Monday, July 16, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett




 City of Stairs is the first of Robert Jackson Bennett's "The Divine Cities" trilogy, a trilogy of stand-alone fantasy novels (although they build upon each other) about a world in which the enslaved colony land (essentially a fantasy version of India) of a continent ruled by 6 gods (or rather here, "Divines") struck back, and eliminated those gods to establish a fragile but new global hegemony, with the enslaved now ruling the former conquerors.  The trilogy was nominated for the Best Series Hugo and was included in full in the Hugo Packet...and it's well worth the nomination.

This first novel introduces us to this world, which bears shades of NK Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy and Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence but is very different from either (the series lacks Inheritance's focus on love and the Craft Sequence's analogies for economics/law), as well as series heroine Ashara "Shara" Komayd.  And man is she a fantastic heroine - incredibly clever and driven, curious yet feeling duty bound - she's one of the best guile heroes I've encountered in my reading and she makes this book really really good.

More after the Jump:

----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
For Centuries, the Continent was ruled by the 6 Gods, the Prime Divinities, whose miracles made them a seemingly unstoppable force in the world, and with that power the Continent conquered and enslaved the land of Saypur.  The Divinities each had their own City and part of the Continent, but there was one city shared by each Divinity: Bulikov, which was constructed with the miracles of each Divinity.

And then, decades ago, a man from Saypur known as the Kaj found a weapon that could kill the Gods, and under his leadership, Saypur conquered the Continent and destroyed the Gods.  But with the Gods' deaths, their miracles disappeared with them, leaving Bulikov's infrastructure in tatters, and the City of the Gods became simply the City of Stairs, with a number of staircases now leading up to nowhere.

Now, the Saypur Empire rules Bulikov and insists that its people forget about their former Gods, and that no words/hints of the Divinities be spoken or invoked....except by a Saypur researcher into the histories of the Divinities.  But when that researcher - hated by the entire populace - winds up murdered, everything changes.

To investigate the death of the researcher, Ashara "Shara" Komayd comes to Bulikov under an assumed name.  Shara is not only an intelligence agent, but she's the Kaj's great-granddaughter, who is now the foremost expert of the Divine with that researcher dead.  But in her research she begins to discover that what the World knows about the destruction of the gods may not be totally accurate...and that the Divine may not truly be gone from Bulikov....
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The Best thing about City of Stairs, and there's a lot of good things in this book, is its protagonist, Shara Komayd.  Shara is a most unusual heroine - not least of which because of her appearance (the author has a picture of what she looks like on his blog, here).  On one hand, at her foremost, is her desire to finally go back to her homeland, from which she was essentially exiled for causing a major political dust-up when she was 19.  On the other hand, she's not just a spy, but she's driven immensely by both her insatiable curiosity and her need to do better for the entire world, not just her homeland.  Though others would never believe it, she cares, and that makes her absolutely driven to achieve her goals by seemingly (But not actually) any means necessary.  The result is a guile hero who puts together answers from even the most minuscule clues in a way that doesn't seem improbable (or break the narrative) but inevitable, and who is incredibly fun to root for.  And despite being a guile hero, she is absolutely not afraid to stir shit up, and goes around doing just that as often as possible.  She's simply....awesome.

Incidentally, the second best thing about this book is Shara's sidekick, Sigurd, a man who looks like a giant (for a human) brute whose reaction to threats is simply to shrug them off and crush them with his bare hands...or any weapon he can get a hold of, and yet who is also fairly intelligent.  Only one such as he could handle being around Shara for so long, and they make an amazing teams, with Sigurd almost stealing every scene he's a part of.  The third major character, Governor Turyin Mulaghesh is probably the most standard character of the trio - she's a witty sarcastic authority figure who doesn't take shit and just wants to get things done, which makes her another excellent complement (she'll return as the protagonist of the next book).

The worldbuilding is also extremely good - like I said before it has seeming similarities to other books, but is its own thing as well.  The idea of a colonized land taking over the colonizers and trying to enforce their own sociological power upon them is intriguing and the resistance that encounters is well done here, not to mention the godly aspects involved here.

The book begins each chapter with a passage from either the dead researcher or other historical/mythical text, which further adds to the worldbuilding....except a careful reader will get hints of what exactly is coming from those excerpts, which aren't simply worldbuilding but more exposition of things to come that are not yet revealed.  I have mixed feelings about that - the book is suspenseful and excellent enough that the hints being rather obvious don't hurt it so much, but it's kind of silly if you see it coming.

Regardless, this is an excellent book and a great start to a series, which I will greatly recommend to anyone wanting a fun fantasy mystery/adventure with some absolutely amazing characters.  Or nearly anyone. 


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