Rescued – sort of – by a warrior monk from a fanatical sect known as the Mirrorfaith, and caught between the Mirrorfaith and the Pride (an army of sentient machines), Viv frees an ancient pirate queen, the so-called Tyrant Zanj, more-or-less through a combination of accident and desperation from centuries of torment at the hands of the Empress of Forever. When she wakes up, it’s the far, far future and she’s a prisoner. In the cold darkness of a Boston server farm, she encounters something terrifying and everything goes dark.

Even a multibillionaire’s only one woman, in the end.) So, on the eve of her greatest success – trying to put her most ambitious plan yet into motion, a technological ploy that would allow her to control all the world’s networked systems so that she could make things better and, not incidentally, survive – she’s on the run from those enemies. (Even a multibillionaire can be disappeared to a black site eventually. Most of the time, she’s even right, but she has enemies – many enemies, and right now she might not live long enough to beat them. A tech genius and a savvy businesswoman, she’s ambitious, driven, and convinced that her way is the best way. Vivian Liao is a wildly successful inventor, innovator, and entrepreneur. It’s certainly just as complex and thought provoking, and it’s even faster, tighter, and more intense. He has to turn his pen to science fiction, and with his first novel-length foray, turn out something brain-meltingly excellent.Įmpress of Forever may, in fact, be an even better novel than any of his fantasies. It was nominated for one of the first Hugo Awards for Best Series, an honour that it fairly deserved. It’s not enough that his Craft Sequence series is a complex, twisty, delightfully playful and deeply thought provoking set of works that take on themes of power, the tension between progress and conservatism, social dynamics, colonialism, and social responsibility. Reviewing his Empress of Forever is a bloody intimidating undertaking, because it’s just that damn good.

Max gladstone empress of forever