Nanites and Space Madness: Exile’s Throne by Rhonda Mason

It’s taken me 2 years and a few re-reads to get to this point, but here I am, finally finished with Rhonda Mason’s excellent Empress Game trilogy. And as an official part of my 2020 Resolution Project, I can now mark another book off my list! Was it all worth it? You’ll have to read everything below to find out! (Spoiler alert — yes. Yes it was.)

Exile’s Throne (2018)
Written by: Rhonda Mason
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 359
Series: The Empress Game (Book 3)
Publisher: Titan Books

The Premise:

One seat on the intergalactic Sakien Empire’s supreme ruling body, the Council of Seven, remains unfilled, that of the Empress Apparent. The seat isn’t won by votes or marriage. It’s won in a tournament of ritualized combat in the ancient tradition. Now that tournament, the Empress Game, has been called and the women of the empire will stop at nothing to secure political domination for their homeworlds. Kayla Reunimon, a supreme fighter, is called to battle it out in the arena.

The battle for political power isn’t contained by the tournament’s ring, however. The empire’s elite gather to forge, strengthen or betray alliances in a dance that will determine the fate of the empire for a generation. With the empire wracked by a rising nanovirus plague and stretched thin by an ill-advised planet-wide occupation of Ordoch in enemy territory, everything rests on the woman who rises to the top.

No spoilers (contains spoilers for previous books)

Discussion: There’s a lot for poor Kayla and company to pull off in this book. So much so that I started to wonder how it was going to happen. I remember getting halfway through the book and still nothing had been done to overthrow the Imperials and win Ordoch its freedom. Heck, hardly anyone had made it off of the Yari, which meant being stuck in the middle of space. How was this all going to play out if the massively important spaceship still hadn’t moved? The clock kept ticking down (ok, the pages) and I endlessly wondered — how was Mason going to pull this off?

And then things finally hit and I thought, “Ooooooh. Huh. Wasn’t expecting that at all.” Which I love. I’m always tickled pink by surprises in books, and I’m not going to lie — I occasionally couldn’t help myself and kept peeking ahead at other chapters, wanting to read bits to know more but also trying not to spoil things for myself. Stupid, yes, I know, but that’s what happens when, even if you already are a fast reader, you still can’t read fast enough to satisfy yourself.

Kayla and Malkor still remain my favorite two characters. I do think it was pretty unfair of Kayla to saddle Vayne with Corinth though. Vayne, after so long of an imprisonment and daily torture was in NO condition to be helping anyone. That poor man needs time and therapy. A lot of it. I was on Malkor’s side that I got annoyed when Vayne was being an ass to Kayla from time to time, but also it was nice that Vayne realized he was being a jerk.

The rooks were great fun once their mystery was solved. Though it did feel weird Kayla compared them to an octopus. Cephalopod is a weird enough word that you can kind of get away with using it, but octopus and more specifically, octopus beaks, felt weird appearing in a book by a character with blue hair, mind powers, and a planet called Ordoch. Science fiction can be a pain in the ass that way though — trying to describe a creature with other creatures that don’t immediately make a reader think of Earth. Funny thing is I didn’t really need it — my brain had already defaulted to the Shadows from Babylon 5 for adult rooks and squidgy dumbo octopus for the little ones.

What surprised me the most was that Isonde and Ardin never appeared again on the pages. They get a few chapters before departing for Ordoch and then we never hear from them. I’m kind of bummed about that. Mostly because I wanted Isonde to apologize for being an idiot — especially after what she did to Malkor — and thank them for saving everyone in the galaxy. Ardin could just be there and smile knowing that he’d done the right thing in the first place.

Ah well. At least Isonde acknowledges her jackassery earlier on.

In Conclusion: What a trilogy this was! It’s a lot of science fiction to absorb, so I did have to take a break in between books (especially since I was reading these along with John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire series). But that makes it even easier and more fun to dive right back in. There’s still plenty of action and what-the-heckery going on so you’re certainly never bored. It’s hard to put these down, but ultimately you do, although that’s mostly because it’s 1 AM and you’re tired and probably should have been in bed 2 hours ago.

If you like good science fiction that isn’t the super hard kind and will keep you on your toes and quite entertained, this is a solid batch of books to go on. Although I do want to leave this behind for future printings, so this is for you editors at Titan Books:

Fuck “frutt.”