Empire of Chains

World in Chains #1

by Ryan W. Mueller

An empire ravaged by dark forces. A quest through perilous lands. One woman who could save the people, or doom them.

Young noblewoman Nadia will do anything to kill Emperor Darien Warrick. He has executed her mother, unleashed dark magic on his citizens., and imprisoned everyone within the empire. He might claim he's doing it all for the greater good, but Nadia knows the truth. He is nothing but a tyrant and a murderer.

Young woodsman Markus has spent his entire life dreading the day he must serve in Warrick's Imperial Guard. Markus will do anything to escape that fate, even if it means joining Nadia in her desperate quest. With danger around every corner, they must fight their way across the empire, and that's only the beginning.

Empire of Chains is a fast-paced, action-packed epic fantasy adventure perfect for fans of classic fantasy looking for a few modern twists. Join Nadia, Markus, and other heroes as they battle through burning cities, deadly swamps, and the ever-present threat of Warrick's elite Imperial Guards.

Genres: Fantasy

473 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 30, 2017

About the author

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Ryan W. Mueller is an author of fantasy and science fiction for all ages. He enjoys talking about himself in the third person (who doesn't?). Currently, he has written all four books of the World in Chains series, with the first, Empire of Chains, scheduled for release on June 30, 2017 and the next three to follow over the course of the next year.

He's a big fan of Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks, Jim Butcher, and many other fantasy authors. He first decided he wanted to be a writer at the age of 11 after he started reading Harry Potter. Between that and Super Nintendo RPGs, he was pretty much destined (or perhaps doomed) to become a fantasy writer, though he does like to branch out to science fiction occasionally. His fantasy is classic fantasy with modern twists. That is, you'll see a lot of familiar tropes, but he tries to put his own spin on them (hopefully with some success). For him, part of the joy of fantasy is the tropes, and as TVTropes would tell you, there is nothing wrong with tropes. It's all a matter of how you use them.

He enjoys connecting with readers and other writers. You can find him on Facebook as Ryan W. Mueller, on Twitter as @RW_Mueller, and on various fantasy forums including Fantasy Faction, SFFWorld, and Best Fantasy Books.

Reviews

[Ryan Mueller]

Since this is my own book, I'm not going to leave a star rating. That would feel a bit like cheating. Instead, this is going to be more of an informational review.

This is a book that has been with me in many forms over the years. I first wrote a (really bad) version of it when I was 15 years old. This is not that version, so don't worry. It only sucks a little bit now.

I've seen this book through many versions, and I was never quite satisfied with any of them. But now I've created a version that I think (or maybe hope) that readers will love. I've also written the rest of the series, and I plan to release them all, most likely within a year of the release of this one.

If you're looking for fantasy that takes some of the common tropes and puts an interesting spin on them, I hope you'll take a chance on my book. At its heart, this is an action-packed story with some quest elements, but what really makes it interesting for me is Darien Warrick. Unlike most evil emperor/dark lord stories, I've actually attempted to give him depth (and hopefully I've succeeded). In fact, you see things occasionally from his point of view, which will hopefully show a different side to the events in the story and the nature of the world in general.

I don't want to get into any spoilers here. You wouldn't want to read the book then. If you have any questions, though, feel free to comment on this review. I enjoy interacting with other people in the SFF community because it's such a great and supportive community.

[Julia Sarene]

I won't rate this, as I only read about 25% of it. I might read on once SPFBO is done. The book isn't so bad I couldn't finished it, but sadly it isn't good enough to keep me hooked.

I so hoped to like this, as I adore the cover, and the author said he is a big fan of Sanderson, whose books I love.

Sadly Empire of chains fell flat for me. I do think the author has potential, and might become really good over time, but in this one the prose felt really wooden to me. Especially the dialogues felt stilted in a way, and not really natural. The plot is interesting , the characters likable and the world exciting to explore - for me it really is mostly the prose that didn't work (yet).

So I hope the author will keep on writing and getting better and maybe in some more years time I'll find another favorite. :)

[Andria Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating 3.5 ⭐ rounded up to 4. I'm unsure of this tbh. It has its pros but also it's cons. I liked the characters but I thought about just dnf'ing several times as it wasn't keeping my interest. RTC.

[A.M. Rowe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was John Steinbeck fantasy adventure fiction’s greatest fanboy? His first novel, Cup of Gold, is a straight forward-pirate adventure that is also a retelling of the adventures of Captain Morgan (the English pirate they named the rum after). Towards the end of his life Steinbeck finally began working on his life’s obsession: the legend of King Arthur. Steinbeck spent the last decades of his life re-writing and retelling Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. He never finished the work. What classifies Steinbeck’s first and last works as fanboy efforts are that they are not original works, but the result of enthusiasm that has been driven to imitation. Unlike other Steinbeck works, that were inspired by real life events around him, Steinbeck’s first and last works were extensions of the fiction and historical tales that he loved. I assert that is what separates the fan from the fanboy; the fan enjoys the media, the fanboy uses the media as a launch pad for his own ideas. While some (Goethe) might dismiss genre works or fan fiction as coarse emulation, I think Steinbeck is proof that purposely derivative works can still be art.



Ryan W. Mueller’s book Empire of Chains (2017 available through Amazon) is an attempt to recreate the classic high fantasy epic. Mueller describes his book (at www.sffworld.com) as



“an epic fantasy for people who miss classic epic fantasy…I set out with the intention of giving fantasy readers a lot of those comfortable elements. They're the kinds of stories I still have a soft spot for. It's full of action, and I think I did an interesting twist on the dark lord trope.”



Mueller is obviously an enthusiastic fan of the genre, and we can all understand his desire to appreciate fantasy fiction by contributing to it. Mueller’s story is boiler plate stuff. The evil emperor executes the mother of a teenage noble because the mom was plotting to over throw the emperor. She was guilty, no argument there. But the daughter of the dead woman grows into adulthood bent on revenge. Through careful research in her castle’s library, when she isn’t practicing archery or sword play with the castle guards, the young noble woman (Nadia) learns of a spell that can kill the Emperor. He is not the kind of emperor that can be taken out by a rotted piece of horse flesh or a stray arrow to the eye. The Emperor killing spell is called “White Fire” and to cast the spell she needs to obtain three scrolls. She eventually pulls everyone she meets and knows into this quest.



The interesting hook in Mueller’s story is that evil emperor knows of Nadia’s plan and indeed wants Nadia to carry out. The emperor can “read the webs of fate” and he can see all (or most) possible futures. It is the emperor that is indirectly guiding Nadia and her crew. He pushes them to pursue his assassination and tries his best to protect them while they are doing it. The Emperor believes that everything he is doing is for the greater good of humanity and he tells himself that this cruel overlord shtick is nothing more than an act and that deep down he is a good guy. This also provides a wonderful parallel to Nadia's journey, because like the evil Emperor she is willing to make sacrifices and hurt people for the greater good. It is a wonderfully interesting premise. I only wish Mueller was able to write prose as interesting as his premise, and that he'd been able to bring his novel to a satisfactory conclusion.



Mueller takes a number of risks with his writing, which do succeed in making the writing style different than other epic fantasy novels but ultimately undercut his story. First, most of his story is told through dialog and Mueller has no talent for dialog or any sense of the pacing of speech. The characters in Empire of Chains talk as if they are in a bad radio play and lampshade all their actions. For example, when one character is hiding in a closet he over hears the guards outside talking to each other aloud about whether or not they are going to search the closet. A character falls off a bridge into rushing water and the other characters have to time argue before jumping in after. The characters are always speaking aloud their entire litany of feelings and their own personal logic. Consider the following excerpt.



“Oh, it’s nothing,” Danica said. “I just don’t care for the thought of spending so long in dark cave. Not that there is anything to do about it. I just have to approach it with the best attitude possible.”



While the character of Danica most resembles a summer camp song leader in attitudes and platitudes all the characters speak in essentially the same manner. When given the choice of being subtle or overtly explaining something, Mueller’s characters always go the overt route. The content of the conversations is also redundant. In almost every chapter Nadia tells people “that she is going to kill the Emperor.”



In addition to being repetitive and clumsy with dialog, Mueller also doesn’t risk a large vocabulary in his writing. I understand the desire and the need to cut back on the use of purple prose in fantasy fiction, but Mueller writes at close to a fifth-grade level. Furthermore, he uses a lot of modern colloquialisms. For example, character’s don’t run away they “take off”. It might be acceptable if the narrator had a voice that justified this, but there is no strong voice to the prose. Everything is written in a tight third person that switches between the main characters.



Finally, I personally disliked the top down view and tell-not-show use of meta-vocabulary Mueller and his characters employ to describe things. When discussing a story or a video game, I might use the terms quest, party, hero or monster, but I don’t use them to describe my day-to-day life. Remember Mueller’s character communicate in very modern English. There is a town that is literally terrorized by something referred to only as ‘a monster’, and when describing a transcontinental cave system the guide says ‘there will be monsters’. Fans of fantasy know that a monster is scarier and more monstrous when it has a name. Mueller describes his world from a fantasy fan's view point using a modern genre fan's vocabulary. The use of generic and repetitive words makes the world feel flat and poorly thought-out. In one particular paragraph, I noted every sentence had the word hero in it. Mueller should come up with proper names for his monsters and crack out a thesaurus from time to time.



There are more things that disappointed in this book. The ending was anti-climatic and poorly paced. The two main characters got shallower as the book went on and not deeper. Halfway through the book, God shows up and the characters start having discussions about how to maintain faith in an absent God in a cruel world. The role of religion and faith in this world had not been explored and comes out of left field. There were many pointless descriptions of combat and tangents the lead nowhere. I think Nadia actually ran away from home three times and then went home again to have the same conversation with her father. The book is overlong. It was not a fun book to read. I lower my bar for self-published works, but this one was a chore. I pushed through so I could leave an honest review.


Steinbeck said of the Le Morte de Arthur, that he didn’t care as much for the content of the book as much as he loved the language. The book was beautifully written in his opinion but it didn’t do the characters in these epic stories justice. In Steinbeck’s retelling of the Arthurian legend, he puts that right. Mueller’s story suffers from the opposite problem; there is are interesting ideas in the Empire of Chains, but the author didn’t care about the art of writing enough to give us prose or characters that pop off the page. Like Mallory’s Le Morte de Arthur, Empire of Chains gives us lots of battles but not enough character (ironic considering how much dialog there is). I hope someday Empire of Chains will get the fanboy treatment and we finally get an exploration of this corrupted, clairvoyant and well-meaning Emperor. I believe Mueller has a good story to tell, but I think he will need somebody else to do the telling.

[Noor Al-Shanti · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is difficult to rate because it had so many good elements, and the world seems to be really well-built, but there were a few things that weren't pulled off as smoothly as they could have been. Everything was well-planned and well-built, but it was hard to really get into it and feel the stakes or care about the world as much and so it kind of dragged and felt long.

I think the main issue for me was that the evil Emperor Warrick's scenes were all so vague, we were led to believe that maybe he has good reasons for some of his evil deeds or maybe he is somehow being forced to commit them or whatever, but we weren't given enough detail or inside information into what he was seeing in the webs of fate, what was compelling him to do these things and so it was hard to buy this whole angle.

Something about the level of detail, which wasn't necessarily too much detail, just kind of included at the wrong times bogged down some of the action scenes and the tension fizzled away a little bit.

I also found that there wasn't enough pay off at the end for such a long book. It's the first in a series, of course, so I didn't expect a decisive conclusion, but I would have liked to see that there was more point to all the wandering around in the Empire.

Anyway, as I said, this book has a lot of good elements and I'm interested to read some of the author's later works because I'm certain that with a tiny bit more writing experience he could tell some fascinating fantasy stories.

[Jane Stockwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Empire of Chains" started in the classic fantasy style, a young woman, Nadia, whose mother was killed by the evil, immortal, antagonist emperor for opposing him. Her vow to find a way to kill him. Cruel minions and soldiers, the arranged marriage to the nasty and arrogant noble who supports the emperor. Marcus, the young man raised by his uncle after his parents were killed by the emperor's soldiers as they tried to leave the Empire. Then it becomes apparent that the emperor, Warwick, perhaps has more altruistic reasons for his apparent evil behavior.

The problem is that his cruelty and imposition of a class structure based on support for him doesn't really make sense if his motives are pure.

My biggest criticism is that the story seemed overly long, then the last two or three chapters feel really rushed. Elements that were given in meticulous detail throughout the rest of this 450-page novel were glossed over toward the end.

The author has created an interesting universe here, and I related well with Nadia and Marcus, but the reasons for their being thrust into their almost-certainly-doomed attempt to kill the all-knowing, immortal Warwick, who not only knows their every move but has carefully coordinated it needed to be made clearer. I'm sure that the author understands these, but it didn't necessarily make its way to the reader.

All up, it's a good story and the author has made a strong start in the fantasy genre.

[Arizona Spartan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This self published author needs an editor and someone to help him develop his story. He tries to straddle the line between YA and adult fantasy which fails. This books plays out like so many journeys with attempts at characterization spread across each journey but really many of the characters come off as over emotional and flat. It seems everyone wants to kill the villain who miraculously has won before the book started, obviously the idea ripped from Sanderson's far superior Mistborn. But each must take turns convincing the others to continue on. I struggled to finish this book taking me 23 days due to it's unneeded length and choppy pace, I can finish a good book in about 1 week sometimes less. Avoid.

[Bender · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was an OK read. The scope of setting was epic-esque, but author had too much attention to plot machinations to detriment of overarching plot and character building both were a bit flat.

Decent read still.

[Henry Bohleke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constant danger and a hidden agenda yet to be revealed

The book is full of excitement, overwhelming enemies and the narrowest of escapes. It includes horrifying tragedies and help from unlikely sources that lead the characters into the perilous pathway ahead and to an uncertain future. Definitively worth the time to read and to read on.