The Killing of Words

TITLE: Succession (Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds)
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: TOR

RATING
5/5 "Obsession/Nonagression (tie)"; 4/5 "Expression"; 3/5 "Impression"; 2/5 "Recession"; 1/5 "Depression"
SCORE 3/5

So much SF gets garishly tarted up in a bid to make it more appealing to 'mature' audiences, only for the end result to turn out like a five-year-old getting into Mommy's jewelry and make-up (anyone for midi-chlorians?). This is cute with kids, squirmingly embarrassing with adults.

So when author Scott Westerfeld proudly proclaims he wrote "Succession" as a space opera "for [his] 14-year-old self", the teenage part of my brain lights up like a video game played by preschooler after three cans of Red Bull. While "Succession" stays on this caffeine high for most of its first half, it crashes badly in the second half with some misjudged material and poor handling of pacing.

The key to impressing boys is, in a vulcanized, carbon-fiber machine-actuated cyber-nutshell: Cool Stuff. And early on, Mr Westerfeld delivers cool by the ice bucket.

In the fine tradition of space opera, Mr Westerfeld drops us straight into the middle of the action, as Laurent Zai, captain on the imperial frigate Lynx, prepares a mission to rescue the Child Empress held hostage by the cyborg Rix on the planet Legis XV below. Mr Westerfeld gleefully pushes us to the logical extremes of both technological and human capabilities, teetering just on the edge of scientific plausibility: millimeter-scale remote spy drones, orbital drops by imperial space marines embalmed in shock-absorbent gel, spaceships controlled via deliberately induced synesthesia (the perception of one sense being felt in another—seeing sounds as colors, for example).

The central Cool Thing in all of this is Laurent Zai's Emperor, who happens to be dead, and has been for quite some time. This slows the Emperor down less than you'd think, because 1,600 years ago he discovered a means of reanimating the dead by implanting something known as a Lazarus symbiont, which not only restores life but also keeps the risen dead in perfect health. For example the Emperor's sister, the aforementioned Child Empress being held hostage, is physically a child but over a millennia old.

The ever-growing ranks of the undead have produced an unstable, two-tier society in the Empire, which the recent Rix attacks threaten to tear completely asunder. A second strand of the novel, intercut with the action above Legis XV, revolves around empathic Senator Nara Oxham as she leads a sort of "loyal opposition' political faction against the aristocracy of the dead. Additional chapters taking place 10 years before the main action of the novel cover the romantic history between Zai and Oxham.

The cuts between characters come thick an fast, keeping the action zipping along like an overexcited nerve cell, spitting out new ideas and technologies on every page. The weightier questions hanging on Oxham's story—is death necessary for progress? Do new ideas only arise because the older generations pass away?—form a nice complement to the shoot-'em-up frenzy of Zai's rescue mission.

The neurons begin to misfire in the second half, however, as once-perky ideas are replaced with sluggish technobabble. There is much talk about virtual matter involving "quantum wells", hardly the space adventure fare the target audience is looking for. Oh hell, even if they were begging for it, it's still dreadfully dreary. To fill the gap, a subplot involving a self-building, sentient house suddenly gets more air time, which is about as exciting as it sounds. The already fractured plot speeds up, skipping whole blocks of time, before juddering to a sudden halt that positively screams for a sequel, though as of June 2010 none has been forthcoming.

In short, "Succession" is hugely fun when it acts its age, a bit of a bore when it puts on grown-up airs.