The Grace of Kings
The islands of Dara have been hammered into a single empire. Emperor Mapidere's conquest of the six other Tiro states brought one script, one road system and a court full of schemers, and it cost a generation of conscripts, labourers and executed nobles. When the old emperor dies and a boy takes the throne behind his regents, the archipelago goes up.
Two men rise out of the rebellion. Kuni Garu is a truant and a street-gang leader turned bandit, indifferent to study, quick with people, and far more dangerous than he looks. Mata Zyndu is the last son of the Zyndu clan, the son of a duke the empire deposed, and built for a battlefield in a way nobody else in Dara is. They meet as allies, become the closest of friends, and take the throne apart between them. Then the war is won, and they discover they want incompatible worlds — one governed by merit, negotiation and restless improvisation, the other by honour, lineage and overwhelming force.
Ken Liu's first novel reimagines the Chu-Han Contention, the succession war that founded China's Han dynasty, as an epic fantasy of his own devising. He called the aesthetic "silkpunk": speculative engineering grafted onto the material culture of East Asian antiquity, all silk-draped airships and ingenious craft, watched over by seven shapeshifting gods who each patronise a region of Dara and cannot keep out of mortal quarrels. The telling is deliberately unmodern — a sweeping omniscient voice that steps away from its two protagonists to follow the people around them, a wife or a soldier or a god, for a chapter at a time, in the manner of the classical Chinese historical epics.
The Grace of Kings opens The Dandelion Dynasty, completed across four volumes with The Wall of Storms, The Veiled Throne and Speaking Bones. It won the 2016 Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
A truant and street-gang leader turned bandit, charming and quick with people, who rises to lead one faction of the rebellion against the Xana Empire.
The last son of the Zyndu Clan and son of a duke deposed by Xana. A towering, honour-bound warrior, Kuni's closest friend and then his rival.
The Xana emperor who conquered the six other Tiro states and welded Dara into one empire. His death sets the rebellion in motion.
A servant of the Xana Empire who takes the field against the rebellion.
A rancher's daughter and skilled herbalist who becomes Kuni Garu's wife.
The narrative is a reimagining of the historical events surrounding the rise of the Han Dynasty in China, blended with the author's own concept of silkpunk, which integrates East Asian antiquity with speculative technology.
This is the first installment of the four-volume Dandelion Dynasty series, which follows a continuous narrative arc across all books.
Yes — it won the 2016 Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was also a finalist rather than a winner for two others: the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2016 (the seal on the jacket reads "Nebula Finalist") and the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award in 2016, and the Japanese translation was nominated for the 2017 Seiun Award. Ken Liu's own Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, mentioned on the cover, were won for his short fiction rather than for this novel.