Your rating:
Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy. It was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fighting a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Publication Year: 2018
What a start to the series. Hadrian is already one of the most... Morally gray and interesting characters I've read, and the way story is told has been refreshing. Knowing this is the weakest book in the entire series has me even more excited to continue. The politicking, scheming, twists, characters, plot, mystery, antagonist, everything in this book felt well done and clearly is setting up for something epic.
The war between religion and science/discovery is timeless and always relevant. Regardless of how far into the future we may go, this will always be a theme.