Hidden Empire (The Saga Of The Seven Suns Book 1) by Kevin J Anderson
01/08/2003 . Source: Joules Taylor 

pub: Earthlight/Simon and Schuster. 677 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7434-3065-4.

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It's Earth year 2427, 327 years since humans sent the first 'generation' ships out to find other worlds on which to found human colonies - and 144 years since the alien Ildirans encountered the first of the generation ships and guided it to the safe haven of Theroc.

Further such rescues ensued, the seemingly-benevolent Ildirans rescuing all except one of the ships. A wide variety of human cultures developed, from the green priests of Thereoc with their instantaneous telepathic link with the sentient trees of the worldforest, to the Roamers, the gypsies who make their homes in places others would decree impossible to support life and who mine the atmospheres of gas giants for the rare elements that produce 'ekti', the substance which powers human and Ildiran starships alike.

Back on Earth, the Terran Hanseatic League keeps as tight a control over commerce and business throughout the galaxy as it can, fronted by a puppet king, a manufactured figurehead for the people to love and believe in.

The Ildirans are an ancient people comprised of different 'kiths' - physically distinct from each other but able to interbreed - with a millennia-old Empire, superior technology and a sophisticated culture. However, they have remained at this level for centuries, if not millennia, with no obvious change: humans see them as stagnating.

On the other hand, the Ildirans, for all their assistance in human affairs (which seems to be designed to keep the species where they can be observed) view humans as potentially dangerous upstarts with an obsessive urge to spread throughout the galaxy as quickly as they can.

There are two other great species in the story, the long-extinct insectoid Klikiss, about whom practically nothing is known although the husband and wife archaeological team of Margaret and Louis Colicos are doing everything possible to change that, and the mysterious hydrogues who inhabit the cores of gas giants and whose existence is only discovered when the Colicos-discovered 'Klikiss Torch' is used to turn the gas giant of Oncier into a small sun...

The book is organised into short chapters, each told from the perspective of one of the numerous main characters, and skips from the treetops of Theroc to the Ildiran capital of Mijistra to the Roamer skymines to the Whisper Palace on Earth to the struggling colony of Corvus Landing, touching all points in between.

It's vast in scope, wonderfully detailed and while the overall plot is fairly straightforward, the individual elements are complex and very deftly handled. There are a couple of very useful appendices, including a glossary and a timeline.

By all rights, it should be a thrilling ride through a year in the life of the galaxy, with glimpses into alien cultures and mores, the machinations of the Hanseatic League and Ildiran Empire, the responses of the various races to each other and the dangers that threaten them all.

So why on Earth is it so DULL?!

I freely confess to being an avid fan of the 'don't tell - show' style of writing and, to me, 'Hidden Empire' reads as though the author is reciting a long, long list of details - in a monotone.

I prefer to get to know the characters in a story through the way they speak and act and think, not by having them described to me and it didn't help that after a while they all seemed to blend together: there's insufficient depth of character here to hold my interest and no subtlety of motivation or personality.

From a grammatical point of view, I very quickly grew very tired of the causal clauses (there's an awful lot of them) and given the huge number of sophisticated alternatives, the continual use of the humdrum 'said' in the dialogue became irritating before I was a quarter of the way through.

I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of readers will thoroughly enjoy ‘Hidden Empire’.

Nevertheless, if I hadn't agreed to read it for review, I'd have given up after the first ten chapters (yes, I'd have read that much - I do try to give a book a fair chance).

I can't say I'm looking forward to book two...

Joules Taylor

www.wordwrights.co.uk