u/elimgaraks

I recall reading somewhere that Christopher Ruocchio was raised Catholic, grew up to be agnostic, and then eventually found his way back to Catholicism.

If I had to guess, I’d say he found his way back to Catholicism right before beginning to write this book.

Up until this point, we had a Hadrian who — while still believing that the Cielcin cannot be reasoned with and must be destroyed — at least felt regretful and tortured about it. Now, we have a Hadrian who has seen the light (yuck) and is now fully committed to his future genocidal act (yuck) because he was visited by an angel (yuck) who told him that it’s part of God’s plan (yuck).

Of course, the parallels to Biblical stories and direct Bible quotes were always present, but prior to this book they were dealt with in a more nuanced way, with the narrative making it clear that, despite his parallels to Jesus, Hadrian was flawed and in some ways evil himself. This nuance disappears after the Ragama chapter. It almost feels as if Ruocchio wasn’t initially intending to transform Hadrian’s mindset in this way, but then changed his plot outline suddenly.

To clarify: my main issue does not lie in the reveal that The Quiet is all powerful and will come into being whether Hadrian succeeds or not (despite it being a bad writing choice that makes everything feel meaningless and narratively unearned, I was initially willing to ignore it in order to protect my enjoyment of the series). Rather, I take issue with the change in Hadrian’s attitude after this reveal as it implies a new guiding philosophy of the narrative that makes me sick to my stomach: that some cultures are inherently evil due to communing with the Devil, and that committing genocide is actually okay as long as God says it’s okay.

This is a familiar philosophy that has led to untold amounts of suffering in the real world, and it is not a philosophy I am interested in having preached at me in my leisure time.

I am not opposed to Christian themes in media (if I was, I wouldn’t be able to read much of anything at all as they’re steeped too deeply into our culture to be avoided). I *am,* however, opposed to Christian themes being bent in such a way as to perpetuate the same racist (see footnote), colonialist behaviors that have held humanity back for centuries. Unfortunately, the types of Christians who can distinguish between the two are typically not the type to be writing a 7 book space opera Bible allegory.

There’s so many other weird conservative and conservative-adjacent bits in these books that I could go into whole essays about (like the clumsy and derivative metaphor for communism displayed in the Lothrians, or how Hadrian’s disapproval of the Extrasolarians is often phrased in ways that are eerily similar to common arguments against gender-affirming healthcare, or the usage of the classic trope where the wife who doesn’t want children magically changes her mind right before dying, or perhaps Hadrian flat out mocking the notion of political power coming from the people via a social contract, to name a few), but it’s 3AM and this is already a long enough block of text.

I guess what I’m realizing after finishing this book is that I should’ve seen all of this coming. I wanted to believe that Ruocchio was intentionally writing Hadrian as a wicked man and not that he actually believed these things himself, but I was blind to obvious red flags. The unironic glazing of Jordan Peterson in Book 2 was a clear sign, but I gave it pass and brushed it off as “eh, Ruocchio was, like, 22 when he was writing that book. I believed some dumb stuff when I was 22, too.” But I was wrong, and the hints that Ruocchio held these views were there from the start.

I was so naive to think that it wouldn’t turn out this way.

This must be.

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Footnote:

I debated whether or not to keep the word “racist” in this review because I’m posting this review to both my Goodreads and Reddit accounts and I didn’t want to be accused of “reaching” given that, in my experience, some of the people on sci-fi subreddits tend to be… uh… racist.. However, I ultimately decided to leave it in given that certain moments in the book that make it clearly not a reach at all:

1. When The Quiet/God revives Hadrian, he not only makes him younger but also gives him a eugenics makeover. Direct quote: “Where before mine had been a long and pointed face, sharp of nose and chin, the face that peered out at me was one perfectly balanced, with a slim, straight nose, strong brow, and pronounced cheekbones… Any of the great sculptors of the Imperial court—acting in the grand classical tradition—might have produced such a face, so precise was its symmetry, so ideal its ratios.” This reminds me of the weird guys on twitter with classical Greek statues as their profile pictures and “Defend Western Civilization” written in their bios. I can’t stop imagining Born Again Hadrian as looking like Clavicular.
2. Hadrian theorizes that any religion with more than one god, the use of altars, and any form of sacrifice (even of inanimate objects) must be demonic because that faith would not have developed those traits without proximity to the Devil. It misrepresents a subjective idea of what evil looks like as an objective truth. It’s the same argument of heresy and devilry that Christian colonizers used to place themselves above the “savages.”

Edit: formatting