SPSFC3 review: Galaxy of Thorns by Bogdan Tabusca

Galaxy of Thorns starts with a lot of backstory about how Sereine, the future Empress, was made. Did I say tell? There’s a lot of tell. Now a lot of the tell sounds very interesting as we hear about war robots and genetic modification. But this is in the past. 

Sereine has been modified by the Union to become the most powerful, most advanced human possible. Technically as she is 3 and later 4 metres tall, I suppose she is more of a giantess but I digress. 

She also has magic, and is considered to be a witch by her town, thus exiling her into the army. She hates and fears her power, and refuses to use it, although later the army demand that she does use it. Later still she befriends witches and becomes the most powerful of them all. 

There’s a heck of a lot happening in this story, and I think the author would have been better to make this one book a series, and actually delve into the story instead of flying past without explaining it. 

Sereine discovers she has powers, but the author does not tell us how that happened or why. Why is she so tall? What do her parents think about it? Why does she mysteriously lose her pants before fighting the witches? It’s all rather baffling. 

The language switches a lot from a rather archaic form which is suited to a medieval fantasy, to very modern language, such as lousy Queen, or, yay. It’s unpredictable and it made it hard to follow. 

The characters are extremely one dimensional and I found it hard to relate to Sereine, or understand her actions. She falls in love with her enemy, and then she’s married to him with children. How? How did that happen? I thought he had exploded her eyeball? 

But then when he dies, she leaves the two children with a nanny which she basically coerces into the job, and forgets about them all. 

The other POV, Markov, who becomes her husband even though he tried to kill her, is a little better. The modern, more scifi side, isn’t really that scifi, it’s probably more action, in my opinion. We have bullets, and parachutes, and an army. But their special weapons seem to be magically induced, or something that seems to elude magic for no particular reason. 

Now the author does seem to write action better, and when writing the action scenes with the army, his dialogue flows a little better. Of course, the more modern dialogue fits which helps. 

There’s a lack of editing, both line and developmentally. It makes the story difficult to follow at times. 

There’s also a thread of unexplained violence which doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Sereine becomes the Empress but her own pilots are threatening to punch her in the eye, and this is then joked about between them. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be funny because she appears to be immortal, or if they just don’t seem to mind punching their ruler in the eye. It left me rather bemused. 

The world building here is huge, and it’s clear that the author has a real passion for it. We have so many different settings, factions fighting each other, it’s huge. I didn’t get much of a sense of it. Moving from place to place, I was a little confused as to why they were there and who they were fighting. They were fighting the witches but then they were allies. There was a lot going on. It’s a sprawling epic, but it’s been spread so thinly that it’s hard to get a sense of what is happening. 

What I did like was the imaginative usage of coin. There were no gold pieces here! Swans and feathers. I like that. It would be easy to just step into the usual, but the author did not do that. He clearly cares for the world and wants to draw us in. I also liked the element of humour that popped up, and the reference to hugging witch made me smile. There were little flashes of wonderfulness but they were overpowered by a speedy narrative that flew through events with little description or explanation. The characters behaved oddly, frequently, which would normally leave me with emotional whiplash but I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about them. 

In conclusion, this is an ambitious and sweeping scifi fantasy that has many worlds and influences in it, from magic and tech, from witches to soldiers. With more show and less tell, and less forcing the plot forward, it would be an excellent story. As it is, this is a cut from me.