Sidewise Award winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham (Read my NOAF review here: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/12/book-review-sargassa-by-sophie-burnham.html_ ) provided us with a setting and a vision of a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Part of the story of Selah, new Imperial Historian and the rest of her rivals, adversaries and contemporaries in the novel is finding out that the truth of history is somewhat more complicated than they believed, in the midst of a twisty conspiracy of imperial ambitions, secrets, plots and lies.
Bloodtide continues the story of Selah and the others in her orbit, in the fantastically imagined world of Sargassa.
From a plot perspective in looking at Bloodtide, I am going to skirt the big reveal of Sargassa since it would not be fair to readers who have not read the first book in the series. Readers who have read the first book and are looking to see how Burnham can possibly follow up that big reveal don’t need to be reminded of what it was. So, instead we will carry forward into the second novel and what it tries to do without referencing it.
Having assembled its characters as a rough and contentious group in Sargassa, Bloodtide for the most part scatters them to the winds. This second novel focuses less on Selah than in the first novel, instead providing a lot of screen time to the other members of her somewhat contentious circle of colleagues and associates. Darius is in exile in the badlands, giving us a view of some of the rest of the continent, and the price of his Javert-like obsessions for his investigations from the first novel. Arran and Theo, on the other hand, with the growing revelation that there is a lot more of the old solaric tech lying around than anyone ever suspected, go off to try and resurrect the power and communications arrays from long ago.
We get a greater sense of the scale of the revolutionaries and their opposition to Roman rule. Too, Theo and Arran’s mission are predicated on a slow but smart bit of strategy--they realize that Sargassa casting off control by the Romans is a doomed enterprise, destined to be squashed quickly by the rest of the empire. But if they could coordinate across cities and towns by means of the solaric technology, then all the cities and settlements could rise up at the same time, and make stopping the revolution much more difficult if not impossible. It’s an excellent recognition of the tactics and necessity of coordination of
So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’ plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as does Tair, and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the secrets its holds (as well as the spoilery revelations it containers) gets less airtime as well. This means the often thorny relationship between Selah and Tair gets less play than, say, the budding relationship between Theo and Arran. Still, this is a novel with interesting and fascinating queer relationships, and a preponderance of characters who are not straight men. And we get character development, growth and an intense look at these characters, just like in the first novel.
Like Sargassa, Bloodtide is not just queer friendly, it is queer forward. Sargassa and Bloodtide are the queer forward alternate history/future history SF novels you may not have known you wanted, but are here for you.
And then there is the titular Bloodtide, which is a large set piece of a rather catastrophic storm and flood in the city of Sargassa. All of the characters who are in the city at the time confront what turns out to be a quite catastrophic storm for the city. Rain and flooding, and the inevitable stresses to civilized behavior that occurs afterwards. It’s a challenge for Selah and the others not only for them to survive, but for them to support and help as much of the underclass as they can. (The Patricians, of course, are doing fine. Same as it ever was) While the first novel made the social divide in Sargassa stark, here, in the midst of the storm that hits the city, the have and have-nots, in the wake of a disaster are even more starkly defined. I was reminded, and I believe the author intended it, of the wake of the utter disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Burnham does not pull her punches in depicting the devastation, which of course plays merry hell with the plans of our protagonists. It is a black swan event none of them prepared for, and have to struggle to survive.
The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa, we get the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. We have in the first novel descriptions of lower class areas of the city, Sinktown, that are prone to flooding in the best of times. And so we get not just tidal flooding, but a full on hurricane storm and storm surge.
So is there another big reveal in Bloodtide? In a way, there is an extension of that big reveal, as, in the final portion of this book, we get a sense of more about it. While the novel has danced around the consequences of the world as it is now, a deliberately engineered to be misunderstood thing, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa really are not explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. In the end part of Bloodtide, however, we get a bifurcation of character knowledge and reader knowledge. Selah and the others come across information that they cannot quite decipher or understand, but the reader can definitely put the pieces together and come to a conclusion and a revelation that broadens and extends the revelation in Sargassa further. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire back story is not clear, however, there are still questions as to the state of affairs, in addition to the unresolved character beats. But once again the book remains relatively unique in its approach to worldbuilding.¹
My hope is that this sets up the final book in the trilogy and a broader set of revelations and things coming to a head. I’ve been quite entertained both by the characters and the fascinating and clever worldbuilding in the Ex Romana series and I have high hopes for the third and final volume to stick the landing.
Highlights:
Fantastic depiction of the set-piece disaster as the heart of the book
Excellent character beats.
Deepens the worldbuilding of the first book and provides more context to the surprise of the first book.
Reference: Burnham, Sophie, Bloodtide [Daw, 2025] ¹ This makes it hard to compare this book to others as is my wont because the books I can think of that tie into Ex Romana might inadvertently give a hint to the twist in the series and worldbuilding.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.