The Ghosts of Tieros Kol
Doomed romance in a savage planetary garden.
As you might expect from a novel whose title specifies a place rather than a person, the real star of the novel is its setting: a long-lost human settlement on a mysterious alien world, where the colonists were isolated from the rest of the species for so long that they forgot their origins, lost the capability for space-flight, and reverted to a pre-industrial, feudal society with a religion based around worship of the planet’s titular ghosts. The planet is the only known source of a strange, glowing blue mineral known as tierosite, which immediately fries any advanced electronics brought into proximity. As a result, Tieros Kol has neither computers nor robots, and replaces both with slaves. Tierosite is also highly toxic: to ingest too much too quickly leads to acute poisoning, causing insanity and death; however, as the iridescent tierosite dust blows through the very air, the natives’ bodies are permeated with it, causing their sweat to take on a distinct, unearthly sheen. While it isn’t directly stated, the implication is that Tierosians are all suffering from mild tierosite poisoning, and therefore are all just a little bit mad ... and indeed there are abundant reasons to believe that this is so.
The novel’s action is intertwined around the doomed love affair between two characters who could not be more ill-suited for one another. The first that we meet is Nikolai Lev, a swash-buckling, gold-toothed, low-born space pirate, introduced as he is stealing data for a Tierosian client. Lev is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, two-fisted antihero – moody, intense, confident to the point of cocky, but competent enough to back it up.
When Lev is double-crossed by his client, and his shuttle is shot down over the Tierosian desert, the wreckage is found by Brena and her entourage as their pilgrimage works its way through the valley of monuments. Third of King Cedri’s four daughters, Brena is a princess of Tieros Kol and a high priestess of its occult religion. She is young, beautiful, passionate, brilliant, and wilful, and decides on a whim to adopt Lev as a sort of pet.
As Brena nurses Lev back to health, she draws him into the palace intrigues that are tearing apart both her family and Tierosian society. Brena’s father the king has gone quite mad; her two older sisters have been missing for some time; her younger sister, the flaky and frivolous Meer, has been betrothed to the ominous Dene, an offworld antiquarian researcher who has insinuated himself into King Cedri’s confidence, and is well on his way to consolidating his control over the palace as a stepping-stone to larger, more esoteric ambitions whose nature he keeps entirely private.
Inevitably, Brena and Lev are magnetically drawn to one another. Of course this is an impossible pairing, as both of them realize in their more lucid moments, and as their friends and confidantes do not shy away from telling them. Despite this, they make an incredible team. As Lev’s devotion to Brena blossoms from lust to love, he finds the strength to grow from rogue to hero; in Lev, Brena finds the power to overcome the forces that threaten to destabilize her rule. Kuznak does an excellent job of portraying the intensity of their affair, the emotional depth of their connection, the moments of tenderness, playfulness, and unintentional hurt and heartache. At times the novel threatens to descend into boddice-ripper territory, but Kuznak keeps the more sensual scenes classy, and the novel’s emotional realism prevents it from degenerating into salacious wish fulfillment.
I don’t wish to give the impression that this is nothing but a lurid romance – nothing could be further from the truth. To the contrary, it’s an action-packed story: desperate escapes on rocket-sleds; orbital dogfights; duels for honour and revenge; tense negotiations exploding into brutal violence. There are blood and gore and broken bones aplenty ... along with humour, mystery, and beauty.
In keeping with the setting, the protagonists are strong, but they are not particularly nice. Brena engages in human sacrifice as a routine aspect of the Tierosian religion, and sends men off to be tortured and executed without blinking an eye. Lev is a cheerful rogue, double-crossing, robbing, hijacking, assaulting, and killing those who get in his way as a matter of course. Another of the novel’s protagonists is Kest, essentially the chief of the monarchy’s secret police: a charming brute who knows that his position allows him to do whatever he wants to the enemies of the crown ... and savours this the way he does a fine bourbon. Life is cheap on Tieros Kol; this is a place where the intensity of one’s life counts for more than its duration.
This precarious, violent existence is not only a basic condition of life on Tieros Kol itself: a fair bit of the action takes place offworld, on Lev’s spaceship and various space stations, and here Kuznak depicts an endless, empty frontier in which it is simply impossible for the law to assert itself, where justice is achieved through bounty hunters, revenge, and the honour codes of criminal gangs.
This is not to say that Kuznak’s characters strike the reader as contemptible. Far from it. To the contrary, all hold themselves to a code of loyalty – Lev’s loyalty to his friends; Brena’s to her family; Kest’s to the crown to which he has pledged himself; and of course, Lev’s and Brena’s bond to one another. The moral system that seems to emerge is one in which it is not what one does, precisely, that determines right and wrong, but who one does it to and who one does it for. In the end, we cheer for Lev and Brena not because their cause is an objectively correct one, but simply because it is those characters that we care about ... and Kuznak makes sure we care as deeply for them as they do for one another.
The mysterious origin of Tieros Kol looms over the story like a stormcloud. The planet is known to have been inhabited by a lost alien race, about whom nothing is known; its surface is scattered with monuments bearing untranslatable inscriptions; the Tierosians claim to feel the presence of ghosts that offworlders are deaf to, and consider to be superstitions or hallucinations. The would-be usurper Dene’s research program is bound up with solving these mysteries. The protagonists themselves are almost wholly uninterested in such answers, preoccupied as they are with surviving the brutal realities of Tierosian politics, and of course with one another. Yet there is a sense that the answers are not answers they want to hear ... that nothing good can come from the truth.
In keeping with this, Kuznak keeps much of the world-building off-page, letting the world reveal itself by implication. Neither the technologies of spaceflight nor the wider political context are described in any great detail: after all, the characters are men of action, not scientists, engineers, and historians, and the point of the story is to tell a story, not to lose the reader in exposition. To help offset this, each chapter starts with a brief excerpt from some historical account, illustrating some aspect of Tieros Kol or the wider Galaxy beyond it: interviews with filmmakers or anthropologists, comments from tourists, passages from Tierosian poetry and holy texts. Jack Vance adopted a similar method in his four Demon Princes novels, and given the very Vancian qualities of the novel’s setting, characters, and amorality, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was something of a homage.
The Ghosts of Tieros Kol is not a perfect novel. Kuznak juggles a lot of characters, and not always satisfactorily, often introducing characters – such as an alien crime boss that Lev befriends while in prison, or the spunky leader of a group of young slave girls that Lev inadvertently rescues – without quite making full use of them; they enter the narrative for a brief period, perform their function, and then disappear, never to be heard from again. To a certain degree this is simple verisimilitude – in life, people really do come and go – but I’d make a similar critique of her use of Dene, the story’s primary antagonist, who is sidelined just a little bit too early, and a little bit too easily, which is a shame because he’s potentially a very interesting villain, and had he been brought off the shelf during the story’s denouement the climactic action would have been more satisfying. As it was the ending felt a bit rushed, which blunts what would otherwise have been a devastating emotional gut punch.
Those weaknesses aside, as I said at the beginning, The Ghosts of Tieros Kol is one hell of a fun ride. It’s also a very intelligent novel, weaving in themes of environmental pollution, cultural decay, and intensity and vitality versus the stability and security worshipped by our own society; moreover, the novel does this in the smartest way possible, not by belabouring the reader about the head with a discursive cudgel, but simply by showing you the world and the people that it made, scars and all, and letting you draw your own conclusions.
The Ghosts of Tieros Kol is available, of course, on Amazon, where you can buy it on Kindle, or as a paperback.
Your review is so good I stopped because I didn’t wan’t spoilers and you sold me with the description of Nikolai. Sounds like a great read.
Lisa is a sub of mine (and I'm subbed to her), she's fun and ever so kind. I'm really happy you did a review of her book. She works really hard. I hope this boosts her sales. This was a very kind act on your part mon ami. I know it doesn't mean much but this Franc is proud of you. Even with all the success you have on Substack you still showing kindness like this to her is very impressive.
This was a very enticing review! Now I'm kind of intrigued by it. I wonder if after I'm done reformatting and updating Crown of Blood I shouldn't try sending you a copy John. It'd be neat to see what you think of it!