The Empire is designed to put its most vulnerable people at the margins, and so to fight within it she must harm the very people she tries to save. Read an exclusive excerpt from The Monster Baru Cormorant. (The series is chock full of grim and fascinating detail: “Baru’s tongue stuck to her palate when she breathed.”) After holding a calm and flinty conversation, she throws up from stress and grief and then moves on. But when alone she is clearly holding in great emotion. (Dickinson spoke about writing Baru’s layers and the difference between the two novels in our recent interview.)ĭoes the fact that Baru does not act on her moral qualms really mean she does not understand them? Some characters have occasion to call her utterly cold. Baru is unreliable in a carefully balanced fashion. With rapid-fire delivery of ideas, second-guesses, and opinions that Baru holds but which the novel clearly does not intend to have authoritative weight.

That horror is always logical to the point of coldness: she wonders which actions will have consequences, but does not change her course. At one point, she throws the economy of an area into shambles, then thinks back on it much later with distant, brief horror. Baru doesn’t always seem to understand the intensity of her atrocities. The focus on empire is not the same, but the willingness to follow a sometimes cruel protagonist is.Īs Traitor dealt with Baru trying to do the right thing from inside the empire, the second novel asks whether that is even possible. Locke lives in a world of corrupt Mafia-esque officials, and is, primarily, fighting against people who would or have done harm to him. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch also asks us to follow a morally dubious protagonist, a Robin Hood-esque rogue who tortures his enemies. (Seth Dickinson refers to Lee in his acknowledgements in Monster.) The series gradually explores his motivation, and the process of him essentially creating a moral philosophy from scratch occupies much of the trilogy. Shuos Jedao is known for being a renowned general who destroyed his own fleet.

(Her status as a lesbian woman rather narrows the list of comparable candidates.) In a recent example, Yoon Ha Lee’s series Machineries of Empire also features a protagonist who commits atrocity in the name of a greater cause. Convincingly playing the part, though, requires enabling those techniques the empire uses to spread across the known world.Īs a morally dubious protagonist, Baru is not alone in fantasy fiction. She joins the empire of Masks in an effort to take revenge after the empire colonizes her home country, killing and brainwashing the people she loves. Baru herself is a math prodigy, skilled in manipulated finances and systems. 30, follows 2015’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

The monster baru cormorant