Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone)

Empress of Forever
Max Gladstone
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The night before she disappeared to take over the world, prodigal innovator Vivian Liao threw a party to end all parties at her private tropical getaway, as much a farewell as a means to distract the ever-watchful government agencies who dogged her ever move. It's not like she wanted to go around faking her own suicide and sneaking into server farms on the sly, uploading experimental code that would allow her to dominate and direct global development, but everyone else had done a spectacular job screwing up everything from warfare to the climate, so someone needed to fix it - and, in her experience, nobody was better qualified than herself. But her moment of triumph is interrupted: first by government agents pounding on the door, then by a mysterious woman made entirely of green light. She reaches into Viv's chest, grabs her heart... and pulls her elsewhere.
Viv awakes on a space station in the middle of a pitched battle between warrior monks and bizarre monster robots. Apparently, she was taken by a godlike figure known as the Empress, who holds the whole galaxy in an unbreakable grip - and who is Herself at war with entities known as the Bleed, who devour any civilization that becomes sufficiently advanced to attract their attention. What this Empress plans to do with Viv, she doesn't know and is in no hurry to find out. She wastes no time fleeing, along with a renegade monk and a pirate queen whom the Empress imprisoned for three thousand years in the heart of a star. Together, they might free the galaxy - or make many people, including themselves, very dead.

REVIEW: At one point, reading Empress of Forever, I was following along with the characters as they explored the immense corpse of a god drifting through space, encountering a race of spider-people who mined godstuff and broke into tinier spiders, only to eat each other and become even bigger spiders. It was a wild scene, vast and imaginative - and I honestly could not have cared less about it. Why not? Because Gladstone had already numbed me with countless previous wild, vast, and imaginative things - things that made a point of emphasizing how wild and vast and imaginative they were, and which often had little to do with the plot and a lot to do with dazzling me with things that it assured me I could not truly understand as a mere Earthbound human bound to three dimensions of perception. When I'm numbed like that, I find it hard to care about the characters or the story.
Everyone and everything Viv encounters in her surreal journey is larger than life in some way: able to reshape bodies on a whim, or step into the extra dimensions of the "Cloud" (where souls live forever, and sometimes morph into gods, which are more pesky than noble most of the time), or devour raw starstuff and become their own spaceships - and why many of the characters even bother with spaceships at all is a mystery, because with the Cloud it's possible to essentially will yourself to any other point in the galaxy, and some of them can just walk through space without a problem anyway - and more. It's hard to feel like character goals or stakes matter when the galaxy feels little more substantial and every bit as mutable as a fever dream: oh, yeah, there's another immortal entity that's only slightly different from the previous immortal entity, and now someone was just devoured by nanites only to re-emerge without a scratch, while someone else casually wields a spaceship that's also a weapon that can also be tucked behind an ear like a pencil or shaken out like a picnic blanket to accommodate the one character so primitive she needs a ship. Seen it already... what's next? It didn't help that I found the characters unlikable much of the time, particularly Viv. One significant plot point is telegraphed within the first few pages while others are blatantly hinted at, though the characters prove remarkably obtuse in connecting the dots - willfully so. (At one point, after trying in vain for some time to find anyone who knows where Earth is and how she can return, she meets a character who casually mentions Earth... and, instead of latching on and demanding more details, she never brings up the matter again in all their implied weeks of traveling together.) The whole story quickly devolves from strange into surreal, then jumps deep into metaphysical abstraction, until near the end I started wondering why the story was even still going on if everything is impermanent illusion anyway.
A few of the weird encounters and ideas rise above the numbness, and there was some wit sprinkled about. In the end, though, what should've been a wild flight through bizarre wonders turns out to be a whiplash-inducing trip through a hallucinatory galaxy with people I could barely stand for the length of a bus ride, let alone nearly five hundred pages of book.

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