Thursday, January 21, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Scarlet Odyssey by C. T. Rwizi

 



Scarlet Odyssey is the start of a grimdark epic fantasy series by C. T. Rwizi.  It's a series published by 47North, which is Amazon's own book imprint for science fiction and fantasy.  As such, like a lot of 47North books - Marko Kloos' works are also under this umbrella for example - the books are available under the Kindle Unlimited service, so if you're a subscriber (I think it comes with some Amazon Prime subscriptions), it's fairly easy to pick up.  And well, this book's sequel, the 2nd in the series, is due out in March (I have an eARC of that incidentally), so now is a solid time to get into it.  

And Scarlet Odyssey is well worth your time - if you can handle its grimdark world.  I don't use the word grimdark lightly, and I'm willing to deal with a bit of brutality when it fits the story, but this is on the border even for me - a story where deaths of innocents and children occur multiple times through its content, along with multiple mass slaughters.  But if you can deal with those things, you have a really interesting epic fantasy story with solid characters who are just beginning their story, with a background that is clearly African-inspired in origin instead of the "Western"-inspired origins that many will be used to.

TRIGGER WARNING:  Rape as backstory, Deaths of innocents and children.  This is a story in which multiple characters preach about power being only accessible at the price of emotional agony, and multiple characters are more than willing to inflict that agony. 



---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
In the Yerezi Plains, the tribespeople have clear rules:  Men become warriors, Women become educated, with only women having the possibility of learning Red Magic and becoming Mystics.  Musalodi, who prefers to go by "Salo," knows that - but ever since his mother's death, he has been unable to stay away from his mother's work - her Axiom she was building to harness magical power.  But Salo failed the test to become an Ajaha ranger in cowardice, and so he has tried to make life for himself working with the machines of the tribe and pretending not to have the magical knowledge he clearly has. 

But when a Mystic known as the Maidservant wields Black Magic and attacks his tribe and kills the boy he was supposed to protect, Salo can no longer hide his abilities in fear.  And so he admits his blasphemy and asks to awaken his magic to serve as the Tribe's mystic.  But to his surprise, the Yerezi Queen not only agrees, but then sends him on a question out of the Plains, through the dangerous Umadiland, to a the foreign Kingdom of the Yontai as a spy for the Queen.  And so for the first time in his life, armed with his new magic, Salo sets off away from his country on his own.  

But what Salo doesn't know is that dark forces are gathering in the world, forces even more powerful than the Maidservant, with their own agendas for Umadiland, Yontai, and beyond - and Salo is a key part of their plans.  And those forces will force Salo to acquire strange allies to help him in his quest if he even wants to make it to Yontai in the first place....
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I describe Scarlet Odyssey above as if it's just Salo's story, but it is absolutely not limited as such.  The story is a classic epic fantasy with multiple POV characters, who spend most of the book far apart in various places with their own storylines going on (The book helpfully tells you each Part which characters' POVs are part of that Part).  So in addition to Salo, most prominent are Ilapara, a Yerezi woman who left the tribes so she could become a warrior; Kelafelo, a woman whose life (child and body) was destroyed and seeks to learn from a reclusive mystic to gain the power to avenge it; Isa, a Yontai princess thrust into power after a massacre; and The Maidservant, the mystic who committed the first massacre of Salo's people and seeks her own freedom from a magical compulsion.  While some of these characters do intersect, some never do and we have at least two other POVs pop up a few times: one of the powerful Enchantress who has big plans for this whole world and one that features in mysterious excerpts before each part of a child talking to someone else.  There's a lot going on here, far more than I described above in the plot summary, is what I'm trying to say.

And it's all happening in a setting that is fascinating.  The world is African inspired, with a foreign power (gee, wonder who that could be inspired by) across the ocean seemingly leaving the continent alone as part of a peace treaty with other powers but the continent we see is far from monolithic.  So you have the Yerezi people, who are strict in their gender roles and in banning men from magic & leadership and women from being warriors; but then you have the Umadi, for whom men wielding magic is commonplace (if nowhere near well) and whose land isn't united but fought over constantly by various magic-wielding warlords (whose magic grows as they gain more territory).  And then you have the Yontai a kingdom of clans magically cursed to squabble with each other, whose ruling family uses a drafted police force cursed to serve them under pain of death; and there are even more peoples, all of whom are unique and have their own traditions and cultures.  And then there's the magic system, which is highly based upon programming (and indeed, much of the magic and charms could easily be seen as technology instead) with the Axioms that every mystic relies upon requiring good code to work properly and powerfully. 

It's also a brutal as hell world - again, this is a very grimdark setting, so you have rape as the backstory for Kelafelo; mass murders and massacres as backstories to Salo, Kelafelo, and Isa; and a tribe of people frequently sold as slaves is Umadiland and sometimes elsewhere.  You have Isa's clan, who seem to be the good guys in Yontai, who draft sons of their enemy clans as hostages into their police force. the Sentinels, and bind them with a curse that forces obedience.*  And you have the magic of mystics, which several teachers we see in the story suggest is powered by emotional and physical agony - requiring one to commit atrocities that strike at your humanity in order to gain power.  This is not easy to read, and it will absolutely not be for everyone - it's something that's barely for me, honestly.

*Isa has a sexual relation with one of these Sentinels, who enters into it wholly willingly out of love....and yet obviously the curse raises the question of how much consent is really possible there if she wasn't the type of good person who would get rid of the Curse if she could.  This issue is however never raised by the book, which is not good in this day and age.*

But beyond the brutality, the setting and the characters and the intrigues of the plot make this all work so well, even as you fear the worst so much of the time.  Most of these characters are struggling against the roles their societies try to fit them into - Isa into being a supposedly powerless princess, Salo into being a warrior, Ilapara into not fighting, etc.  They are trying to do their best, even as schemers wield power to dark ends to try and control and manipulate them, and the resultant plots that develop through it all are fascinating from beginning to end.  The book doesn't end so much as it does stop - so again, you can't really end with this volume as a complete story; but it does end at a satisfactory point with major plot threads tied up, which is what I hope for in a first novel of an epic fantasy series.

In short, after some consideration, I will be back for the sequel.  I think I need to read some less brutal books first to compensate though.       

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