An Empire in the Clouds - Ai Jiang

As you might expect, or hope, fantasy written with a Chinese cultural background and setting has a completely different feel and approach to the genre than the usual medieval settling of wizards, dragons, warring empires, ancient prophesies and long quests. That's a huge generalisation of course but it's an intentional comparison to reflect just how far away from the familiar we are in An Empire in the Clouds. Chinese-Canadian Ai Jiang's first novel-length work very much has its own interests and purpose. It's not quite as ambitious to stretch to a trilogy for a start, so without all the scene setting, you are thrown into the deep end (literally) of a water-based world with little preparation or time for adjustment, and no time wasted on information dumping. I was going to say 'grounding', but that would be a clash of metaphors as well as one too many.

Still, there is time to get accustomed to the world and the principal character because, well, there's not much going on in regards to plot at the start, although there are hints of a direction when the history of the fate of the former ruling royal family is summarised in the corrupted and rewritten history of the Great Drowning that divided Piāo from Opera. The ruling emperor and empress drowned in the catastrophe, the current position of their three triplet children is divided. Yún is now the ruler of Piāo (apparently in name only), Làng has been banished, and the only daughter Xilian looks like facing the same fate when, having heard whispers of conspiracy among the royal advisors who appear to be the de facto rulers, she prepares to reveal the truth about the Great Drowning.

The way this information is gathered reveals a lot about the world. It's a world where masks are worn, some for practical reasons (in Opera, the air is corrupted), some for entertainment (like the Chinese mask tradition), others as a means to hide their identity. Communities are organised into bàns on floating lotuses and koi are used for travelling. It's a world a lot easier to feel yourself a part of rather than describe or even envision, but the implication is clear that this is a society where technology has reduced the world to a new relationship with nature. 

The driver of the plot then is the division of two worlds or kingdoms - Piāo and Opera - that Xilian's mother hoped to reunite. We get the viewpoints and contrast between these two worlds principally from Xilian in Piāo and No Face (also known as Qiānbiàn) in Opera, the latter an expert in the art of changing faces. Both want to see an end to the power of the advisors, but both have different ideas about how to achieve this and, fuelled by a sense of injustice and personal grievances, neither seems to really have considered the full implications of what their individual actions against an Empire will achieve.

Getting a grasp on how this world operates is similarly challenging for the reader. Aside from Opera and Piāo, there are other continents and Performers, there is REBOOT and REVIVE, XXX hackers, there are seaescapers and Pop-Up opera contests; all highly original but I found it difficult to get a handle on. There underlying conflict is clear enough as it's not heavily plotted, and while there are certainly twists and revelations, none of them are major ones. There is perhaps the possibility of seeing the book in terms of the current Asian geopolitical context, as well as an environmental side, but that doesn't seem to be the purpose here.

An Empire in the Clouds is more about the realisation of a world, or world building without explaining, just letting you figure out what you make of it. While a lot of the special characteristics of this world appear to be just playfully imaginative and colourful situations, they do ultimately provide the tools that will be used when Xilian and No Face confront the ruling advisors on Piāo. Without giving anything away, some of those are overly convenient - MIMICS, an immortality drug and obviously the ability to switch masks makes changing identity almost too easy - and I don't think best use is made of them.


Reading notes: An Empire in the Clouds is published by Titan Books on the 8th September. I received an advance review eBook from the publisher through NetGalley.

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