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language: Korean (English tr. Anton Hur)
country: South Korea
year: 2016
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: The Bleeding Empire, #1
dates read: 10.11.24-13.11.24
Your Empire’s lot is to diminish and consume the world, until nothing of worth is left.
Kim Sung-il’s Blood of the Old Kings, translated by Anton Hur, is an exhilarating high fantasy about rebelling against empire. it governs — I can’t wait for the second book to be released; it had better come soon. if you like necromancy and anticolonial uprisings this is a book for you. if you just like solid epic fantasy, this is a book for you.
the novel interweaves three perspectives: Loran, a thirty-something swordsmanship teacher whose family were killed by the Empire, who makes a pact with a dragon for the power to proclaim herself King of Arland; Cain, a 25-year-old Arlander living in the imperial capital, trying to avenge the death of his closest friend; and Arienne, a runaway student fleeing the Empire’s control, carrying the stolen corpse of an undead sorcerer stored inside her mind. the three characters’ lives intersect as they find themselves — sometimes expectedly and sometimes not — at the confluence of this moment in history and, perhaps, subject to destiny.
Anton Hur’s translation is excellent; there were a few sentences here and there where the syntax felt like it had gotten turned around clunkily, but they didn’t at all detract from my enjoyment of the novel. it’s fast-paced, with carefully developed tension, but it leaves room for its characters to delve into the political and ethical complications of revolution. crucially, even when characters make strategic compromises, the novel is unrelenting in reminding its characters and its readers that empire is built on violence and dispossession, and that it must be resisted and, eventually, destroyed. if not today, then soon.
but it also does not shy away from the internal divisions of the resistance to empire. cowardly careerists, the reality of reprisals, an evil sorcerer with an agenda of his own (you know, very ordinary complications).
I’m especially excited about this book because in contrast to much of the fantasy (and to a lesser extent science fiction) that’s published in English translation, Blood of the Old Kings resists being read as (“just”) Korean Fantasy™ in the way that something like Xia Jia’s or Hao Jingfang’s work (for example) is marketed as Chinese Science Fiction™ or Haïlji’s The Republic of Užupis is Korean Fantasy(-ish)™. it is, for lack of a better term, “generic” epic fantasy — and it’s really good at what it does. this isn’t to say that it doesn’t bear the mark of modern Korean history, because it clearly does, as Kim notes in an interview with John Scalzi (sorry lol). but I hope this means we may see more of this kind of work in translation — the kind of work that, if written in English, might be published by Tor or Ace or Pyr or Titan without needing to bear the burden of Representing Korea (or Poland or Venezuela or the Philippines or...). (though I would also love to see work that embraces other generic conventions but is amenable to reading as fantasy — I’m thinking again about the perplexing lack of interest in xianxia by larger anglophone publishers.)
I think this book would pair interestingly with The Locked Tomb (in the way it links necromancy with imperial power) and also with some of the fantasy that Marxist fantasy critics have historically been most enthusiastic about, perhaps especially Earthsea, in the way it links magic (and imperial control thereof) with the exercise of human freedom and especially the imagination. I can’t wait to see where the series goes next.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, inspiring, tense