One-sentence summary:
Elis Royd is a one-dimensional romp through colonisation and man’s arrogance with an uninspired story and eye-rolling conclusion.
Longer Musings
I feel there is no better way to start this review than with parts of the author’s own promotional blurb:
At last: science fiction for grown-ups!
…
No vampires here. No superheroes, wizards or werewolves. No talking dragons, no zombies, no flying bespectacled British schoolchildren. Sorry. Elis Royd is solely for thinking adult readers.
So, big promises, huge premise…does it deliver?
Elis Royd serves as the name of the novel and the name of the asteroid it’s based on. It takes us to the last few months (weeks?) of the colonised-rock’s existence and shows us how the empire falls. Part narrative; part faux-history; part science text, the work is designed to challenge our assumptions of intergalactic colonisation and how we would react as we spread out across the stars.
Essentially, there’s two cultures–humans and Royds. Royds are a sort of an advanced insect labourer that has less developed cognitive functions than homo-sapiens. They are trusting (conveniently) and easily manipulated by the devious and scandalous administrators of the Earth compound. There’s also a whole host of other evolved species such as leeches, giant roaches and things that go bump in the night. But don’t worry about them, they only exist to mysteriously appear and kill the characters whose arc has finished.
On the human side, we learn about the three masters of the Earth Administration: The Commander, The Arbiter General and The Elder. They are presented as a trio of old men desperately besotted with dreams of a vast mountain of gold hidden in the Royd camp. They will torture, cheat, lie and steal their way to it. If it exists at all. And of course, despite their immense intellect, they will come unstuck because the are unprepared for any deviation from their plans.
Then there’s Emra, the Queen. She’s the first Royd who shows the mental capacity to fight against the Earth Administration. After a series of tragic events, Emra discovers her emotional strength as well and gathers her forces to charge forward and remake the world how she wishes. Along the way she finds a general (who just appears and has a brilliant strategic mind), another Royd who is also full of cunning despite having done nothing with it, and an uncanny ability to get herself into trouble.
As the story is mostly vignette, it jumps from character to character to give a complete picture of the upcoming war on both sides. In many ways, it’s similar to the historical narratives now written by historians about past battles. Unfortunately, for me, that’s where the positive parts of Elis Royd end.
Firstly, I didn’t care about anyone. I had plenty of time to be made to care, there’s lots of pages, but no one was complex enough for me to worry about. The Elder was motivated by greed. That’s it. Emra only cared about defeating the humans. Finish. The characters didn’t think or reason or strategise. There was no doubt. They simply travelled along a series of pre-set rails until they reached their final destinations.
As for the secondary characters, they were all the same. Arrogant Guard 1 shows up, dies. Then he (always a he) is replaced by Arrogant Guard 2. And so on. In the Royd camp, there was Trusting Civilian X. As such, even the number of named people in the novel didn’t matter. They were cutouts to replace the same type of person who had existed previously.
There’s no doubt the book has big ambitions — showing the fall of a culture in a novel — but the end result is not a highly-developed think piece for ‘adults’. A think piece for me is one that cuts deep and makes you question your basic assumptions about the world. Elis Royd fails that. Firstly, its humans are white, male and American. Ron Sanders seems to realise this is a problem about halfway through and info-dumps Earth’s history on us. This isn’t a complex, nuanced info-dump either. It’s basically, the Earth was filling up and the Americans innovated their way to success because, y’know, they’re Americans.
Also, for some reason that’s never explained, people in the colony are Christians although there are no theological discussions about what that means. Generally, what happens in the novel is that when a character needs to commit a terrible act, they invoke the almighty power of God. Who knows why. God becomes a sort of author-invented motivating force to remove any questions about actions that have had no foreshadowing.
Finally, at the ultimate climax, Ron Sanders tosses in a twist that makes no sense. The more I think about the ending and its logical conclusion, the more I scratch my head. It’s supposed to be profound, but all it did was make me wonder if the author had considered what technology would be available to those in that situation.
Which brings us to the writing… it was ok. Mostly it was fine, although a little dry for my tastes. There were some odd uses of idioms that didn’t make sense when placed in a sci-fi novel. Some dialogue was less cultural specific that it should’ve been and more ripped from today’s vernacular which warped the characters into a sort of time vacuum. Where did they come from? What is their culture? Just simply things that took me out of the story. Otherwise it was fine, but not quite electric with excitement.
Conclusion
I can’t recommend Elis Royd. It paints itself as an adult novel for the intelligentsia of today who are bored of genre-based stories; yet, it trades in one-dimensional characters and strange cultural underpinnings. What it aims to do — analyse the complexities of colonising another life form — it completely fails at. By making 90% of its characters white; male; American and Christian, it takes away the diversity of humanity for no reason and then fails to take advantage of the differences of opinion people have about things. There are long info-dumps that are as interesting as recipe-book instructions and lifeforms which serve as deus-ex machina tools so they can conveniently kill off the unneeded characters.
Overall, I left bored and was counting the pages to the end.
For those looking for thought-provoking, I’d suggest Irradiated by S. Elliot Brandis.
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