FREE: *The Risen Empire: Book One of Succession

The listing, *The Risen Empire: Book One of Succession has ended.

This book is full of surprises. It starts out by putting you in a setting you think is familiar, and then with one sentence it puts the entire scene in a completely different context, eliciting a "What? Oh, wow!" response. There are many ideas we don't often encounter - a symbiant giving everlasting life after death, complex laws expressed as a sort of hologram facilitating understanding, the proposition that artificial intelligence is the natural state of a planet's electronic data flow and requires deliberate acts to supress, and much more.

Such concepts are not nearly enough to glue me to a book, however. I found the characters very human and the protagonists entirely sympathetic. In addition, the politics invented in the risen empire are fascinating and entirely plausible. Westerfeld displays considerable thoughtfulness in analyzing and presenting the repercussions of the precepts upon which the book is founded. Human nature seems very well represented. All this together in one book makes a sort of masterpiece for me.