The latest novel by K.J. Parker set in his Parkerland ‘verse
K.J. Parker has settled into doing novels set in his Parkerland ‘verse. For lack of a better term for the setting, since it involves a variety of locations, timelines, characters, and inconsistencies, it is a medieval world that isn’t our own, but rhymes and plays with that rhyme in a whole bunch of different ways. Be it the Siege (Sixteen Ways to Defend a City) Trilogy about the not-quite-fall of Byzantium to Saevus Corax, battlefield salvager who winds up trying to head off international conflicts, to various novellas involving the ubiquitous Salonicus, who is a con artist, inventor, playwright, and possibly also the most brilliant person in the entire timeline. The novellas and novels aren’t in any sort of sensical order, the very idea of a map is scoffed at, and just when things actually took place is not clear.
Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead is the latest in these. This novel feels, from internal evidence, to be late in the timeline of events compared to the others. The church has been going along for quite a while and doesn’t have any competition anymore, and seems ready to have a schism of some size. The eternal threat of the Sashan Empire seems muted. Once again we have people lamenting lost manuscripts, writings and whole technologies.¹
And an impious monk and a female assassin/nun are dispatched to a synod where they have been tasked with killing a troublesome princess. But things get hot and hairy before they can even get there, and when they get to the synod itself, trouble erupts not of their own making, but definitely because they are there.
Despite the title, our viewpoint character is not the assassin/nun Sister Svangerd herself, but rather a more typical Parker point-of-view character: Brother Desiderius. He is a well worn and familiar archetype to readers of Parker’s work. A cynical, knowledgeable, brains-driven protagonist. He’s also an out-and-out atheist, even given that he’s a monk. He also has some other useful skills, and the classic Parker game of “I reveal this about the character and that changes what you just read” runs riot through his story. Sister Svangerd, for all that she is in the title, doesn’t hold a candle to our real protagonist, and that is a shame and a missed opportunity.
This novel’s theological debates about The Invincible Sun and the minutiae of its dogma are interesting if you want a debate over a religion in a fantasy novel. Parker, and to various extents his characters, are engaged with it. And there is a veneer of the idea that maybe there are supernatural forces using human agents here—or are the human agents simply thinking they are working for those supernatural elements—or is it all lies, delusions and half truths?
Take the Not-Quite-Dead from the title. Yes, this novel has a type of zombie in it. Or at least an undead. But there is a real fascination with Parker with the idea of people thinking they are supernatural, and regarding their presence as prima facie evidence for the truth of evil, versus the alternative. Our protagonist is from a country where this happens in families: naturally, there are families where, when people die, they come back as these undead. He’s an atheist and has a materialistic view of the entire affair, even if nearly nobody else does. It’s like this novel is having arguments with the more fantastical novellas such as Inside Man about whether the supernatural elements of Parkerland are actually real or not. Are they? Unclear!
And that is the thing about this novel, for better or worse. This novel is very much, absolutely meant as inside baseball catnip for people who have read a bunch of these novels and stories already and want to keep burrowing into this world and try to figure it out and see if there is a consistent design behind everything. Is there? Some days I think Parker is deliberately inconsistent just to mess with his longtime deep readers, and half the time I think he is just winging it and doesn’t have a consistent theory of worldbuilding. As I have read a number of books and reviewed them, here. Making History, for example, seems like a serious contemplation on the nature of history and its transmission. The Saevus Corax series, which this book resembles in some ways, does a lot of what this novel does, although with a somewhat different focus and at a different point in the timeline. I do think, especially given his academic focused stories, that it is all a game to Parker.
And that’s fine, but, and here’s the but. I might enjoy trying to figure out things here, trying to tease out where and when in Parkerland these events are happening and what it all means for the history and development of the world. I might enjoy the reading references, the aforementioned familiar archetype of a character. There is a well worn groove here in these novels.
The problem, the but, as it were, is that there is no way I would recommend this book to someone absolutely new to Parker. I am glad Parker is not writing solely for the inside baseball (the aforementioned Making History works pretty well for readers who haven’t read much or any of Parker). But a novel like this, although it is first in a series, really isn’t the first in a series at all. It’s a novel for a limited audience—deep fans of Parkerland.
I can hope, based on prior experience, that the next two novels will tie things together and get me to reconsider this novel and its merits. But then again, that’s once again something for the deep Parkerland reader, not for the casual fantasy reader picking up Parker for the first time. And so we come back to the original problem.
So in a real way what this review boils down to is: If you like and read lots of Parkerland novels, you get more of the same here. Other readers probably won’t derive as much enjoyment out of the novel as you’d hope. I think it’s not worth your time, frankly. I enjoy Parker’s tone and world, and his knowledgable protagonist, but this is down deep in that, and starting here won’t land well at all. There are better places to start, I think (e.g. Sixteen Ways to Defend a City).
Highlights:
- A novel set late in the Parkerland timeline
- A familiar protagonist despite the book title
- Too well worn a groove for a limited audience
Reference: Parker, K.J. Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead [Orbit, 2026].
¹ Inside baseball here. One of the things that make it hard to date and come up with a chronology of the Parkerland ‘verse is that technology and knowledge keeps getting lost. This world seems to be continually in a trap where no sustained technological development can take place without a war or other disaster knocking the sandcastle down all over again and regressing to an equilibrium. Even for a world with multiple organizations trying to preserve and extend knowledge, in Parkerland, it never *lasts*.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
