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| Each book in the series has a cover by Joe Wilson. (Image via Amazon) |
There’s a sprawling cast of memorable characters struggling against the oppression of inflexible ideology.
There are interesting themes surrounding the alienation of labour, about what it means to be a moral being, and about the mutability of identity.
There’s impressively original worldbuilding that seems distinct from much of what exists in the fantasy landscape.
There’s the compelling antagonists, the titular Tyrant Philosophers known as the Palleseen Sway. It’s an empire whose goal to make the world “more perfect” has a surface veneer of reasonableness that belies an inflexible and impractical tyranny.
But most of all, what makes the Tyrant Philosophers series resonate with us is the joy that the author seems to take playing with language. These are very writerly books — and will appeal to those seeking sentence-to-sentence craft. These are not the propulsive, tightly plotted narrative-forward books that many readers might expect from Tchaikovsky, but more meandering affairs.
In fact, The Tyrant Philosophers quintet of novels do not read like anything else Adrian Tchaikovsky has written; they are more whimsical, more rococo, and occasionally more obtuse. Some might find the language overly twisted (and occasionally impenetrable), but for us it is a joy to see what knots he ties out of the English language.
Set in a semi-industrialized fantasy world, each book in the series explores a different facet of the Palleseen Sway’s colonial aspirations. Once a small island nation, the Palleseen developed a philosophy of what they call “perfection” — a set of rigid rules derived from theoretical principles by which the their leadership believe society will function in the best way possible. These rules of “correctness” are long on theory, and short on practicality.
Time and again, Tchaikovsky confronts the reader with the deep irony of the Palleseen Sway — the fact that even the most carefully reasoned systems of thought tend to founder on the messy realities of human experience that is often dictated by emotion, not logic.
The first book, set in the recently conquered City of Ilmar, set the tone for the series with a multitudinous cast of characters: Yasnic the bedraggled priest, shady academic Ivarn, student Lemya, and a dozen more. It’s the story of the city and of an uprising, told through a variety of perspectives. The second book, House of Open Wounds, takes readers to the hospital tents near the Palleseen front lines in a war against the Lorruthi empire, mostly following a surgeon known as The Butcher and his crew of irregulars. The third book, set in the not-quite-conquered vassal state of Alkhalend, features Sage Monitor Angilly, a disillusioned Pal officer. The fourth volume, Pretenders to the Throne of God, concerns itself with the siege of Eres Ffenegh, and the hapless city champion Kiffel. A few characters here and there show up in multiple volumes (notably Yasnic), but for the most part each book is easy to read independently of the others.
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| Author Adrian Tchaikovsky at the 2024 Hugo Awards ceremony. (Photo by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk CC-BY-NC 3.0) |
It isn’t lost on readers that the “correctness” and “perfection” that the Pals profess are culturally elitist and colonial in aspiration. The Pal language, designed from the ground up to be resistant to misunderstanding, is imposed on conquered populations and vassal states. This language is intended to be impervious to incongruity, inimical to metaphor, inhospitable to wit, and anathema to humour.
The Pallesseen would be uncomfortable with turns of phrase based on polysyndeton, or anacoluthon, or antiphrasis, or syllepsis… and perhaps this is why these books seem to revel in such rhetorical devices. Tchaikovsky’s joyfully off-kilter sentences and wry wordplay act as a repudiation of the absolutist ideal of “correctness.” The Palleseen seek to eliminate ambiguity, but it feels like Tchaikovsky is suggesting that there is virtue in it.
There are times in the series that the narration in the Tyrant Philosophers sounds like a more world-weary Terry Pratchett. If Rincewind, the protagonist in several of Pratchett’s classic Discworld novels, were ever to find himself in the City of Ilmar, he might not feel at home… but he would understand the irony-laden patois of the Maric locals.
This linguistic play (P)ratchets up in the final volume of the series, The Grave of Perfection. Perhaps because Tchaikovsky brings readers back to where everything started: Ilmar the City of Last Chances. Ilmar is as much a character in these books as anyone else: a city that might be imagined as an ill-begotten love child of Gormenghast and Ankh-Morpork. Like many of the other characters, Ilmar has come in and out of the overall story.
With this series, Tchaikovsky has constructed a fantasy world in which the greatest threat is not simply military conquest, but the imposition of a single (supposedly rational) way of understanding existence. Against that threat, he mobilizes an army of off-kilter perspectives, ironic jokes, logical contradictions, and delightfully contorted sentences.
The Tyrant Philosophers may be a series about resisting an empire, but it is also a celebration of the unruliness and imperfection of all communication and the need for diversity as a driver of human aspirations.
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