Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

★★★★

Empire of Silence is a sci-fi / space opera set in the distant future, where humans have colonised the galaxy and are now fighting a war with an alien race known as the Cielcin. At the book’s opening we get a pretty strong hook - the protagonist Hadrian Marlowe is set to do terrible things in the future, killing a star and gaining the infamous moniker “The Sun Eater”.

Quite amazingly this book was author Christopher Ruocchio’s debut novel, who was only 22 at the time, which is hard to believe considering the dense scope of this book. It’s the first of a 7-book series published between 2018 and 2025, and it seems it has had a more recent resurgence in popularity after being picked up on BookTube. Personally I had never heard of it, which is kind of surprising to me for how good it is.

Hadrian is only in his 20s in this first book, so I suppose you will have to read the whole series to find out where it all goes wrong. As the firstborn son of a noble family (distantly related to the Emperor), Hadrian is chafing at his role of presumed heir, while excelling in learning languages from his tutor and generally being just a bit immature like you might expect someone in their early 20s to be.

Unlike a YA book where immature characters are annoying, though, his naivety is framed by the perspective of a Hadrian 600 years into the future (yes, that’s how long he’s going to live) who knows he was annoying and immature, which makes it interesting more than anything else.

Along with the Cielcin, one of the other major forces in the book is a religion known as the Chantry, who believe that humans are “the” dominant species in the galaxy. The idea of even attempting a peace treaty with the Cielcin is considered heresy, as the Cielcin are considered subhuman and not worth dealing with. Our protagonist Hadrian has learnt how to speak the Cielcin language, and has some heretical thoughts of actually communicating with these guys. 600-years-later Hadrian occasionally throws in hints about how much of a mistake that that will end up being, though, which makes me pretty curious to know what is going to happen.

Although I’m not so sure if I’m curious enough to actually read the remaining 6 books! (That’d be quite the commitment). But an entertaining read nonetheless.