Empress of Forever is a novel by Max Gladstone, his first book outside of the Craft Sequence.
20 Minutes into the Future, wealthy entrepreneur Vivian Liao schemes to use her mastery of information technology to overthrow a corrupt government. Her plans are interrupted by a visit from the titular Empress, who abducts Viv to a far future whee the lines between magic, mysticism, and technology are extremely blurred and the Empress' will is inviolable... to nearly everyone except Viv herself, who isn't connected to the "Cloud" of power and information that is the basis for the magic/technology of the future. Viv escapes from the Empress' grasp and searches for a way to return to her own time, but as she learns more about the future world and forms connections with its people, her perspective and goals become more complicated.
This book provides examples of:
- And I Must Scream: Zanj’s imprisonment; thousands of years chained in a small box inside the heart of a star.
- Antagonist Title
- Benevolent A.I.: Zanj was originally the emergent consciousness of the Pasquaran internet. She revealed her presence to the Pasquarans in the course of protecting them from a Cloud-based threat and became a powerful supporter for them for many generations.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Empress is overthrown, the conflict with the Bleed is over or at least greatly forestalled, and the power of the Cloud is freely available to everyone. Hong has died, although it's implied that he has Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. Viv can’t ever return to her old life, but she can share a new one with her surviving friends.
- Church Militant: The Mirrorfaith use advanced weapons, fleets of starfighters, and warrior monks to defend their knowledge and treasures from threats like the Pride.
- Civilization Destroyer: It’s a fact of life that civilizations that grow sufficiently large and complex enough within the Cloud end up drawing and getting eaten by the Bleed, or end up drawing and getting reaped by the Empress for any insights that could help her fight the Bleed. The Mirrorfaith and the Pride only escape this fate because they’re fully nomadic.
- Clone Angst: Downplayed. Viv is naturally devastated to learn that she's a copy of the Empress, and that her world is effectively gone entirely, but adjusts fairly quickly because she has to go rescue her friends. Zanj on the other hand, is completely distraught by Queen Zanj, to the point where she's clearly unsure if she's the original or the copy.
- Cursed with Awesome: Viv doesn’t have a soul (aka a digital presence) in the future, which means she’s unable to interact with the Cloud and all its benefits, such as Casual Interstellar Travel or a guaranteed afterlife. On the other hand, not having a soul means that weapons that target or detect souls plain don’t work on her. Although the truth is that Viv does have a soul. As (a version of) the creator of the entire Cloud, her soul is the entire Cloud, which would make her effectively godlike if she was aware of it and if the Empress wasn’t already occupying it.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Generally averted; in fact, the people of the future perceive Viv as lacking a soul because she doesn't have any cybernetic or biotechnological modifications that would allow her to interact with the Cloud. Xiara does struggle to hold onto her sense of identity and humanity while connected to powerful starships, but that’s because of how huge and powerful the starships are, not some inherent trait of her own.
- Cyborg Helmsman: The people of Orn have hereditary Cyborg Helmsman abilities through advanced Cloud-integrated biotechnology. The civilization that developed those abilities was destroyed by the Empress, but their planet-bound descendants still have legends and songs about interstellar travel. Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter, the first resident of Orn in centuries to actually pilot a spacecraft, is eager for the opportunity and performs very well, eventually learning to control a massive battle fleet with her mind.
- Death Seeker: It turns out that Zanj didn’t really expect to survive her confrontation with the Empress, but she preferred being killed to being imprisoned again and wanted to make as much trouble for the Empress as possible on her way out.
- Determinator: Viv, as the narration puts it at one point, does not have a “give up” setting.
- The Dreaded: After hundreds of years of interstellar banditry and a nearly-successful military campaign against the Empress, Zanj can strike panic in would-be opponents simply by introducing herself.
- Emperor Scientist: The Empress is a version of Viv who successfully carried out her initial plan to build a self-improving AI and take over the world, then went on to colonize the galaxy.
- Everything Is Online: Both subverted and taken to its logical extreme, with the Cloud encompassing literally everything in the galaxy, up to and including the laws of physics. Souls are real because they're your digital presence in the Cloud, which persists after your death. Faster-than-light travel is possible because causality propagates instantly in the Cloud, so ships (and sometimes people) cross interstellar distances by turning into data and calculating themselves into new locations. If you want to move a planet around, you tell the Cloud the planet should move, and it will. Where it becomes subverted however is the revelation late in the book that the Cloud is an entirely natural feature of the universe that was taken over and controlled by the Empress; it's implied that it ended up being treated as it was mostly because Viv Liao was a tech billionaire. This ultimately proves to be why the Bleed appear to destroy advanced civilizations; they're a form of non-sentient life that traveled in the Cloud before Viv Liao asserted her total control over it, and are just trying to free themselves.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The Empress is so far removed from her erstwhile humanity that she can’t understand why Viv jeopardized her world-conquering plan to protect Magda, or how this choice could have led to a positive outcome. She thinks the whole thing must be an error in her simulation.
- Extreme Omnivore: Grey can and will eat anything from grain to rocks to dreams.
- Future Me Scares Me: Viv is deeply disturbed to learn that the Empress is her alternate/future self.
- Grey Goo: The Greyframe are a species of intelligent grey goo created by the Empress. They have individuality but are composed of self-replicating, all-consuming clouds of nanomachines. Viv ends up befriending one of them, a young Grey named Grey of Greyframe, and his huge appetite marks him as the novel’s equivalent of Zhu Bajie.
- I'll Kill You!: When Zanj discovers the crown binding her to Viv’s will, she demands that Viv free her and then, when Viv doesn’t, vows to kill her. By the time she gets the opportunity, she no longer wants to.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: When we first meet Grey, he uses this technique to trap people and harvest their dreams.
- Monkey King Lite: Zanj is a legendary outlaw, warrior, and warlord from a planet described as a “world of flowers and fruit”. She has fur and a tail, a prideful, aggressive, and adventurous personality, and phenomenal powers worthy of her reputation including the power to travel faster than almost anyone in the setting. She spent an incredible span of time imprisoned as punishment for her transgressions against the ruling powers of the cosmos, and upon being released from that imprisonment, found herself compelled to obey the person who let her out with a pain-inflicting circlet. She isn’t even a “natural” member of her species; like how the Monkey King was a stone monkey who hatched from a stone egg, Zanj started as an AI created by accident from the electronic systems of her planet’s monkey-like inhabitants.
- Morally Superior Copy: Viv is a simulated copy of the Empress’ past self, before thousands of years of ruling the galaxy and fighting the Bleed eroded her compassion and inflated her already sizeable ego to cosmic proportions; out of countless simulated universes, Viv's was the only one to result in a universe that wouldn't result in the Bleed, and the sole differentiating factor between Viv Liao and the Empress is that Viv wasn't willing to abandon her friends.
- Must Make Amends: Grey promises the people of Refuge that he will make amends for accidentally destroying their granary by helping them rebuild it and grow more food.
- Nay-Theist: There are advanced minds in the Cloud that are referred to as “gods”, but few people seem to worship them. The Mirrorfaith consider becoming a god to be a distraction from the pursuit of enlightenment because gods are absorbed by material concerns such as power or self-indulgence despite having transcended material existence. Some of the Ornclans bargain and trade with small gods, who according to Xiara are not powerful enough to take the clans’ treasures by force.
- Non-Malicious Monster: The horrifying, civilization-destroying Bleed are reacting to their extradimensional habitat being crowded out by the expanding Cloud. They destroy civilizations so they can have their living space back. In a universe with no Cloud, the Bleed are dangerous only because their sheer size is an obstruction to space travel.
- Other Me Annoys Me: Original Zanj is disgusted by Queen Zanj, while Queen Zanj regards Original Zanj with pity.
- Poor Communication Kills: “You wink with two eyes?”
- Recycled In Space: The book is a loose space-opera take on Journey to the West.
- Secret Secret-Keeper: Zanj suspected that Viv was the Empress almost from the moment they met.
- Self-Made Woman: Viv grew up in a well-to-do family, but she became one of the wealthiest businesswomen in the world through her own efforts.
- Slow Laser: Soon after Viv wakes up in the future, she’s attacked by a Pride robot that shoots bolts of red energy that she can see traveling through the air, which she lampshades as not how a laser or a plasma weapon should work.
- Spotting the Thread: When Vivian’s group reaches Pasquarai, Zanj’s birthplace, they’re taken in by its fantastical appearance, a combination of city and forest all floating in space. Zanj, however, is unsettled, because none of it is correct: the trees are too regular, there aren’t any of the dangers she remembers, and Pasquarai was a planet the last time she visited and not an arrangement of floating continents.
- Translator Microbes: Despite being hurled thousands of years into the future, Viv can understand and speak to everyone perfectly fine. This is an early sign that she isn’t as “soulless” as she seems. There’s a moment where Hong tells her that a certain class of Pride warship is called, in the holy texts, “close air support”, and she’s bemused to realize that Hong is saying it in a sacred language that’s also getting translated to her in plain terms.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The book opens in this time frame, when Viv is implementing her AI plan, and it’s well on its way to a Crapsack World. Most of the story takes place closer to Twenty Millennia Into The Future, into a whole crapsack galaxy.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: One of Grey’s signature abilities.
- Warrior Monk: Hong and the other members of the Mirrorfaith.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Several.
- Viv’s plan at the beginning is essentially to create a super-powerful AI and Take Over the World so that she can overthrow oppressive governments and fix the environment.
- The Empress destroys advanced civilizations so that they won’t attract the Bleed, who are a threat to the galaxy at large.
- Grand Rector Celestine will do whatever it takes to keep the Mirrorfaith united and powerful.
- You Can't Go Home Again: One of the major themes of the book. Viv willingly chooses to ignore her portal home, and later discovers she never had the opportunity in the first place; she's not just a copy of the Empress, but a copy of that copy, and the original version of Viv as she appears in the story never left the simulation.
- You Shall Not Pass!: Grey holds off the Empress so that Viv and Zanj can escape her throne room. He doesn’t expect to survive, and he almost doesn’t, but Zanj manages to save enough of him that he eventually heals.
