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Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

Review: The New Empire, by Alison McBain

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The New Empire by Alison McBain

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The New Empire is a novel of alternate history, telling the story of a young man caught between worlds and struggling with the contradictions of his life.

In the prologue of The New Empire, we see what appears to be the final minutes of a young man named Jiangxi. He confronts an older man named Onas, with whom he clearly has a complicated relationship, but they share only a brief moment and have little to say to one another. Then Jiangxi goes out to meet the firing squad which is there to carry out his execution. The rest of the story is about who Jiangxi is, and how he got to be in such a fix.

When next we see Jiangxi, he is a young boy, a slave, being shipped across the ocean to a distant land. American readers may think they already recognize the narrative, but it turns out that Jiangxi is Chinese, and that the land to which he is being sent is somewhere in what we would call California.

This isn’t the world we know, but one in which the Ming Dynasty “treasure fleets” discovered the Americas in the early 15th century. Three centuries later, contact between China and the peoples of North America has led to the formation of a “new empire,” a loose confederation of peoples that spans the continent. Influenced by Chinese culture and technology, the confederation is putting up strong resistance against the encroachment of European colonialists. The story later mentions armed conflict against the Europeans, especially the Spanish, led by a real-world historical figure (the missionary Junípero Serra). Yet we never see any of them, and the only part they play in the story is as distant barbarians who threaten the order of the confederation.

Jiangxi is purchased by Onas, an influential religious leader and statesman among the Ohlone peoples of the California coast. At first it seems that Jiangxi is going to be treated as a common slave, assigned menial tasks and brutally punished when he disobeys. Soon, however, Onas begins to educate him, teaching him skills he might need to be more than a simple slave. It becomes clear that Onas has something specific in mind for Jiangxi . . . but the Chinese boy develops ideas of his own, which may wreck all of Onas’s plans for him.

The alternate-historical setting of The New Empire is extremely well done. Chinese and Native American history are not my specialties, but what little research I was able to do while reading this novel seemed to support what we see in the story. It’s a very plausible setting. In particular, alternate-history authors often make the mistake of idealizing the cultures they write about, but there is none of that here. These are slave-holding cultures, backed by ruthless violence, and even sympathetic characters seem reluctant to condemn this.

Only Jiangxi is an eternal rebel against the injustices of his setting, and this is a key to understanding his character. He’s a mass of contradictions – originating from the very highest family in China, sold into slavery, forced to adapt to an alien civilization, eventually granted a position of privilege there. He lives in several different worlds and is at home in none of them, and the contradiction eventually drives his tragedy to its conclusion.

If there’s one aspect of The New Empire that didn’t quite work for me on first reading, it was the ending. Jiangxi’s story comes to a conclusion that feels very abrupt at first, and it’s not at all a happy one. On further reflection, I suspect that was intentional. It’s Jiangxi’s well-established character traits that lead him to his fate – this is a tragedy very much in the classical mode.

The prose style here is very clean, and the copy- and line-editing is quite good. One or two errors did catch my eye, but these never quite pulled me out of the story. Viewpoint discipline is good; the story is told very strictly from Jiangxi’s perspective. Exposition is done almost entirely through character action and dialogue, with no big clumsy blocks in authorial voice, and the reader is trusted to figure out the details of the setting on their own.

I very much enjoyed immersing myself in the world of The New Empire, and I would be interested in seeing what else Ms. McBain might attempt in this genre. Very highly recommended.

An Interesting Alternate History

An Interesting Alternate History

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Alexander Putting his Seal Ring over Hephaistion’s Lips, by Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1781)

While I slog through the Architect of Worlds draft, I’m still thinking about Hellenic alternate histories for my Danassos setting.

One of the most popular premises for a Hellenistic AH is the one in which Alexander the Great lives longer, perhaps long enough to see a legitimate heir born and recognized. Lots of people have played with that one . . . but I think I’ve found another one that’s just as interesting.

Suppose Hephaistion had lived longer?

Hephaistion, son of Amyntor, was Alexander’s closest friend and companion from boyhood, possibly his lover, certainly one of his most talented officers. Alexander trusted Hephaistion absolutely and without reservation – and that trust was apparently well-earned.

Hephaistion wasn’t just lucky enough to strike up a close relationship with his king. He was a competent diplomat and battlefield officer in his own right, often entrusted with important missions. He was apparently quite intelligent, patronizing the arts, maintaining his own years-long correspondence with Aristotle. With one or two exceptions, he got along well with his colleagues on Alexander’s staff. Most importantly, he understood Alexander – his ambitions, his ideas about building and governing a world-empire, his desire to build bridges between the Hellenic and Persian worlds. He was well-respected both among Makedonians and among Persians.

When Hephaistion died in 324 BCE, possibly due to complications of a bout of typhoid fever, it just about unhinged Alexander. The king lived only another eight months afterward, and it seems that the loss of his life-long companion had robbed him of something vital. When Alexander died in turn, at Babylon, he had made no provision for a regency or succession. That omission led the Makedonians to revert to their historical pattern of behavior, fighting ruthlessly over the throne, only this time on a much grander scale than before. The result was the complete extinction of Alexander’s royal line, and the permanent division of his empire. In the end, while Hellenistic culture came into its own, it was the rival empires of Rome and Parthia that inherited Alexander’s political ambitions.

If Hephaistion had survived to a decent age, it might not have added too many years to Alexander’s tally. By the time of his arrival in Babylon, Alexander had pretty thoroughly burned himself out and wrecked his physical health. Yet if Hephaistion had survived his king, there would have been no question of who would serve as Regent. He would also have been a competent guardian and foster father for Alexander’s son by Roxane. Doubtless others among Alexander’s generals would still have reached for their own ambitions, hoping to unseat Hephaistion or carve out their own kingdoms, but the imperial structure would have started out on a much sounder footing. It’s possible that Alexander’s empire would have remained intact for at least another generation.

This has possibilities – not least because I’m not aware of anyone else who has run with this specific premise. I’m going to tinker with the idea as time allows.

The Next Novel

The Next Novel

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and planning for the next novel I want to write and publish.

That may not be The Sunlit Lands. Work on that one is proceeding, albeit slowly, so it’s possible that will be the next book-length project I finish. It’s not the only possibility, though.

More likely is an extension of my short story, “A Fire in Winter,” published here a few months ago.

Portrait of Prince Hall in Masonic regalia, artist unknown.

I’ve conceived the notion of a novel-length collection of connected stories, laying out the history of an alternate-historical American Revolution, with the African-American Freemason figure Prince Hall as the protagonist. The collection would hint at an alternative United States that might be a little better-founded from the beginning.

“A Fire in Winter” would be the first story in the collection. I’ve already blocked out the plot and action of the second story – the working title is “Anabasis,” and it involves Mr. Hall accompanying an expedition into the New York and Pennsylvania back-country, led by a brilliant but troubled American general named Benedict Arnold. I’m thinking there might be six or seven stories in the collection by the time I’m finished.

An alternate-historical American Revolution: the situation in the Northern colonies as of early 1777.

While I mull over this idea, I’ve been working through the tabletop game 1776, generating an alternate history of the Revolutionary War to serve as a scaffold for the stories. The exercise has been unusually fruitful, giving me plenty of ideas as to where Mr. Hall might be at any given time, who he might meet, what conflict or danger he might have to survive. Before long I may have the whole collection of stories planned out.

The third possibility is an extensive re-work of The Master’s Oath, which I’ve mentioned earlier. This seems the least likely, even though I do have a complete draft of that novel. It would require a considerable rewrite to be publishable.

Whichever project comes to fruition most quickly, I’ve also been thinking about improving my plan for releasing and promoting the book.

Sales of The Curse of Steel have been disappointing, to be honest. After an initial surge of sales upon release, it’s fallen to zero since the beginning of the calendar year. So far, advertising on Amazon and Facebook has been ineffective and a net loss.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I made a number of unforced errors with that novel – not in its writing, but in the plan for its release and promotion. Things like doing my own cover art, not spreading the word before release or allowing for pre-orders, not arranging for editorial reviews in advance, not arranging for a paperback edition, relying exclusively on Kindle Unlimited for sales, and so on.

For the next book, I’m probably going to bite the bullet and set myself a budget for preparation and promotion.

The Curse of Steel cost me roughly $800 to release, most of which went to a hired editor who ended up recommending no changes to my draft. The biggest chunk of funding after that was for graphic assets for the book cover. All of this suggests that I might set aside a few hundred dollars for the next book, but spend it more wisely. Maybe hire an editor (or a sensitivity reader), certainly get a professional book cover done, budget more generously for pre-release promotion and post-release advertising, and so on. Hopefully getting better results.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently linked up with a couple of communities of self-publishing authors, and I’ve been lurking and listening to their talk. Some of their advice and common practices don’t fit my profile, but some of them do, and I’ve made note of a lot of resources that might be useful.

All of this means that my next book release, whenever that comes along, is going to be more carefully planned and supported.

One or two stand-alone books might help me figure out a better workflow and see more sales. Then, if and when I do finish The Sunlit Lands, I can always go back and re-release The Curse of Steel, applying some of what I’ve learned.

This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Notes for a New Project

Notes for a New Project

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Soon after I stopped spending most of my creative effort on work for the tabletop game industry, I started work on what would eventually become my first mature, original, and complete novel. Its title was The Master’s Oath, and it will never be published.

When I finished working for Steve Jackson Games, I still had a lot of that company’s influences in the back of my mind. In particular, a book Ken Hite had written for GURPS in 2001 (GURPS Cabal) made quite an impression on me. It was that book that made me aware of the Western esoteric traditions for the first time: kabbalah, Hermeticism, Johannes Trithemius, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, that whole utterly snarled yet gorgeous ball of yarn. I studied esoterica for years afterward, building quite the library of relevant works, all of which are still in my possession.

Mind you, I’m not by any means a believer or a practitioner. The Western occult tradition was a false trail in our intellectual history, not something that has any pragmatic reality. I still find it useful as a source of creative inspiration. To this day, the attentive reader might notice little scraps of it in my fiction – alchemical or Tarot imagery, that kind of thing.

The Master’s Oath was one product of that period of my life. It was an alternate-history novel, a portal fantasy too, with Golden Dawn-style magic built into the plot. I worked on it from about 2008 through 2012, and that was a fierce and terrible struggle. I learned a lot about planning and writing long-form fiction, about world-building in the service of literary work, about a lot of things not to do. I don’t regret that time spent.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, The Master’s Oath is utterly unpublishable, a fact I only realized after I had congratulated myself on finally finishing my first mature original novel. I’m still proud of the research, the world-building, the quality of the prose in it. Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply problematic piece of work . . . not outright racist, as such, but thoroughly insensitive, with tropes built in that an American White male author really needs to be very careful about. Much more careful than I knew how to be at the time. Probably more careful than I have the skill for even today. So I’ve chalked The Master’s Oath up as part of the “million crappy words” that every novelist probably has to write before he can start making real progress.

Still. Nothing a writer ever learns is likely to go to waste forever. I still have all that esoterica lurking in the back of my head, along with everything I’ve learned as a Freemason, and whole reams of early-modern history.

Finally, I think I may have discovered a way to put all of it to use.

Imagine a world that diverges slightly from our own about the time of Elizabeth I, and becomes significantly different sometime in the early eighteenth century. A world where people like John Dee, Michael Maier, Robert Fludd, and Elias Ashmole were really on to something. A world where the Rosicrucian movement wasn’t just a weird historical joke.

A world in which different ideas and different historical currents might give rise to a different kind of modernity. A different kind of United States, in fact. Maybe even a better one.

As always, when I’m tinkering with alternate-historical ideas, my first impulse is to bring a few games to the tabletop out of my extensive library of historical simulations. For example:

Imperial Struggle is one of the most recent purchases in my library, a grand-strategic simulation of the conflict between Britain and France in the long eighteenth century. Its mechanics are deceptively simple, but the resulting gameplay is deep, rich, and nicely balanced – a great tool for developing alternate histories.

Here’s another one, ironically the very first historical simulation game I ever owned:

1776 is a much older game – my copy has been on my shelves for well over forty years now – but it’s a decent simulation of the American theater of a war that was fought across half the world, and ended with the formation of the United States. It’s nicely customizable too, easy to build alternate-historical scenarios for.

I can think of two or three other games I might be able to bring down and use, too. I have more than enough material to start building a timeline and a “bible” for stories set in this putative alternate reality.

As for the stories themselves? Well, “A Fire in Winter” fits nicely into the emerging structure. In fact, thinking about what else I could write to follow that story is probably what got my hindbrain working on this notion. I’m sure that as I start writing down and organizing all of this, more stories will suggest themselves.

None of which means I’m going to be setting aside other projects, to be sure. I still need to keep making progress with Architect of Worlds, the Human Destiny setting, and The Sunlit Lands. Still, I’ve been in a bit of a rut for the last few weeks, and my creative brain seems to work better when I can shift to a new project once in a while. This may be a promising candidate.

Juggling Calendars

Juggling Calendars

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In my day job, I develop and teach short courses in cybersecurity. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been overseeing a pilot offering for a new course, which implies nine- and ten-hour days at a minimum. This week in particular I’ve been “on the platform,” lecturing and leading classroom sessions. All of which is to say, I’ve been coming home in the evening and crashing hard rather than getting any writing done. Today was spent mostly just resting.

I did get one interesting task done today, though. Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked out an overall timeline to support the story of Alexandra’s adventures – essentially an alternate history of the Peloponnesian Wars. That’s a little coarse-grained, though, mostly just a bullet list of the most important handful of events to take place each year. Now that I’m getting close to starting to write, I need a more fine-grained timeline on which to hang the plot. Which means I spent today juggling calendars.

Most of the first novel is going to take place in and around Athens, in the years 416 BCE to 414 BCE. Alexandra is going to be involved in the life of the city, its religious festivals, civic observances, and political debates. All of which means I need to deal with the Athenian calendar. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single, consistent, well-designed Athenian calendar.

The Athenians kept track of religious festivals with a lunar calendar, each year starting on the first new moon after the summer solstice, with 12-13 months per year. A fairly rigorous lunar calendar existed in the period I’m writing in, based on the calculations of an Athenian astronomer named Meton. However, the actual festival calendar seems to have been maintained by the city magistrates, who were not astronomers and just based an ad hoc reckoning on whenever someone spotted the new moon every month.

Meanwhile, during the period I’m working on, the Athenians maintained a completely separate solar calendar to keep track of the workings of the polis government. They broke the solar year (365 or 366 days) into ten roughly equal prytania of 36-37 days, with a different set of citizens overseeing the government in each. These divisions, of course, never lined up with the festival calendar in any consistent way.

Meanwhile, I’ve already invented my own calendar for Alexandra’s home country, the Etos Kosmou reckoning I mentioned in this post. Meanwhile, for my own sanity, I need to relate everything back to the Gregorian calendar so I can keep track of things.

It was actually a challenge to figure out the dates of new moons, full moons, and the four points of the solar year that far back in history. I spent an hour or two this afternoon messing with my usual planetarium software (a copy of Starry Night 7 Enthusiast), but that was kind of imprecise. Finally I found a couple of useful links:

Since both of those sources matched the few dates I had already worked out by hand, I felt inclined to put some trust in them. Those sources enabled me to quickly set up a spreadsheet comparing Athenian festival calendar, EK reckoning, and Gregorian reckoning for the roughly two-year period I need:

Part of my spreadsheet of dates

Off to the right, I have columns of the table marking (some) of the prytany beginning dates (important if I need the government to change hands, or for the timing of an ostrakismos). I’ve also worked out some of the most important plot events and placed them on the timeline too. Another useful source: I found an online interactive database that tracks the most likely travel times between most of the important sites in the classical world. Really useful when my characters have to go somewhere and I need to know about how long it will take . . .

Neat exercise, this, and it should lend the story some verisimilitude. I can’t guarantee that this is exactly how the Athenians reckoned those two years in particular, but then their calendars were maintained on the fly. Since this is alternate history, a slightly different set of magistrates might very well have decided to arrange things differently. Hopefully, the result is good enough that any classical experts in the audience (all two of them) will let it pass.

(Whenever I write in this period, I keep having nightmares that involve Harry Turtledove reading the story and shaking his head sadly . . .)