Behind the Throne

Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers is one of the best science fiction debuts I’ve read in a long time. It starts with a bang and keeps up a full-throated roar the entire way.

Hail Bristol is a gunrunner who is both respected and feared. She’s also the heir to the throne of the indranan Empire which she fled in order to take charge of her own life. Now her crew is dead, her ship disabled and she’s being dragged back to become the thing she most wanted to avoid. With her sisters dead and her mother in declining health, Hail must take her place as heir to the throne. The only problem is, people aren’t done trying to kill her yet.

Wagers characters are instantly relatable and likable. Along with Hail, the trackers-cum-bodyguards Emory show more and Zin make up a strong trio. You get an excellent sense of the characters quickly and they continue to add depth throughout the novel. The return to the palace adds several more characters who up the intrigue as Hail tries to figure out who to trust and who is behind the conspiracy to murder her family and destabilize the empire.

Heir to the Throne does a good job of mixing action and intrigue. One of the most impressive things at work here is the world building. Not only do you get to see the beginnings of how the empire works, but you get a glimpse into how it came to be. There are several interesting social constructs in play, but they are layered into the background rather than thrust right in your face. This is a female dominated society with a ruling class and only token acknowledgement of democracy. There are segments of society who want a more full-fledged democracy to replace the hereditary rule. In addition, there is a long-standing but fragile peace treaty with other worlds and the complications that brings with it. There isn’t excessive hand-wringing about these issues; they come up matter of factly and are dealt more in terms of how they impact the crisis at hand. As this is the first book in a series, there is plenty of time to explore this society as needs warrant.

The book has plenty of exciting action sequences along with a generous helping of intrigue that keeps the pages flying by. It’s a self-contained story while also setting up a universe and characters that you’ll want to see more of. I’m on board for whatever comes next. Behind the Throne is one of my favorite reads of the year. Highly recommended!

I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of this book. show less

Barely 3 stars for me. The pacing is good and I wanted to see what would happen. But one of these will do it for me. The protagonist's early career of 'gun running' is presented as a perfectly cromulent and morally neutral occupation. Oh sure, we've all worked as pirates at some time in our lives. Near the end of the book there is some meting out of justice that also raised my hackles. Kind of interesting though. The universe colonizing by the different powers/cultures of earth was one of my favorite parts.
The subvocalized dialogue interspersed with the spoken dialogue is a fun device but wouldn't work IRL. It's hard enough to understand one conversation, much less two or three.

While this may not be transcendent SF, I did thoroughly enjoy it. The basic plot idea is that the black sheep of a royal family becomes heir to the throne after an evil cabal murders much of her family. The world building is well done, with the creation of a female-dominant society somehow derived from a Hindu-historical background. That may sound odd, but I thought it worked well. The protagonist is a bad-ass ex-princess-cum-gun runner, who needs to step up to her duty never having expected to have that mantle thrust upon her. Her mission, and the first person telling, draws the reader in and I remained interested throughout. I just may read the sequel, even though I am notoriously not a completist!

4.5/5 stars

I super enjoyed this book. I could barely put it down.

The world building was done so well, tidbits given throughout the book, no overwhelming info dumps and yet I didn't feel like I was in the dark. The empire was really cool and the way the women were in charge was really interesting. I liked the background of how that came to be as well. The way we were given the background information was really well done, it flowed well with the story - explanations given when new things came up, and it didn't feel contrived. It felt natural and the progression of the story worked well in telling us how things worked.

The writing was very well done too. The book was very readable, fast paced and the sentences flowed really well. :)

I show more loved the characters. Hail was awesome. She was confident, yet vulnerable at times and she felt like a real person. I loved that she wasn't afraid to embrace both of her selves, past and present and meld them together to make future her just as badass and awesome. Emmory and Zin were really well written as well. I liked how we got to know more about them and grew to love them alongside Hail. I found the other side characters quite interesting as well. They added to the story and didn't lack depth. We got to know little tidbits about a lot of them that made them feel important in their own way.

Overall, I LOVED this and can't wait to move on to the next one :) show less

Enjoyed. Political SF with fun inverted gender roles. A matriarchal dynasty empire of 40 odd worlds is reaching a crisis point, for the elderly empress is unwell and all her blood relations have succumbed to accidents, leaving just one daughter still alive - but she ran off decades ago, and is rumoured to have become an infamous space pirate amidst the rest of the galaxy that has less restrictive traditions.

Hailimi, the daughter, is indeed a gunrunner, and had been enjoying life as captain of her own crew. The story picks up as she's been betrayed, and nearly killed, and awakens to a Tracker team (men) from her own empire, who've traced her and very much wish for her to return and uphold her destiny. Hailimi isn't keen, to say the show more least, but despite a few attempts is unable to shale them. Eventually she learns of the deaths of all of her sisters, and determines that perhaps she'll best be able to serve her revenge as Heir to the Throne, and returns home to a troubled situation. Those who'd thought her long lost are even less pleased and swiftly attempt to adjust their plans.

It's written in the first person, solely from Heidi'd view, which is always a style that appeals to me. The information is well constrained, and carefully apportioned without large dumps of things she'd know anyway. The plot moves along at a fast pace, and the secondary characters also have their own charms, particularly her two chief BodyGuards. The feared romance doesn't happen which was a good decision as it would have taken some of the drama away from the politics, and been unbelievable time-wise.

However, I'm not sure the gender switch did any favours to the book. None fo the women are particularly stereo-typical female, (which is good) but nothing has else changes either and a quick search and replace his/her wouldn't alter the story in any manner, and I'm not sure this is actually the effect teh author was aiming for. To have likeable and competent/strong female characters is often a failing in SF, but more believable would be a genuinely balanced world where they happen to be strong, rather than matriarchally imposed.

In addition the imposition of essentially unchanged religious practise is always jarring in an SF novel some centuries ahead. It was slightly refreshing to have this be Hindi rather than the same old boring white mans gods, but only very slightly.

Doesn't spoil the fun though. Good technology, some great one-liners and an around sense of fun. I'm already waiting for the next book in the series, to see how Heidi's old gun-running pals get on with her newly elevated status. show less

{First of 3; Indranan trilogy. Science fiction}

Hailimi Mercedes Jaya Bristol is second in line to the matriarchal Indranan throne but most of the universe knows her as the gunrunner Cressen Stone; until most of her family is assassinated and she is called home to take her rightful place in the empire. She left home twenty years ago after her father was killed, to track his killers, and now she vows to do the same for her sisters' assassins. But she lands amid a lot of political unrest; the peace treaty with the Saxon empire is a fragile one, her empress-mother is not well and whoever killed Hail's sisters isn't stopping there. She is going to need all her skills as a galactic gunrunner to get to the bottom of things while disregarding show more palace protocol (to the horror of traditionalists) along the way.

Good story and the action kept flowing. I liked the character called Portis even though he was absent for most of the story. It was nice to have a heroine who was 'a bit older' (38 by my calculations) although she didn't really act like it.

The Indranan empire is matriarchal and men are said to be the lesser gender but there are men in positions of seniority; there is a faction that is trying to get the gender inequalities addressed which adds to the political intrigue. The culture seems to be a mix of Indian and Western traditions which have evolved over the centuries away from Earth, as far as I can tell. I could have done with less cursing being scattered all over the place even though Hail was a mercenary.

March 2021
4 stars show less

I wanted to think this might have been a vast empire-building SF epic, with spaceships galore and an underdog rise from the dregs, but no. Even the SF portions feel kinda tacked on, focusing more on taking a bit of world-building along the cultural lines and making a matrilineal succession the focus, instead, with an almost obligatory strong female cast to "round" it out.

In actuality, this is not really an SF except in the fact that it has cut and paste SF space-operatic featured over a very old "Princess-Turned-Pirate Returns to Court and Has Intrigue" Fantasy plot. I swear I've played this over twenty times in Japanese RPGs. But yeah, this is supposed to be SF, not Fantasy, right?

So what has the novel going in its favor? Bright show more first-person snark, fairly claustrophobic conflict, and decent interpersonal angst.

What could I have done without? A truly tired plot that is really just a slightly dressed-up fantasy in SF rags.

But what about the action? The intrigue? Wasn't that fun?

Um, yeah, it was okay. The action is something you have to wait for, and if you don't mind ferreting out traitors and dealing with the absolute terrors of being next in in line to a monarchy with all your siblings dead and mamma nearly so, then perhaps this is exactly the right kind of fairly-well-paced novel for you.

For me? I love my SF really juicy with ideas and innovation. This one just felt like it was a repurposed manuscript from the trunk of a paint-by-numbers Fantasy, sadly, with a politically-correct allocation of women and pasted-on cultural bits that were interesting in themselves but didn't leave me all that much to hold on to within the grand expanse of the novel.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the novel, and maybe not. It was very readable, but I just didn't enjoy it all that much. Maybe I've been spoiled by way too much truly good SF to be swayed by something like this, that feels flashy but doesn't have all that much real substance or courage. show less