Oh wow. Talking shit about rich people really does work.
Chapter Seventeen: The Rest of the Voiceless, Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao
Table of Contents
This Book Sucks So Much
Ever read a book that made you want to throw your ebook reader out the fucking window? A book that made you wish that you were illiterate? A book that is excruciatingly painful to read? A book that makes you want to never read another YA fantasy book again? Boy howdy have I got the book for you.
My introduction to Xiran Jay Zhao’s writing was with reading Iron Widow in 2022. At the time I thought Iron Widow was a decent to good book with an interesting sci-fi+fantasy world and a strong feminist message.
On the strength of that, when I saw preorders available for Zhao’s next book, Heavenly Tyrant, I immediately preordered it. Since two years had passed since I read Iron Widow my expectations were lightly positive to neutral – at worst I expected a middling and boring sequel that did a lot of what the first book did but slightly worse.
Oh how wrong I was. Heavenly Tyrant is significantly worse than Iron Widow in every single way. Let’s get into why I think that.
Concentrated Cringe and Clumsy Condescension
Heavenly Tyrant‘s tone sucks for multiple reasons. Firstly, it constantly writes some of the most cringe dialogue imaginable. Second, the book constantly condescends to the reader by explaining to the reader extremely basic concepts about capitalism in a way that I found childish at best and condescending at worst.
Here is an example of what I call cringe dialogue which I imagine the author thought was very funny.
Go to sleep, you vile harlot!”
“I will if Your Majesty would stop being such a massive dick!”
There’s a beat before he says, “Well, I’m flattered by that assessment, but what does the size of my manhood have to do with any of this?”
My brain sputters trying to process his words.
After a longer silence, he says, much more quietly, “Colloquialism?”
“Yes,” I say.
Unbelievable.
Chapter Twenty-One: Nonsensical, Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao
Wow. A dick joke. How original. This isn’t even the only time the book makes a dick joke. Maybe these jokes would be funny in a book that was much better written but it isn’t and they aren’t funny. At all.
The book has what I call “lecture” sections where one of the characters will have a lengthy basic explanation of a communist concept such as the difference between private and personal property or the extremely basic tenets of communism like “workers deserve all the fruits of their labour” or what a revolution is etc.
Do you understand what a revolution is? A revolution is always a tragedy, a destructive force unleashed by those stripped of every last option for peace. There’s not a revolutionary in history who doesn’t wish they could’ve gotten what they wanted within the world order they knew, but you cannot reform a system designed to keep power out of your hands. I learned this lesson long ago. So have some faith in my judgement, will you?
Chapter Eighteen: A Price Worth Paying by Xiran Jay Zhao
Gee thanks, dollar store Mao Zedong I totally didn’t know what a revolution was. The book is filled with these kind of explanatory sections. I have other such quotes saved in my eBook reader and in the interest of saving us all some time, I’ll not put those quotes in here.
What happened to show not tell? Why are we doing Communist Theory 101 lessons in a fiction title? As a leftist myself, I found this sections extremely tedious to read and I don’t think they are an effective way of having your characters espouse communist ideals. Characters in this book are less characters and more automatons whose purpose is to explain to the reader extremely basic aspects of capitalism and communism. This is especially true for the minor characters.
The book thinks the reader is too thick to understand the extremely obvious and extremely unsubtle message that this book has which is – capitalism bad. A message that I agree with! That is is why I am so frustrated that this book delivers it in the most clumsy way possible. If I didn’t know better I would think this is some kind of satire of the way social media leftists talk.
I also thought that perhaps Qin Zheng’s whole character was supposed to be some sort of critique of the cult of personality surrounding Mao Zedong but I don’t think this book has the range for that kind of nuanced critique of state communism.
This book has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It really feels like Xiran Jay Zhao read one too many Twitter threads and did some cursory reading of communist literature and then wrote this book. The ideological stances held in this book are very surface level and are lacking in nuance.
A level of nuance that cannot be hand-waved away as “oh its just a YA fantasy” when you are dealing with political concepts from the real world that come with massive amounts of nuance and baggage. If one is going to wield communism as a rhetorical sledgehammer in a fantasy in such a clumsy way, have the decency to actually make it interesting and/or funny in some way. This book is neither.
If you want to read a book that does a portrayal of leftist revolutionary theory in a much more nuanced and interesting way, go read Babel by R.F Kuang instead.
Shitty Smut
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, this book gave me the gift of smut scenes between two of our main characters, one of which (Qin Zheng) has been constantly abusive to the other (Wu Zeitian) throughout the book. But all of a sudden, Zeitian is way Too Horny and “oh my god I hate this guy so much and yet I want to fuck him so bad, what shall I doooooo????”.
These were the sections where I legitimately wanted to throw my eBook reader out the fucking window. I cannot believe just how much this book tries to redeem Qin Zheng who is ostensibly an extremely unlikable abusive piece of shit and to do it in a way that is just….atrocious.
I have been known to not enjoy reading smut but the reasons I don’t enjoy the smut in this particular are different. I don’t just find these smut scenes tedious or uninteresting, they make me want to throw up. These two characters shouldn’t be fucking! It is a toxic and abusive relationship dynamic. A bad portrayal of BDSM! Stop it!
Or I might kiss you again. It seems you will only be a good girl when I have you moaning beneath me.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Worst Mistake, Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao
I had to read that sentence so now so do you. Feel my pain dear reader,let it run through you. Fucking hell.
Concluding Screams
Heavenly Tyrant is a clumsy, condescending, and cringe book. It is poorly written and poorly paced. It is unfocused in a way that is tragic because the underlying science fiction and fantasy world that is present in in fact quite interesting but it is covered in all of these pieces of extraneous garbage – the lecture sections, atrocious smut scenes, unfunny dick jokes etc.
Ultimately, I think Xiran Jay Zhao overextended themselves on this book. This book tries to cover a lot of different very complex topics – revolution, communism vs capitalism, politics, economics, feminism, war – and does not do justice to any of these topics. While Iron Widow was more focused on a feminist message, Heavenly Tyrant loses that focus and is much much worse off for it.
This is the worst book I have read in a long long time. I cannot remember the last time I read a book that was this bad. I have read books that are middling, average and/or otherwise uninteresting but a book this bad is a novelty in itself. The only compliment I can give this book is that the front cover art is gorgeous. That’s it.
After I publish this review, I don’t want to think about this book again but I suspect it will remain in my brain as an intrusive thought because this book is memorable in all the wrong ways. I will definitely not be reading the third book in the trilogy and I don’t plan on reading any other works by this author going forward because I have lost faith in them.
This book should have stayed in drafts.
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