Book Review: Twilight of the Empire

Book Review: 'Twilight of the Empire' by Simon R. Green

3 / 5 Stars

Simon R. Green (b. 1955) is a UK resident and a prolific author of novels and short stories in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. His ‘Deathstalker’ novels are a very successful Space Opera franchise, with at least 8 novels published from 1995 – 2005. 

‘Twilight of the Empire’ is an omnibus edition compiling three shorter novels that are loosely connected with the Deathstalker storyline: ‘Mistworld’ (1992), ‘Ghostworld’ (1993), and ‘Hellworld’ (1993). ‘Twilight’ (525 pp.) was issued by Roc in August 1997 and features cover art by Don Maitz. 

All three 'World' novels are set in a far-future galaxy under the oppressive of an evil Empire, whose Queen demands absolute fealty from her subjects......under pain of banishment or death.

Cover illustration by Sanjulian, Ace Books, September 1992

Cover illustration by Mark Salwowski, Gollancz, November 1992

‘Mistworld’ takes place on the eponymous planet, which alone of the worlds in the galaxy remains unconquered by the Empire. This is due to the fact that Mistworld hosts a large population of espers, whose combined mental projections are capable of causing mass catatonia, and even death, in attacking spaceship crews. 

But Mistworld pays a price for its defiance; deprived of access to technology, it putters along in a barely medieval state of existence. Its winters are miserably cold, dark, and snowy; its population mostly is made up of criminals and reprobates wanted by the Empire; and its economy is in dire straits, with only the most dedicated of smugglers willing and able to elude Empire patrols and make planetfall to exchange goods.

Topaz once was one of the most feared of the Investigators, a special class of individuals endowed with superhuman esper powers and created by the Empire to enforce its laws and edicts. Having fled the Empire, Topaz now is an outcast, condemned to live on Mistworld. Topaz makes the best of the situation, but as ‘Mistworld’ opens, she finds the planet’s very existence threatened by traitors who are hoping to earn the gratitude of the Empire by selling out their fellow citizens. It will be up to Topaz, and a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, schemers, and thieves, to save their home from elimination by the Empire……

‘Mistworld’ is the best of the three entries in ‘Twilight of the Empire’. The low-tech setting is atmospheric and imaginative, and communicated without laborious world-building. The characters are engaging, and the plot maintains momentum till the final pages, never tipping its hand as to whether Topaz and her compatriots will succeed or not.

Cover illustration by Sanjulian, Ace Books, March 1993

In ‘Ghostworld’, a team of soldiers, espers, and Investigators, led by the battle-scarred Captain John Silence, are dispatched to the planet Unseeli, where Base 13, a mining installation vital to the technological well-being of the Empire, has gone silent. Silence is very familiar with Unseeli, having participated in a past military campaign against the Ashrai race indigenous to the planet, an unusually brutal campaign which ended with the complete eradication of the Ashrai. 

Upon landing on Unseeli Silence and his team find themselves under a concentrated psychic assault, and are forced into an uneasy alliance with a rogue Empire agent named Carrion whose presence on the planet is something of a mystery. As for the status of base Thirteen, there are disturbing signs that the entire installation has been taken over by malevolent entities of unknown origin………

‘Ghostworld’ is a horror sci-fi novel that suffers from too prolonged a buildup to the advent of the marquee attraction, the monsters. There are a surfeit of passages about our heroes feeling uneasy, feeling that Something Is Watching Them, that they are in danger, etc., etc. Once the monsters finally do make their appearance, the narrative doesn’t stray too far from a formulaic plot construction, with darkened corridors, strange noises from dimly-lit corners, Unspeakable Horrors gathering in the gloom, and other staples of sci-fi horror narratives. 

Cover illustration by Sanjulian, Ace Books, September 1993

The third and final novel in the compilation, ‘Hellworld’, adheres to the same template as ‘Ghostworld’. Again we have an Away Team, this one led by Captain Scott Hunter, descending to mystery planet (in this case, Wolf IV). To give some depth to the characters, we learn that this Away Team is in fact a 'Hell Squad', peopled by the Empire’s outcasts, former stalwarts whose transgressions against the Empire have led to their designation as expendables. Hell Squads are dispatched to investigate the most dangerous of places, and the members of this particular Hell Squad all have been psychologically damaged from past ordeals.

 

Once on the surface of Wolf IV there are the same labored adumbrations of Bad Things to Come as we encountered in 'Ghostworld', although in ‘Hellworld’ they are given something of a Lovecraftian flavor, such as alien architecture whose 'wrongness' provokes sensations of fear and loathing; unseen, but sinister Entities lurking in the desert lands; an advanced, eons-old civilization that collapsed from an awful catastrophe. 

When the monsters finally make their appearance, the plot settles into a chase narrative regularly interrupted by life-or-death combats and much psychological and emotional introspection (at one point in the narrative, the action is suspended while our heroes are consumed by hallucinations designed to reveal that said heroes are battling not just the external monsters of Wolf IV, but their own internal demons as well…………..meh…….).  

Summing up, after finishing ‘Twilight of the Empire’ I felt that author Green is a capable writer, who keeps his prose unadorned and his plots manageable. However, only ‘Mistworld’ rises above being a perfunctory effort at Space Opera, thus I’m comfortable with giving ‘Twilight of the Empire’ a three-star rating.