Grave Empire by Richard Swan

Grave Empire

Richard Swan

Orbit, 4 February 2025, 
Available as: HB, 509pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356523866

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Grave Empire to consider for review.

Grave Empire ought not to work. Swan has gone back to the world of his Justice of Kings trilogy for a followup, set several hundred years later and with entirely new characters. The setting is recognisable, but beyond a few callbacks to the earlier books, the action is new (though, as the story develops we see that what I might call the theological character of the world is also the same).

There are pitfalls of writing a continuation to a successful trilogy. You may rehash the original, undoing the earlier resolution and making the reader ask what the point was (hello, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant! Hello, Star Wars episodes VII - IX!) Or you may produce something notionally related but not really, and be accused of simply cashing in on the earlier success. Either want you may miss what appealed the first time round.

Swan, however, avoids both of these traps and indeed rather gloriously transcends them. If the first trilogy had a sort of neo-Roman Empire setting, albeing garnished with Northern, rather than Southern, European tropes, Grave Empire picks things up in a more gunpowdery age. The warfare is a bit Napoleonic, the geopolitics more Age of Empires (complete with colonial excesses) than Ancient World. Yet, behind it all, the menace that Sir Konrad discovered, the cosmic horror that drove events in the earlier books, still festers. Only, the re-established Empire of the Wolf has now made the lore that might have allowed it to resists, even more forbidden. Quite the conundrum.

Against that background, Grave Empire gives us some brilliant new characters. There is Peter, a young man recently recruited to the Sovan Army. Swan is good on the motivation for the this, the mix of personal drift, family situation and peer pressure. He also creates a plausible military for Peter to join, and a plausible disillusionment for him to undergo, amidst the coming apart of Sovan political and diplomatic influence and an increasingly precarious strategic position. Peter's arc will lead him to and beyond the fringes of Sovan power and to him becoming the holder of strange secrets.

There's also Renata, a studious if obscure Sovan diplomat in a little-regarded branch of the bureaucracy, that will soon be brought to the centre of matters as the crisis escalates. I rather like the "obscure functionary unexpectedly thrust into the limelight" trope (as a bureaucrat myself perhaps it plays into my wish fulfilment: if only people would actually listen to ME!) and Renata's an ideal subject for it, a mix of high competence and low confidence. 

This opening volume of the new trilogy takes its time, and gives plenty of space, allowing both Renata and Peter to develop and for us as readers to take their measure. (And also introduces a number of others). Plenty else is happening, with military expeditions, plots and a mysterious master-spy whose motives seem deeply dubious, if still rather obscure. Many of these threads remain separate, though Swan uses the alternate viewpoints they provide to provide more information about the "modern" version of his world.

It's a gripping read, one that fairly rattles along in terms of pace and Swan successfully prevents the reader from pining overmuch at the loss of his earlier roster of characters, as she or he might have if it had been set closer in time. 

Recommended.

For more information about Grave Empire, see the publisher's website here.