Review: Bloodtide by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s Bloodtide continues the Ex Romana trilogy started in Sargassa, peeling back more the story of Selah, her companions and rivals, and of the city of Sargassa herself

Sidewise Award-winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham 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 the first novel, instead providing a lot of screentime 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. Theo and Arran’s mission is 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 a revolution. This puts me in mind of a Silverberg story where a revolution fails, and the revolters recognize, in hindsight, that they needed uprisings in more than just one city in order to have a prayer of success.

So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’s plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as do Tair and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the spoilery revelations it contains. 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. 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. These 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 flood in the city of Sargassa. All 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 to 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 haves 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 that none of them prepared for, and that they have to struggle to survive.

The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa we got the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. In the first novel we have 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 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 thing deliberately engineered to be misunderstood, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa aren’t really explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. At the end 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 further extends the revelation in Sargassa. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire backstory 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.

Book Review: Sargassa by Sophie Burnham

A queer and fearless novel of love, duty, and rebellion in a Rome that never quite fell.

Selah Kelios is the new Imperial Historian in the distant colony city of Sargassa, far from the center of the Roman Empire but high in pride and strength. Her father has just died (honestly, assassinated) and so she has been thrust into his role as Imperial Historian at a young age. Her father has left some secrets (as well as the secret of who assassinated him and why) and as Selah tries to uncover them, it’s the social bonds, and the bonds of love and relationships that tangle Selah and those around her, that are all the more important.

All this is the story of Sargassa, by Sophie Burnham.

Longtime readers of me know that, in the tradition of the meme of “men thinking about the Roman Empire”, I resemble that remark. I’ve thought about the Roman Empire since I first heard about it, more than 40 years ago. So, novels, fantasy and otherwise set in the Roman Empire, or Roman Empires than didn’t fall, et cetera, are catnip to me. It has been a few years, though, since I’ve read one that has satisfied me. “Roman Empire never fell” books often feel like pantomimes or pallid continuations of ancient society without any real growth, change, evolution or development. This really goes even against the spirit of Rome itself. Rome of 250 BC, before the Punic Wars, is a very different place than 146 BC, at the fall of Carthage and of Corinth, different than 45 BC, with Julius Caesar at his height, 5 AD, at Augustus’ high point before the disaster in Germany, 110 AD, Hadrian and building the wall in Britain, and so on. Writing, speaking, army composition, society, all the details of Roman life changed over the centuries. And that doesn’t even get into what 9th century A.D. Byzantium might look like to a Roman from 100 BC.

Happily, Sargassa avoids that trap. Sargassa is a major Roman city that by contextual clues appears to be somewhere in North America. There is some digging one can do in the book to piece together the world situation, but that’s not the worldbuilding Burnham really is interested in--there is no map, and a map would be beside the point. Instead Burnham is interested in what Roman society, in a city far from Rome, is like after rising from a dark age (the mysterious “Quiet” that gets mentioned a lot in the book). Some things are still the same. There are patricians and plebs, client-patron relationships. Sargassa is ruled by a Consul. But then there are differences. Evolutions from the Rome of textbooks and historical novels. There are a class of people called Verna, which sit in a very precarious social relationship with plebs, patricians and the rest of society. Religion is focused on a mother goddess figure (Christianity apparently exists, but never became the state religion in this world). Selah, although a woman, gets to be a paterfamilias in the wake of her father’s death, which would never fly back in the time of the ancient Roman Empire. So we get a built up web of a world in Sargassa, as a Roman society building back from a dark age, trying to recapture things that were lost, but going forward. Selah’s role as Imperial Historian is to try and help preserve some of the lost and glorious past.

And while the book is about Selah and a MacGuffin from that glorious past, and the question of who killed her father and why, it is also really much more about the relationships in the book. Selah’s very complicated relationship with her lover Tair, at first in flashback and then Tair's unexpected return. Selah’s half brother Arran. Arran's role and status as being Selah's half-brother is complicated from the get go and his drifting for meaning and life draws him into contact with another POV character, Theodora, who goes by Theo. Arran’s complicated is-this-a-romance with the nonbinary Theo is further complicated by the fact that Theo works for a revolutionary underground. Thus, these four are four of our five main points of view (Selah being primary), coming from very different social castes and situations in Sargassa society, the evolution of Roman society (as seen above). How they all eventually converge and interact really is the matter of the book. How these four deal with what is happening, to their city and to each other, is the reason to keep turning pages. Burham does an excellent job in point of view in showing the strata and roles of Roman society The relationships, brotherly, sisterly, queer, and otherwise really make this book what it is and give it its potency. Secrets, lies, the secrets of the heart, both confessed and otherwise, all under the slow burning of the aftermath of Selah’s father’s death.

Our fifth point of view is a bit different and is somewhat off the map compared to the others, and that is Darius. Darius provides us the “interior government role” as a law enforcement officer. Darius fits in as our “straight man” to the quartet of the primary POV characters (which is an apt pun, come to think of it). He utterly represents the establishment, the old guard of this new Roman society. He also fills in the “last incorruptible man” slot in the murder mystery strand of the book. He has been told by the powers that be to investigate the death of the Imperial Historian in a very specific way...but Darius wants to, bless his heart, actually find out the truth. It doesn’t really spoil anything to tell you that this approach doesn’t go that well for Darius.

At the three quarter mark, however, the novel changes. I know the conflicting theories and opinions about the nature, use and validity of spoilers are a thing, but I think in the case of this novel, the less I say about the last quarter of the book, the better. It reframes the entire previous book to that point, and to what Burham is doing here. It doesn’t make any of her ideas and her explorations of revolution, class warfare, society and the costs, personally and otherwise, of repression any less valid. If anything, those ideas she explores get turbocharged by the turn at the three quarter mark and to its conclusion. We spend three quarters of the book with a murder mystery, a character web, and a building of a world and society and conflicts, social and societal for them...and then, well, that would be telling.

This does make giving references to books that are similar difficult--because the books I am thinking of that resonate really strongly with Sargassa also rhyme with that three quarter mark turn that I am really trying to not spoil here. I think that telling you it is there does better than to leave it a complete surprise, you’ll watch for it now, and it will be an interesting extra fillip for you to watch out for as the rest of the pleasures of the book unfold.

The book is the start of a series and there really isn’t a good offramp here. I think it would be amazingly difficult to even try, given the last quarter of the book. There is a lot of the world, and the implications of the world left to explore in the projected next two books. I really want to see where Burham goes with this. I know for a lot of people waiting for a trilogy to complete before buying the first book is their power move (as bad as it is for sales of the original book). Thus, if my review has moved you, I do hope you will give Sargassa a try...be it by borrowing it from the local library, audio, or what have you. Burham has something interesting and wondrous going on here and I hope she gets the chance to continue to explore it.

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Highlights:

• Rich and detailed worldbuilding on a social and societal focus

• Excellent set of protagonists and points of view 

• The three quarter turn in this book...watch for it.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie, Sargassa [Daw, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.