The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).
You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.
The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.
The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.
None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.
There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.
Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence did I zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).
As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.
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Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur
