Kalpa imperial

This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.

Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.

Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.

To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.

This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.

Some books that you stumble upon ends up punching you in the guts, others do not. This book was of the latter category, but I still think it should've been the former, much so based on that I like the works of the translator, Ursula K. LeGuin.

As a part of my job I support unemployed persons that have internships at my organization, among them at a few of the charity shops that we run. It was while browsing the bookshelves during a slow hour that I came upon Kalpa imperial. It seemed like my kind of book, and I still think it is.

I think I understand what the author wanted to do, and I think it is clever. She sketches the history of an empire, follows its many rulers , their surge, their downfall, internal and external strife; and how the empire and its society adapts during its history, sometimes needing to start over. In some ways this resembles the setup of LeGuin's Hainish cycle books: It allows the author to write a whole bunch of separate stories, laying out the workings of very dissimilar societies; while still linking them together and setting them in the same universe. While the Hain books are distinct volumes (usually, not always) being collected in the same binding it creates different expectations. I wish I had known this from the beginning, and probably should've researched it a bit more.

For at least the first two-thirds of the book I kept looking for linkages between the action and the characters in the different chapters. That names kept changing between chapters and wasn't names common in my everyday gave me the feeling that I always missed something, that I should recognize this or that character from before. To my knowledge there was no repeating characters (but may have missed some), though a few characters was mentioned later in the book.

I found this frustrating, but mostly due to my own expectations, and probably also reading it when I wasn't in the right frame of mind. Reading a few pages in the evening when I was already exhausted wasn't optimal. I think this book demands more focus. I read the last fifty pages on a day off when both partner and child was off for other adventures and that worked better.

A better way for me to treat the book would probably be as a collection of short stories set in the same setting; with the opportunity both to look at particulars and the long temporal lines. I suspect the book is good, but it didn't work for me right now. I'll keep it with the intention of getting back to it in a year or so.