In Conquest Born - C. S. Friedman

Daw Books, Copyright 1986, printed 1987, 511 pages

ISBN: 088677-198-6

Read: November 2010 (at age 32)

Second time read

What this book is:

This is a mostly standalone book – space opera, with shades of Sparta v. Athens.  It’s followed by The Wilding, which was not written until 2004, and takes place 200 years after In Conquest Born (from the back cover), so I expect that these two books will share a setting more than being part of a the same story.

From the back cover:

“They were the ultimate enemies, generals of star empires forever opposed – and worlds would fall before their private war…

Hmm... my book's not in very good shape.  And that's a terribly brief back cover blurb.

My comments:  (spoilers ahoy!)

Overall: 

I’d picked up the sequel,  The Wilding, and I figured I should read the first one again for some background to book 2.  I’d read this book once before, in High School, I think, and I liked it then, so I was interested to see how it was on re-read.  Unfortunately, it didn’t age as well as I’d hoped.  The themes were big – Interstellar war between two huge star empires, the nature of humanity, genocide, the value of competition, things like that – and it just didn’t click for me this time through.  I felt that the settings weren’t well developed, the characters developed in fits and starts, the final reveals and confrontations were confusing and a bit of a let down, and a major epilogue was needed to explain one of the main mysteries of the book.  I much preferred the Coldfire series of books – Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows – to this book, and would suggest starting there when reading this author.

Rating: 3

Characters: 

Fair.  Neither main character was sympathetic, in that they were both vicious superhuman individuals fuelled mostly by hatred.  At one point, early in the book, I stopped and thought, “It’s pretty amazing that she (Friedman) can write a compelling book with main characters that I dislike so much.”  Eventually, the characters just got old, and the story didn’t compensate for them.

The supporting characters tended to be flat, and forgettable.  They were there simply to  allow the main characters to show their natures.  The naming scheme was hard to remember, which didn’t help with keeping track of specific characters, either.

Premise:

Fair.  On the surface – two powerful people from opposed cultures war on each other.  This was a good start.  The main symbolism that I saw in the book was how competition, especially deadly competition, makes both parties to the competition stronger.  This was shown through the Braxin v. Azean conflicts, the Zatar v. Anzha conflict, and various other conflicts shown within the Braxin and Azean cultures.  It was a good starting point, but I think it really needed a “so what” at the conclusion of the story.  It kind of tapered off into a “but neither can win” situation that may be trying to say that there’s value in competition to a point, but if it goes too far, it can be mutually destructive.  I don’t know.  There wasn’t much punch to it, anyhow.

Setting:

Fair.  The book was set in interstellar space in the far distant future.  The Braxin culture and people were well defined and clearly describe, and worked well.  The Azeans, much less so.  Part of that was that the Azean character, Anzha, did not really fit in with her culture so the opportunity to show the culture didn’t exist.  It felt like a hole in the story, anyway. 

The magic system (psionics) seemed to change based on plot requirements, too.  I wasn’t a fan.

The alien cultures were superb, though – they were all wonderfully alien, varied enough to be believable.  The characters tended to think their cultures well, also. 

Plot:  

Fair.  I think that there was just too much going on in this book to be able to fit it all into one book.  There were snippets here and there and characters popping in for a first-person section and then gone back to the background for the rest of the book, and the whole thing just felt disjointed. 

To be fair, the book was a balancing act trying to not make either of the main characters more sympathetic than the other – the symmetry needed to be maintained for the theme of the story – but the overall picture just left me wanting more.

Readability: 

Good.  The writing was well done, and the pacing was pretty good – things were always happening to keep the pages turning.  In this printing, the copy editor had some problems – word substitutions and misspellings happened rather more frequently than I like to see.  Other than that, though, the book flowed all right.

Other views:

The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf

A nice story re-cap and introduction, not much for opinions.

Fantasy Cafe

Seems like a similar reaction to mine.

From a Sci-fi Standpoint

Read for the same reasons as me, liked the book a bit better.