It’s been a good while since I’ve read any sci-fi fare that I could describe as “chunky.” By this, I mean textually dense and narratively deep, like my previously reviewed Entire and the Rose series by Kay Kenyon, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and of course, Frank Herbert’s Dune books.  Each of these present masterfully designed worlds with top-tier storytelling, with pacing that sometimes tends to lean towards the ponderous.  And it is these elements that are a perfect fit for Christopher Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence: a story that has easily earned its place among my venerated shortlist.

Ruocchio’s seminal opening to his Sun Eater series is the distant future tale of an unlikely savior, viewed simultaneously as a monster among the inhabitants of the star-spanning Sollan Empire, whose acts saved mankind from the depredations of the alien Cielcin, yet cost of billions of lives and destroyed an entire star in the process. It is the story of Hadrian Marlowe, the son of a minor noble, whose penchant for melodrama, outside-the-box thinking, often pathological bad luck, talent for languages and pure serendipity set him on an adventure which ultimately makes him into the man he becomes, recalling the events of his life in the book’s narrative traffic from a time long after he has achieved his combined fame and infamy. 

Ruocchio weaves a gloriously complex character in Hadrian, a character of  many contrasting characteristics that include a combination of arrogance and compassion, a tendency to over-romanticize, yet dispassionately put things into perspective and a somewhat irritating lack of ability to understand the nuances of true friendship or act upon obvious sexual attraction. All of these engender a personality that is so dramatically opposed to his cruel father and dull brother Crispin that it leads him to defy his father’s wishes for him to join the religious order of the Chantry, which is, in truth, the propaganda arm of the Empire. It is this defiance that results in people close to him being punished in his place. 

But Hadrian’s defiance persists, and he leaves his homeworld of Delos to pursue his dreams, only to find himself eventually stranded on the faraway world of Emesh, penniless and alone.  At first living as a beggar for several years, he eventually signs on to become a contract fighter in gladiator blood sports, eking out a successful career — that is until an ill-advised act of impetuosity puts Hadrian at the mercy of Lord Balian Mataro, the count of Emesh.  Placing himself in the count’s good graces, he is employed as a teacher for his children, before the fallout from yet another rash decision leaves him as little more than a pawn of the Emeshi court, destined to the not unpleasant, yet constraining fate of wedding the count’s sweet-natured, but uninteresting daughter.  A sudden turn of events then leads him to his true destiny and the start of his true adventure. 

Even after this overview, I find it difficult to put into words all that I would like to say about this story.  It is truly a personal odyssey that Hadrian recounts, written in a very introspective manner that can only come from a much older, wiser man recounting his younger, more impulsive days. It is in this narrative that the massive cast of characters comes alive, from Hadrian’s tutor Gibson, whose influential and unforgettable lessons become the bedrock of Hadrian’s personality and thinking, to Valka, the beautiful xenoarchaeologist who, despite her initial standoffish personality, becomes one of his few friends and true confidantes — and whose interactions produce an amusing sexual tension that the reader can cut with a knife.

A universe many thousands of years removed from our own time makes for a fertile playground for stories and histories, and this first volume of the Sun Eater series provides a universe that is rich with history, immersing the reader in cultures, futuristic languages both human and alien, governments, religions, and alien lifeforms that come alive through Hadrian’s rapier-sharp memory and the clarity of vision in Ruocchio’s narrative style, like color in a Van Gogh painting. 

Though I have heard other reviewers comparing the narrative style and attributing Ruocchio’s inspiration to the Dune series, I have found more of a similarity to the aforementioned Book of the New Sun in the harmony of its eloquence, loquacity, detail and pacing. It pulls the reader into the world with a visual clarity that will feel like he or she is standing alongside Hadrian, experiencing every sensation dictated by his future self, despite its somewhat glacial pacing, which, for some readers, may be the only hitch that would keep this tale in a grand multi-chapter series from perfection. 

Though distant future space epics have become perhaps a dime a dozen in the world of science fiction, I believe that Ruocchio brings something truly special with Empire of Silence in literary excellence, the complexity of the world that he has set up, and the scope of the story started with this first outing.  Hadrian, as a character, endures a veritable gauntlet of trials and challenges to come to a point where he will set out on the first voyage that will bring him to a foreshadowed destiny of both hero and villain. It is altogether a true epic, which will compel any reader to continue to the next book to bring themselves one step closer to the overarching tale’s ultimate, fiery end. It is a literary treat that has well earned its notoriety, and a world that I will soon be revisiting in the next book. 

9.5/10; Highly Recommended