Sealed Empire

This is a mightily impressive debut, doubly so considering it is a translation.

This is not an easy book to define or nail down, especially without spoilers. It plays with your perception of its setting in clever ways and the ending is an impressive curveball (even though there is some interesting foreshadowing throughout the story). Properly genre bending in ways that you do not expect!

The Sci-Fi elements are cleverly worked in to the story. I can't help but compare this a bit to Brandon Sanderson's most recent book, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, which plays on a similar concept - that any sufficiently advanced technology will feel like magic to a more primitive one. Sealed Empire does this far more successfully by seeing these 'magical' technological items through the eye of the more primitive culture, allowing the mystery around them to actually drive the story. I will also say that the use of AI is very much on the nose for the current zeitgeist and I certainly appreciated its rather dystopian overtures and how subtly it was achieved.

I appreciate books that throw you straight into the action, and Sealed Empire opens up on a boat in the middle of a storm with some proper fast and furious action with its prologue. This sets the tempo well, even though we cycle a decade and half into the future for the story proper. The characters are well drawn, their motivations rational and well realised. Even the more villainous ones have a rationalizable arc to them, avoiding some of the tropey caricatures that can sometimes come in. The sense of political intrigue is also well built considering the general conciseness of the story. This is what drives the central part of the story and it is extremely well done, with its clever twists and turns. Norbert does a really great job of weaving together some very disparate stories into its wild and clever ending, never quite going where you expect but dragging you along eagerly nonetheless. The world building is excellent, with existing conflicts, mythology and a strong grounding in real power dynamics. This is a pretty brutal world, there are definite grimdark motifs in places, edging into sexual violence and control in places, and the conflict that engulfs the story is graphic. That said it never felt gratuitous and always feels like it is driving the plot onwards.

This is also one of the best written translations I have come across - it genuinely did not feel like a translation at all such was the quality of the prose.

This story was fresh and unique - highly entertaining and a delight to read. An author to watch!