Furious Heaven, the sequel to Kate Elliott’s astounding space opera Unconquerable Sun, is an experience. I mean this in the best possible way: richly peopled, vivid with the imprint of history, and striking in the variety and detail of its cultures, it is an incredibly compelling piece of work. Its nearly 750 pages burst with vigour, life, ambition, lust, love both platonic and romantic, cracking space battles and ground assaults, intrigue, espionage, and complicated families. It’s difficult to put down, despite its length, for every single one of those pages is doing something interesting—usually with quite a bit of tension attached.
In the (functionally dictatorial) Republic of Chaonia, Princess Sun is heir, at least for now, to Queen-Marshal Eirene, the abrasive, charismatic war-leader who’s led Chaonia to victory after victory—including over the much larger and richer Phene Empire. Sun has recently followed in her mother’s footsteps in terms of military victory while politically on the outs with Eirene: her unexpected success against the invading Phene has helped secure her position as heir as well as patch up her (political) relationship with her mother. Sun, though, is half-Gatoi, and her father’s foreignness is a tool that can be used against her. The Gatoi are best known in Chaonia as the shock troops of the Phene, while Sun’s mother’s latest spouse is all aristocratic Chaonian and about to give birth to an entirely Chaonian child.
Sun is, if anything, even more ambitious and charismatic than her mother, and as a military leader she’s inspired. But she’s proud and impatient with restraint, and seems likely to set herself on a course that will eventually clash badly with Eirene. Especially if she thinks she’s going to be superseded.
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Furious Heaven
Sun’s is one of the perspectives we see in Furious Heaven. In her orbit are her official Companions, scions of noble families raised to be her household. Those Companions include Persephone Lee, of House Lee, one of the oldest and most powerful families in Chaonia, whose viewpoint is the only one written in the first person, and with whom we spent so much time in Unconquerable Sun. Perse is alienated from her birth family only in part because their machinations threaten both Sun and the security of Chaonia: mostly her family appears to be composed of ruthless assholes. Perse is also sometimes an asshole, but perhaps not quite so ruthless a one, and Sun has pretty firmly acquired her loyalty.
Among Sun’s Companions, we also get the point of view of Hestia, perhaps the calmest and most loyal of Sun’s inner circle, and not just Sun’s lover but someone Sun cares for almost as much as she cares about her next great challenge. And then there’s newcomer Makinde, a young man willing to piss off the older generation of his family by calling them out on their hypocrisies, who finds himself in Sun’s orbit at a crucial moment, and impresses her enough to stay there.
Also in Sun’s orbit is a former Gatoi slave-soldier, known as Zizou. Zizou is perhaps the ultimate outsider: not Chaonian, not part of the Phene, and considered dead to his original people, the Gatoi in their wheel-ships, he’s forging a new life, a different one, in Sun’s service.
And across the field of contending space empires (albeit ones mismatched in size), we follow the perspective of Phene lancer pilot Apama, who’s brought uncomfortably into the centre of affairs of the Phene ruling class by her unpleasant and manipulatively coercive biological father. Raised at the empire’s periphery, but having entered the ranks of the lancers to rise on her own merits, Apama provides an interesting perspective on the Phene: she’s smart and sympathetic, and with her point of view, it becomes clear that the Republic of Chaonia and the Phene empire are not, in fact, terribly different. They’re both imperial projects, and like all states, filled with people—competing, co-operating, contending, or just trying to survive.
When an assassin strikes down Eirene in the middle of a triumphant procession, Sun and her companions are catapulted into leadership, and into Eirene’s long-planned assault on a frontier system of the Phene empire. But Sun is not made to be satisfied with following in her mother’s footsteps. Sun is not made for moderate victories. Sun is not made to stop. Soon, if Chaonia stays behind her, Sun is aiming at the heart of the Phene, where their massed battleships could yet meet her assault. Meanwhile, Perse’s father has got himself to the heart of Phene intrigue—or possibly the Phene are bankrolling his own designs—and Perse is a tool he wants to play.
Kate Elliott has been plain about her influences for Sun and her companions, and reading Furious Heaven, it’s clear that Sun and her campaigns and her companions are very closely modelled on Alexander the Great and his campaigns and his companions for whom we have evidence. From a narrative point of view, this is an interesting choice. From the point of view of an ancient historian interested in classical reception, it’s a fascinating one. On a character level, Elliott isn’t interested in lionising a conqueror, but in understanding what drives one, and what draws people into their orbit and keeps them there. We see Sun from many different perspectives, and she’s compelling in all of them—bright enough to burn, like her namesake, loyal to those who offer her loyalty, possessed of personal integrity (albeit willing to let others dirty their hands on her account), product of a militarised society that values prowess in combat as well as art and philosophy and someone who excels by its exacting standards.
Yet it is clear that it is pride more than any other necessity that spurs Sun onwards: at times wounded pride, but more often the kind of pride of someone who can, in fact, reach for almost everything and find it not outside their grasp. The arc of her life bends towards tragedy, for in her decisions the astute reader can see the seeds of conflict that’s bound to erupt when she’s no longer there to hold her new conquests together with the sheer force of her personality. For eventually someone who’s always striving after their next great challenge will find themselves defeated, or their empire undone by the lesser details of administration and logistics when they take one chance too many. Furious Heaven is the triumphant upward thrust of the conqueror’s journey, the unstoppable advance, and it ends on a note of temporary equilibrium. But knowing that Alexander is the pattern for Sun means you’re alive to the prospect of collapse contained within Sun’s imperial drive, and the rivalries than make civil war an inevitability for the conqueror’s successors.
Elliott isn’t blind to the costs and consequences of military campaigns. Nor the fact that not all the people possessed military prowess and martial notions of honour—in fact, rather few of them—are much troubled to bother with ethical treatment of the conquered. Or even the less powerful of their own society. But her characters are compelling and understandable, each in their own way—some more sympathetic, and some less so. The vast scope of space opera gives Elliott room for even more of the rich, detailed cultural worldbuilding that has always delighted me about her work, and Elliott’s prose is, as ever, clear and engaging.
Furious Heaven is a novel jam-packed with action and rich with thematic arguments about family, loyalty, power and empire. (There are entire essays to write about power, greatness, and Sun as a genderbent Alexander figure. And more essays to write on its treatment of sexuality, polyamorous political marriage, and the role of self-conscious “history” in its portrayal of propaganda.) I admire and adore it. It kept me reading well into the small hours, and will keep me thinking for a long time yet.
Start with Unconquerable Sun, but Furious Heaven is a more than worthy successor. I would dearly like to read a great deal more in this vein.
Furious Heaven is published by Tor Books.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. She was a finalist for the inaugural 2020 Ignyte Critic Award, and has also been a finalist for the BSFA nonfiction award. She lives in Ireland with an insomniac toddler, her wife, and their two very put-upon cats.
