuming the souls of the dead. Renata is sent away by the Empress to Casamir. There she is swept up into the heart of a main battle in preventing the opening of the eye. The others stay in Sova to work on maintaining support from the government and to discover possible reasoning for the Vorr being released in the afterlife. They discover Yelena’s betrayal and the reasoning for who released the Vorr and what the end goal is.
Von Oldenburg continues his mission to create vacants and push Sova into a new era of industrialism. In this book we get to see his descent into madness and connect him to the goal of beings in the afterlife.
I enjoyed reading this book and seeing how these characters continued working toward their goals. They really were widely spread across this world. We get more info on the religion and mythology of this world. We are also shown just how easy it is to stir up a religious civil rebellion in a country. Von Oldenburg I thought was more tolerable this go around, still terrible but more tolerable. I thought the battle scenes were good and drew you in. I also liked how at the end of this book we really dont know who has the upper hand. You could argue for one side more than the other, but with the new characters introduced at the end it really could go either way. I am excited to see how this story wraps up in the last book.
Von Oldenburg continues his mission to create vacants and push Sova into a new era of industrialism. In this book we get to see his descent into madness and connect him to the goal of beings in the afterlife.
I enjoyed reading this book and seeing how these characters continued working toward their goals. They really were widely spread across this world. We get more info on the religion and mythology of this world. We are also shown just how easy it is to stir up a religious civil rebellion in a country. Von Oldenburg I thought was more tolerable this go around, still terrible but more tolerable. I thought the battle scenes were good and drew you in. I also liked how at the end of this book we really dont know who has the upper hand. You could argue for one side more than the other, but with the new characters introduced at the end it really could go either way. I am excited to see how this story wraps up in the last book.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
"Steel Gods" is narrowly beaten out by the preceding book of Richard Swan's "Great Silence" trilogy, but it's not far off. In fact, there's some of what this book improves on, and some that it doesn't quite match, in comparison to Book 1 ("Grave Empire").
My favorite part of this book definitely had to be the worldbuilding, something that Swan has been gradually adding on since the first book of this world's universe ("The Justice of Kings"). To me, it's like baking a multi-layer cake, with Swan adding carefully designed new layers onto the old ones. The multi-layer cake compares to the multi-cultural world, something that we pick up on info-dumping, definitely a plus for me. I like the colorful cast of characters, some good, some not-so-good, some morally gray, and a few that are just bad news.
I also really appreciated the themes in this book, continuing on what we've seen in "Grave Empire", as well as to an extent in his previous series. I see it as the pursuit of power, and how it's just more than a mustache twirling bad guy with powerful weapons or lots of stormtroopers. It's convincing ordinary people to partake in bad actions and injustice, and to turn a blind eye to true evil staring you in the face. Quite relatable in the real world, which makes the "antagonist" more than just a lone individual. These books make you consider a lot, and I view that as such a great part of the writing.
The only part I am not as high on is the increased amount of horror and otherworldly interactions. I liked it okay, and I never at all dislike it- however, I think some fans get more out of this than I do. But by all means, this series wouldn't be what it is without it. Swan's creativity in designing these scenes is impressive.
I give this 4/5. I know Swan is writing a few more books at the moment, set to come out within a year or two. I'll read anything he writes.
(I received an ARC through Orbit and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review)
My favorite part of this book definitely had to be the worldbuilding, something that Swan has been gradually adding on since the first book of this world's universe ("The Justice of Kings"). To me, it's like baking a multi-layer cake, with Swan adding carefully designed new layers onto the old ones. The multi-layer cake compares to the multi-cultural world, something that we pick up on info-dumping, definitely a plus for me. I like the colorful cast of characters, some good, some not-so-good, some morally gray, and a few that are just bad news.
I also really appreciated the themes in this book, continuing on what we've seen in "Grave Empire", as well as to an extent in his previous series. I see it as the pursuit of power, and how it's just more than a mustache twirling bad guy with powerful weapons or lots of stormtroopers. It's convincing ordinary people to partake in bad actions and injustice, and to turn a blind eye to true evil staring you in the face. Quite relatable in the real world, which makes the "antagonist" more than just a lone individual. These books make you consider a lot, and I view that as such a great part of the writing.
The only part I am not as high on is the increased amount of horror and otherworldly interactions. I liked it okay, and I never at all dislike it- however, I think some fans get more out of this than I do. But by all means, this series wouldn't be what it is without it. Swan's creativity in designing these scenes is impressive.
I give this 4/5. I know Swan is writing a few more books at the moment, set to come out within a year or two. I'll read anything he writes.
(I received an ARC through Orbit and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review)
January 11, 2026
First off, a huge thanks to Orbit Books US for the e-ARC of Steel Gods. My most anticipated book of the year, and I’m already impatiently waiting for the third.
Steel gods was amazing. Full of spine chilling terror and ectoplasm, just as I expect from Richard Swan. Uncovering more mysteries of the afterlife, and delving into the hierarchy, politicking and deceitful nature of the various entities therein was gripping the whole way through.
The development of every character, new and returning, became more fleshed out, always feeling natural and true to their natures, not forced or surprising.
Swan’s grasp of writing true insanity and torment is masterly and terrifying, and when mixed with body horror and supernatural elementals, is truly something to behold. His ability to capture huge, bloody battles sets the heart racing, and the sheer shock I felt at some of the revelations were enough to make me put the book down, remind myself to breathe, and sit in silence.
An absolutely incredible book, start to finish. I can’t recommend Steel Gods, The Great Silence series, and Richard Swan’s work as whole enough.
Steel gods was amazing. Full of spine chilling terror and ectoplasm, just as I expect from Richard Swan. Uncovering more mysteries of the afterlife, and delving into the hierarchy, politicking and deceitful nature of the various entities therein was gripping the whole way through.
The development of every character, new and returning, became more fleshed out, always feeling natural and true to their natures, not forced or surprising.
Swan’s grasp of writing true insanity and torment is masterly and terrifying, and when mixed with body horror and supernatural elementals, is truly something to behold. His ability to capture huge, bloody battles sets the heart racing, and the sheer shock I felt at some of the revelations were enough to make me put the book down, remind myself to breathe, and sit in silence.
An absolutely incredible book, start to finish. I can’t recommend Steel Gods, The Great Silence series, and Richard Swan’s work as whole enough.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I love when the second book in a series hits harder than the first and this second visit to The Great Silence doesn't pull any punches. This series seems to be leaning more heavily into horror than the mystery undertones of Empire of the Wolf, the plot and characters are grittier and darker and so the richer for it. The characters go from banquets to battles and impending doom looms adding tension to the turn of every page toward the end of this book. The only problem that I had at the end of the epilogue was the fact that I would need to wait for the next book to see how this series concludes.
I received access to this eARC thru NetGalley (for which I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher, Orbit Books) for an honest review. The opinion expressed here is my own.
I received access to this eARC thru NetGalley (for which I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher, Orbit Books) for an honest review. The opinion expressed here is my own.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you so much to Netgalley and Orbit for a copy of this eARC, in exchange for an honest review.
4.5 stars
Oh boy, that was not where I wanted it to end. Richard Swan continues to build upon the world he created in Grave Empire (or, more accurately, in his first Empire of the Wolf trilogy). Our protagonists fight to prevent the end of the world - and the afterlife - as we know it. We get a perfect blend of horror and fantasy elements, which makes for an exciting and fresh read. His characters continue to be engaging to follow, even the truly despicable and insane ones. I can't wait to see where the final book takes us!
4.5 stars
Oh boy, that was not where I wanted it to end. Richard Swan continues to build upon the world he created in Grave Empire (or, more accurately, in his first Empire of the Wolf trilogy). Our protagonists fight to prevent the end of the world - and the afterlife - as we know it. We get a perfect blend of horror and fantasy elements, which makes for an exciting and fresh read. His characters continue to be engaging to follow, even the truly despicable and insane ones. I can't wait to see where the final book takes us!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book hits harder than the first book. The story is darker and more intense, moving from uneasy calm into battles and constant pressure as things spiral toward disaster. There’s plenty of action, but what stands out is how much the book focuses on power, faith, and the way rules and institutions can make violence feel acceptable. The world feels rough and believable, shaped by politics and belief just as much as by fighting and magic. By the end, I was dying to know what would happen in the next book.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
What a ride!
The storylines converge, the magic gets deeper, the stakes higher, and the world fall to chaos.
The characters arcs, especially von Oldenburg's, are an absolute treat. His descent in madness is both horrific and hilarious.
This is a great fantasy story, but the horror elements are not for the faint of heart.
The book ends on a great battle and a fantastic cliffhanger, and I can't wait for the next one. There are still so much mysteries to uncover.
Thank you so much Orbit Books for this ARC.
The storylines converge, the magic gets deeper, the stakes higher, and the world fall to chaos.
The characters arcs, especially von Oldenburg's, are an absolute treat. His descent in madness is both horrific and hilarious.
This is a great fantasy story, but the horror elements are not for the faint of heart.
The book ends on a great battle and a fantastic cliffhanger, and I can't wait for the next one. There are still so much mysteries to uncover.
Thank you so much Orbit Books for this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
*An ARC was provided by the publisher through Netgalley*
Steel Gods returns us to the Sovan Empire where an arcane task force has been assembled by the Empress to stop Von Oldenburg and his designs to release the Vorr upon the world. It is an emotionless journey including love, loss and sacrifice both for country and for the ones we care for. The first half is full of the political intrigue Richard Swan is known for leading into an explosive second half with Naval battles and emergences of peoples thought long gone. The call backs to the Empire of the Wolf trilogy remain, but once again are unnecessary to continue the trilogy, but make it oh so much better. This is a definite book of the year contender in my Eye and cements Richard Swan as one of the best novelists writing today.
Steel Gods returns us to the Sovan Empire where an arcane task force has been assembled by the Empress to stop Von Oldenburg and his designs to release the Vorr upon the world. It is an emotionless journey including love, loss and sacrifice both for country and for the ones we care for. The first half is full of the political intrigue Richard Swan is known for leading into an explosive second half with Naval battles and emergences of peoples thought long gone. The call backs to the Empire of the Wolf trilogy remain, but once again are unnecessary to continue the trilogy, but make it oh so much better. This is a definite book of the year contender in my Eye and cements Richard Swan as one of the best novelists writing today.
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November 7, 2025Coolest cover I've ever seen! So sick!
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