The Sun Eater #01 - Empire of Silence

Christopher Ruocchio of Raleigh, North Carolina authors giant space opera fantasy novels that his fans and critics cherish. He wrote a six-book (thus far) epic series and related in-universe works under the series name, The Sun Eater with the first volume being the 763-paged Empire of Silence (2018).

Our hero is Hadrian Marlowe who lives in a future long after Earth was evacuated by humans who then colonized the universe. We are told that Hadrian was a hero in a battle against an alien force called the Cielcin that harvested humans for meat as they destroyed entire planets. It was Hadrian that won the war and beat back the aliens by exploding their home star with an impossible ship, cementing his lore as The Sun Eater.

But this act of heroic genocide was in the past. When we join Hadrian, he is living far away from anyone as a recluse. The inhabitants of the Sollan empire assume he is dead, which is the official story. All of this is fronted in Chapter One, and then Hadrian goes back to tell the reader how he got here.

As our narrator, Hadrian takes the reader through his life story, including the childhood lessons from a sword master and the obligatory rivalry with his own brother. He is the son of a wealthy and cold industrialist in the uranium mining business - not glamorous nobility - but a harsh man of business ruling his planet of workers, a place called Delos.

During Hadrian’s young adulthood, the Cielcin were already laying waste to entire planets far from Hadrian’s home. Like distant wars in our own world, Hadrian was able to disassociate atrocities from galaxies far away. As telegraphed in the opening chapter (why do that?) Hadrian’s extended coming of age story and rise to greatness is a windy road to his saving of humanity and destruction of the enemy race.

As a science-fiction space operas and thick fantasy epics go, this one is readable and compelling. The buyer’s market for this genre seems to demand 800-page epics, but Empire of Silence would have been stronger and faster-moving at half the size. Regardless, Ruocchio is a fine author who embraces the “rise to greatness” trope and executes it quite well. Dune and Star Wars and countless other media have told variations of the same plot, but genre fiction relies on these familiar story arcs as comfort food — no penalties assessed.

The downside to Empire of Silence is that it could have been titled, "Hadrian: The Early Years". The novel ends with Hadrian setting off on another adventure for which we may be another six books away from resolving. As good as this first novel was, I may not have the stamina for another 4,000 pages to reach a resolution. We’ll see. 

Get the book HERE.