Empire's Passing opens pretty quickly. In fact, you might say it opens with a bang—the destruction of Earth, to be exact. Of all the human planets in the future, the one that you and I are familiar with is the one that ends in a fiery blaze at the hands of a so-called goddess, the deity of a religion followed by many citizens of the Goth Planet Nations, an alliance of three nonhuman populations.The goddess psychically inserts splinters of herself into her subordinates to control them. She uses this control to gain access to even more populations she can control, all simply for the purpose of feeding on them—especially the human race, as she finds them the most savory. Is she really a goddess? She certainly has wild powers.
In this future, Earth was part of an empire, which draws interesting parallels to the Roman Empire. Duke Michael, a human of the late emperor's direct bloodline, doesn't take kindly to tens of billions of us human folk being massacred. The ensuing battle to own and nibble upon our people won't be as quick as the goddess would like, but the cards are still stacked against us.
My favorite part of this book is the constant mention of real historical Earth military events and the similarity they show with the story's events. For the space travelers of Empire's Passing, planets are like the continents of the old Earth. Communication is difficult for them, just as it was for Columbus and Magellan. Or is it? That's a question Michael finds himself asking quite often, especially because the enemy always seems to be ahead of his plans somehow. The humans aren't entirely without secret weapons, but that's something you'll have to read on your own. Obviously, I can't divulge it all.Moving on, I don't see any need to tiptoe around saying I loved this book. I don't personally like future-based sci-fi military stories, but I found it difficult to put this one down. Empire's Passing deals in politics, war, technology, and even a bit of species-ism and relates them to the parallel "past times"—I think we know what "times" they mean—that these issues mirror. I thought the story was great, I thought the characters were unique, and I was angry that I don't quite get to read on yet. On the downside, it does contain about five pages of graphic sexual encounters. That's only a small percentage of the actual reading material in the book. Generally when I read, I like to stay away from sexual description, because while I might not personally believe God is watching, during the occasional erotic reading it sure felt like my mom was. On the upside, these few pages could never detract from this amazing story. Buy it!
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