Books Iron Empires, by Christopher Moeller
mylescorcoran and I have an agreement to each read 50 books in 2009. He's got quite a headstart, the creature. But I haven't been entirely idle!
I.
Iron Empires: Faith Conquers
Iron Empires: Sheva's War
I'm counting this pair of graphic novels (by Christopher Moeller) as one book; each is really a short story and together they might make a novella. Together with a little vignette in the back of Faith Conquers they constitute all the published stories set in Moeller's Iron Empires universe, where humanity, now a pale shadow of a former galactic civilisation, struggles to survive in a kind of spacefaring dark age, fragmented into a shrunken handful of warring and divided states and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the invasion of the body-stealing alien Vaylen: a setting which has recently become the basis for the Burning Empires RPG.
I wasn't too interested in Iron Empires; I'd read Burning Empires and didn't find the background that inspiring. I got more interested last month when I had a good idea for a game that slashed Burning Empires, Fading Suns and Dune with real-world Byzantine history (yes this is how my mind works), so I borrowed the comics from a friend.
And they were quite enjoyable. The stories themselves are very very light, especially Faith Conquers, both centering around the choices of a single character. In Faith Conquers, the eponymous main character (it's not a very impressive pun) doesn't really change at all, and the story is really more of a slice-of-life adventure showcasing aspects of the setting.
Sheva's War is a big improvement; Moeller seems more confident in his writing and tries for a bit more depth and explanation of the heroine's and villains' psychology and motives and is much more entertaining as a result, but it doesn't go into a lot of detail and though I believe the author when he says the events depicted were enough to transform the (again eponymous) heroine, I don't feel the story really shows its work, so to speak.
But all of that is fine: the truth is, in both stories the real main character is the setting itself. The author, who is also the artist (and a quite good one even if he does have trouble with feet in the first volume) has worked out his world in minute detail and it shows, right down to the lovingly imagined equipment. He's also created a perfect stage for dramatic heros and villains; the alien Vaylen are a wonderfully villainous creation guaranteed to create tragedy and triumph and hard choices for protagonists. (It's easy to see why Luke Crane and the Burning Wheel people wanted to make a game out of it.)
As it stands, character-wise these two stories are popcorn (and Faith Conquers is popcorn without butter?), but the setting is clearly worth a more elaborate menu.*
I really liked Moeller's art in the books; he does it all as paintings in a fairly realistic style and is good at conveying a lot of information with his art. Really interesting character designs too: dramatic, distinctive and believable. I especially enjoyed the high-tech Japanese armour and clothing in Sheva's War. It's also possible to look at his drawings of machines and equipment, try and work out how they function, and be proved right when you see them in action.
If he publishes more of this stuff, I'll definitely check it out.
(*and if you feel like doing the cooking yourself, Burning Empires is a good tool for the task - but that's another review.)