The Goblin Emperor

First: please imagine this review written in this font.

Second: so, goblins, eh!

Third: I read this as part of the Nebula Nominees for Best Novel list, and would probably have missed it otherwise. Despite what I am about to say, I was happy to be given a chance to read it! Because, different!

So, The Goblin Emperor is a fairly charming, one-note high fantasy book about Maia, a half-elf, half-goblin teen kid who ends up - thanks to a blimp accident which kills his dad and everyone else ahead of him in line for the throne - becoming the all-powerful emperor of Elflands. Or part of Elflands? There is a map somewhere (of course there is! high fantasy!). Imagine the emperor and his empireness as a sort of late 19th century Russian thing, a la Romanovs. There are blimps, steam, iron and other “steampunk” (STEAMPUNK!!!, the jacket cover screams in advertisement) things. People have notable, expressive, possibly pointy ears.

Anyway, Maia is a Sensitive Soul. He's been raised outside of the Palatial Palace by Setheris (NOT Severus, one needs to remind oneself), his evil tutor who berated him and abused him and never bothered to give him any helpful hints about how to be an emperor. Maia is thus woefully unprepared when it comes time to be crowned, woefully unprepared to even survive socially at court, and he's also super insecure, and basically a woobie. If this feels like fanfic, yeah. It felt like fanfic to me, at least in terms of his characterization.

The rest of the book is about courtly intrigues, both petty and grand, and if that stuff rocks your boat, cool. I found it mostly dull, and very predictable. What saves the book is its general humanistic charm: Maia's entourage is mostly lovable, from the lovable secretary man to the lovable bodyguards (1 wizard guy, 1 soldier guy) and so on. There is a visit from Maia's full-goblin grandfather, the king/ruler/pasha of the neighboring goblin kingdom. There is a fair amount of Jane Austen-style “human drama”, if you will, about people's feelings and relationships. Again, I say, if this sounds good to you, you will enjoy this stuff, because it's very satisfying on those dimensions.

I myself! However! Found it pretty blah, and it tried my patience after a while. In particular, I was sooooo(ooo) disappointed by the kinda lame “let's be socially liberal!” attempts. i.e. Elflands are a land where elves are white (like snow), goblins are black (like charcoal), mixed people are gray (like slate, aluminum, etc.), men wear the pants, and gay stuff is like whaaaat totally not cool. Maia, being Maia our Sensitive Hero, is thus: conflicted about his ethnic heritage, kinda thinking maybe women can be more than babymakers, and kinda OK with gay folks. He makes some kinda small-fry attempts to fix the homophobic sexism around him. Good? Yo, I was disappointed. The book really missed a golden opportunity here (as, well, so many, many sci-fi/fantasy books do), in that, instead of just making Elflands a matriarchal, bisexual empire full of purple-skinned oppressors and polka-dotted oppressees, we instead had to suffer through a tediously usual replication of our own social mores. Again! Sci-fi/fantasy! Should be visionary! And yet - on the social stuff, such failure of vision. So I found this stuff lame, and I worry about the little girls reading about the little girls who do nothing but act cute, or the grown women who are basically all either vamps or butch.

I was also miffed by the “evil Marxists coming to kill us all” assassination subplot/allegory, but I guess that fits in with the emperors-as-Romanovs stuff? Oh, and another failure of vision: imagine, in your mind, what a foreign dignitary from a foreign land would look like? One who is introduced as pasha-like? Do you imagine a very large, very bearded man who booms, bellows, blusters, is gruff and so on? Yes, so does everyone else, so it was kinda cliche to have the goblin king be basically that.

OK, I will stop abusing this book. It is not bad, and I'm sure most people will forgive it these things and be charmed by the Austeny Romanov courtly drama stuff. For me, though - meh. I wanted more.