★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: There Before The Chaos
• Author: K.B. Wagers
• Year: 2018 (mine was 2018 trade paperback)
• Pages: 451*
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Orbit
• ISBN 978-0-316-41121-9 (trade paperback)

(* not including afterword, author bio, sneak peek, and several blank pages.)

 

Summary

Recently crowned Empress of Indrana, Hail Bristol, a former gunrunner, navigates the stifling political world her empire while discovering multiple plots and galactic machinations that threaten to undo all she’s worked for. For example, two ancient alien races, which might possibly be the same alien race, are fighting amongst themselves and trying to draw in Bristol and humanity.

I began this book because I recognized the author’s name from my Twitter feed and knew that they haven’t yet “made it” — when I can, I try to support authors who aren’t yet big time. I made sure before I checked it out from the library that it was “#1” in a series, rather than a sequel, but that turned out to be mistaken. While it IS the first of a new series, it is also built on a long-running story in a previous trilogy.

 

Points For

The positives here include likeable characters, well-described action, immensely intricate world-building, and fairly accurate (it seemed to me) descriptions of mentally and emotionally dealing with past trauma. Also, for a sequel, the author did make a noticeable effort to make it stand on its own.

Also notable: Lovely cover art.

 

Points Off For...

However, because the story is a sequel — resting on at least three previous novels — the story begins incredibly slowly, introducing far too many characters to keep track of — even too many for a “List of Characters” page, if there had been one. Lots of rehashing and catching up. The slowness stays with the book, with an almost complete lack of action. Weirdly, the author tries to make up for the dialog-only chapters by mentioning tons of irrelevant physical movement (more on that later), which was heavily distracting.

The naming of too many characters kept happening throughout the book, as more were repeatedly introduced, the reader never knowing which ones to pay attention to. Most had unusual name-spellings. Several were similar to each other, and so were easily confused (Alice and Alba, for example). Every time the empress moved from one room to another, the author lists several bodyguards and which side they’re standing on, and which ones seemed tense, and who glanced at whom. All of this took up space, but was confounding.

There were also mistakes, possibly due to late edits. For example, on page 316, Hail says she wants Alice on the line during an upcoming call, but on page 318, as the call ends, she says Alice “insisted” on being in on the call; Hail hadn’t asked for it. There’s no way to reconcile contradictions like this, and in most cases, neither is relevant to the story; it would have been simpler to leave out both Hail’s request to have Alice on the call and the mention that Alice insisted on being there.

Also, the story doesn’t end. The action finally picked up in the final 50 pages or so, but then the book ended at a point in the story I would have identified as the end of the first act.

 

Pet Words And Body Movements

I’m not taking off points for this, because many authors do it unconsciously, but this book included quite a few pet phrases/words — ones you don’t see often elsewhere so they stand out when used, and especially when overused. A big distraction. For example, “chai”. Hail Bristol, drinks chai all the time. I’ve seen the word maybe twice in the last two hundred books I read, and here it’s used hundreds of times. Also, “I stuck my tongue out at her” is used fairly often, which would probably seem normal if this were a book about 8-year-old kids, but it’s about a middle-aged empress, so it seemed weird. (Do adults do this? I haven’t seen it.) “Lifted a shoulder” is a different way to say “shrugged”, but here it’s almost always used in place of shrugged. (Both of those could also fall into the category of the following paragraph.) But perhaps her favorite phrase is “out in the black”, which is also never explained, though from contextual clues I assume it means “places in outer space that aren’t governed by the empire”. There were also several non-English words repeated through the text without explanation or definition, and always in italics: Ekam, Dve, and smati, for example.

We’re all accustomed to authors using physical gestures/movements in place of describing emotions or thoughts, like pursing one’s lips in place of concentration, or a pat on the shoulder to convey comfort or support. But in this book, much of the physical movement was odd (to me, anyway), and possibly denoted some emotion or thought but they went over my head. For example, “I punched him in the shoulder” (context is a conversation, not a fight), “I rubbed the back of my neck”, “she put both hands over her mouth” (but not in surprise), “I threw my hands in the air” (but not in frustration), “I hissed”, “wiggled her fingers”, and so on. “I choked on my chai” apparently meant “I thought it was funny”, but never having seen the phrase before and now seeing it dozens of times without explanation was off-putting. I found these fascinating, but spent far too much time trying to deduce what they were meant to convey, if anything, or why they were included. Mostly, I was flummoxed.

 

Conclusion

After a chapter or two, the only reason I kept going was because I was mildly curious about what was going to happen, and what kind of future civilization(s) the author had created. I forced myself to ignore most of the character names and chose a few to keep track of. I taught myself to ignore the hissing and shoulder-punching and finger-wiggling that I didn’t understand, and simply find the parts that advanced the story.

I’m not convinced it was worth my effort.

 

 

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