Dread Empire's Fall : The Praxis
by Walter Jon Williams

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Book Reviews of Dread Empire's Fall : The Praxis

Book Review: Superior!
Summary: 5 Stars

The basic setup is reasonably standard: It's placed in that hoary old cliche, the last days of glory for a massive stellar empire. What Williams *does* with this tired cliche is what's so impressive. To start, he gives the empire a reasonable excuse for existence. Almost every one of the usual reasons for interstellar empire falls apart under any reasonable examination, and most space operas blithely ignore this as they move on with the action. While that's often just fine, and many excellent genre books have been written without any rational explanation for the existence of empire, Williams actually gives a plausible explanation for such a cumbersome and inefficient social structure: Religion. Old-fashioned, fanatical, unyielding, uncompromising, burn-the-heretics religion. In another break from the 'usual,' the religion isn't human. Humans don't run the empire, they're not even second in charge. Nor, to avoid another cliche, is humanity an oppressed bottom-of-the-heap victim. Instead, humans are respected, powerful, third members of the empire; essential parts of the machinery of empire, but nothing more special than that. Earth itself is merely one planet among many human worlds, and only mildly notable.

The religion in the case is the "Praxis," an uncompromising, vaguely feudal philosophy belonging to the undisputed masters of the empire, the Shaa. The Shaa have bent every species they've ever met to their will, and their will is the Praxis. No level of brutality has been spared in converting the various species to the Parxis, but once a species adapts to the Praxis, they are incorporated into the empire with full rights, and are assumed to be equals to all other species (save, of course for the Shaa... no one is equal to the Shaa). That's the theory, anyway. In practice, so long as the Shaa live, `practice' is pretty close to `theory.' Unfortunately for everyone, the Shaa are dying out. Having renounced immortality, the Shaa have diminished, and now only one remains. When the last Shaa dies, what will become the empire? At least one group has plans for the empire that don't include the status quo...

Williams breaks a number of other stereotypes: There is no pan-galactic integration, but rather the various species keep to their own planets and clusters for the most part, with the notable exception of the civil service and military. Likewise, crews of spaceships tend to be broken down along species lines in the name of efficiency. Communication between species is still an inexact science, though practical means to do so are available. Spaceships follow known physics and orbital mechanics, with strategy and warfare both being dictated by this. Interstellar traffic is via wormholes, with fairly fixed destinations. These facts will become crucial to the plot, and to the course of the empire.

Drop into this environment a skilled and ambitious young lord of a wealthy but very minor family, and the disrespectful last scion of a disgraced family, and the elements of the space opera are complete. What will young Lord Martinez do, when his patronage is lost with the death of the last Shaa? How will young Lady Sula, bereft of patronage from the start and possessed of an irreverent attitude, make her way in this new, unsettled universe? What plots are afoot, and what do they mean to the future of the empire, now that the Shaa are no more? What intrigues will take place, and where will personal ambition and species interest take the empire? *I'm* not telling, but finding out is a GOOD read.

Read it!

Summary of Dread Empire's Fall : The Praxis

All will must bend to the perfect truth of The Praxis

For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The dread empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order . . . and bloody chaos.

A young Terran naval officer marked by his lowly birth, Lt. Gareth Martinez is the first to recognize the insidious plot of the Naxid -- the powerful, warlike insectoid society that was enslaved before all others -- to replace the masters? despotic rule with their own. Barely escaping a swarming surprise attack, Martinez and Caroline Sula, a pilot whose beautiful face conceals a deadly secret, are now the last hope for freedom for every being who ever languished in Shaa chains -- as the interstellar battle begins against a merciless foe whose only perfect truth is annihilation.

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