Warlords of Utopia

To recap: Warlords of Utopia by Lance Parkin is a book about a war between every alternate dimension where Rome never fell, and every alternate dimension where the Nazis won WWII. It's framed as a translated memoir of one Marcus Americanius Scriptor, the man who discovered the existence of alternate dimensions and helped lead the war to take over Nazi-occupied  worlds.

Warlords of Utopia is the first Faction Paradox book I've read that I've really struggled to enjoy. Like Of the City of the Saved before it, Warlords goes big with its scope, with a premise spanning countless civilizations. The difference comes down to how they frame the premise: City focuses on a single period of one or two days, while Warlords lets years at a time pass by. This means that City allows the setting and the way it's seen by its characters to really sink in with a bunch of little scenes, whereas Warlords prefers to be very matter-of-fact about the sequence of events without allowing the characters or scenery to speak for themselves. It's a shame, because Warlords proves it can make those little moments work, with a particular highlight being the scene set in a world where the dinosaurs only went extinct after Rome thrived. The ideas on display here are great! But the execution doesn't let them thrive.

And this absolutely extends to the characters. To aid in conveying the scope, City stretches its plot between around fifteen richly-written perspective characters, whereas Warlords just has the one, and doesn't seem interested in making any of the cast feel alive. Characters are introduced with relationships to the main protagonist, and things happen to them that the protagonist feels one way or another about, but they read as sets of actions in a history book as opposed to personalities. The summary blurb characterizes it as a particularly intimate memoir, a trait which would've been lovely for the book to actually have.

The character who comes closest to having a personality is of course the main character, Marcus Americanius Scriptor, but hoo boy there's a lot to unpack here. Marcus grew up in a world where Rome flourished and took over all of Earth, and as a member of one of the richest families to boot. He's ridiculously patriotic, and as the book is framed as his memoirs, it reads as very pro-Roman Empire. Some discussion is given to the unsavory aspects of Roman society, which Marcus does engage in (most notably slavery), but the discussion amounts to Marcus going out of his way to justify it with Bible quotes and comparisons to Nazi slavery, before moving on.

Let's go back to Of the City of the Saved for a moment, for one more comparison. That novel contains a Roman character named Urbanus (I know, I know). He isn't the deepest of characters, but he's fleshed out more than enough to feel like a real person, in complete contrast to Marcus. Urbanus was hardly the main focus of City, and yet he still feels ten times as believable as Marcus. And though he's loyal to Rome throughout most of the book, his experiences of other cultures and worlds change his outlook and he begins to question some of the ideas he's been socialized into. We do not get that with Marcus Americanius Scriptor. For a while I wanted to give the book the benefit of the doubt and say that he was simply being written as an unreliable narrator, and that he'd develop as the story went on and he adventured more. Instead, as the book went on and got increasingly pro-Roman Empire I started to question the author's own beliefs. Rome triumphs at the end and converts scores of worlds to their "utopian" way of life - I could simply not believe that they would wipe the floor with the Nazis the way they did (especially when the Nazis have, of all things, House Mirraflex on their side). Forget Marcus's opinions: even the plot itself views Ancient Roman culture and warfare as near-perfect, and it tired me out to see the narration and plot condemning Nazis while portraying Ancient Roman society as the zenith of civilization. These two groups both have serious ethical faults, and it's possible to have Marcus be a biased narrator while still having the events of the book themselves portray Ancient Roman culture as fallible: something Warlords of Utopia just doesn't bother with.

Back to Marcus as a protagonist, though. Let's say we continue with the argument that the book is the way it is because Marcus is a biased narrator, and it doesn't mean that the book on a meta level is arguing that dictatorships or institutionalized pedophilia or imperialism (etcetc) are good. This comes into question when we look at the rest of the few traits he's given. By which I mean: this man is a total self-insert. He's from a rich family yet still grabs at power; he's very focused on reading and making deductions in a way that feels very "I'm superior because I'm intellectual"; he attacks soldiers and guards willy-nilly and hardly ever takes hits; and he's generally written without any major character flaws. This all rubbed me the wrong way, but you could make the argument I'm interpreting it all in bad faith. One thing that can't be pushed aside, though, is the way Marcus's wife Angela is written.

At eighteen, this guy marries a twelve-year-old (an age gap which is barely brought up), basically abandons her to go gallivanting in alternate dimensions for a large chunk of the book, meets an alternate-dimension version of her who has intimate sex with him on the first date (she's at least an adult by then), and both versions of her seem to be okay with him having cheated on Angela prime with the other Angela. The alternate version is mildly perturbed to hear of the main Angela's age upon marriage, which is barely touched on again, and then they have a threesome, at which point I was seriously considering dropping the book entirely. Marcus's relationship with Angela is a blatant self-insert fantasy which allows her little true agency or nuance, which is tiring enough, but the real sticking point here is that you cannot have a problematic biased narrator with such opinions as "pedophilia and slavery are okay" while also channeling all these self-insert fantasies through them. At least not without seriously raising some eyebrows. I'm not saying the book on a metatextual level condones these things, but it doesn't not condone them either. Certainly I never want to meet Lance Parkin after reading this.

I reserve 3/10 ratings generally for things that have promise, but are very lacking. And yes, this book has promise, and some of it is realized. There's a few lines in the prose that make the sense of scale this book has really hit, and hearing about the interactions between dimensions was seriously entertaining at points. It has some genuinely great moments. I was also intrigued by the bits of lore we got about how this ties into the greater Faction Paradox mythos, though some of the hints went over my head. There's an interesting plotline buried in here, but that's all it is: a big plotline, with nothing to fill in the gaps and make it meaningful. No characters with personality, no self-reflection on the morals involved, nothing but plot and the occasional moment that makes you want to push the main character off a cliff.

Can you believe this thing goes for a hundred bucks second-hand?

This book is phenomenal. It's a cool and original idea and is written excellently. It's one of those books that is almost adictive: you can't help but read one more chapter every time you decide to stop a reading session. As evidence of this, I was not initially planning to read the book when it first arrived, but I decided to have a look at the first page after opening the package it arrived in and just decided to put what I was reading before on hold and read this instead. It did drop off a bit towards the end, but that doesn't affect how great this book is much.