The epic anachronisms of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

[I’m doing something a bit awkward here, reviewing a work by someone whom I follow on Cohost, and who follows me in turn. It’s overall a positive review, but I’ve tried to be objective about places where I think it comes up short.]

Anachronisms in a literary work are often held up as flaws, but they can have their own charm—for example, translations that introduce some modern vocabulary for dramatic effect (Maria Headley turning Beowulf’s initial “Hwæt!” into “Bro!”), ancient tales recast in wholly modern language (Christopher Logue’s reworking of the Iliad in War Music and All Day Permanent Red), or present-day stories that echo ancient ones (Derek Wolcott transplanting the Trojan War and the voyages of Odysseus into the Caribbean in his Omeros).

Or, in the case of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright by @Thaliarchus, stories set in the far future that reuse and evoke elements and works of the distant past.

If you were reading closely, you will have noticed that all the examples I gave were poems, and that is true of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as well. In the past I was an avid reader of science fiction, and somewhat later became an avid reader of poetry. I would occasionally come across poems in an SF context—whether standalone efforts or embedded within a short story or novel—but I found them to be unsatisfying at best and cringeworthy at worst.¹

What then are we to make of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, described by its author as a “yuri mecha epic poem,” and claimed to be inspired by “[Space Runaway] Ideon, UC Gundam, the Aeneid, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Simoun, and a good steeping in both classic mecha anime and 1300 years of English verse”?

In my case I’ve read the Iliad (multiple translations), the Odyssey, Beowulf, and parts of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, as well as lots of poetry in English. I’ve also watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, plus a few episodes of the original Gundam series. With that as background, I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an interesting, fun, and often compulsively readable attempt to tell a mecha story in verse. (I’ll leave the yuri aspect for later discussion.)

Rather than have me blather on about Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright (serious literary criticism not being my forte), it’s best to experience it for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from “Burning Foldspace,” the first section (or “book”, as the author calls it) of the poem, as our protagonist pilots her mecha (“armour”) in the vanguard of her people’s fleet:

She’d risen to the crest of one great wave
of Fold, the strange and undulating sea
between, beneath, beyond all real space,
the stretched elastic membrane of the true,
and with her armour skimming at the ridge,
her naked eye could see behind outspread
the vanguard squadrons in the trough, a-hunt
for subfold ships or other threats. Beyond,
the god was slicing down the facing slope,
advancing to conform with earlier call.

Many authors have compared outer space to an ocean, and many have imagined an alternative dimension as a way to enable faster-than-light travel. This is one of the best examples I‘ve read of combining those in a single striking image. (Incidentally, the “god” here resembles the EVAs of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the God Warriors of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind: an enormous constructed (?) being of fearsome power and otherworldly aspect.)

Some of the lines in this first book also remind me of the demonic images in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno:

A broad, ungainly silhouette up-rose
atop the facing crest, with fighter cloud
attendant: generator vast, below
a set of edges horned and points grotesque,
the weaving gear for tying Fold to space,
with ship constructed round to bear it forth.

Note how putting the story into (competently-executed) verse elevates it from a conventional telling in prose, and the iambic pentameter (claimed as the most natural meter for English) propels the reader along.

Book I is a bravura tale of a battle between Kin-Bright’s people and an attacking fleet, in which Kin-Bright and her co-combatants are rescued by the appearance out of nowhere of a newfound ally, a nomadic group of spacefarers and their queen, fellow mecha pilot Qwerthart. If you read nothing else, read this part. If you then don’t want to read more, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is simply not for you.

Book II, “The Gods Depart,” I found less satisfying. This is partially because it turns away from the present to tell the backstory of how Kin-Bright’s people came to flee Tar, their native planet, and thus risks turning into an exposition dump. However, my main complaint is that it reuses a plot element that I thought clunky even in the original, made clunkier here because the author has to do extra work to paper over obvious objections and make it even superficially plausible in context.

Things pick up again in Book III, “A View from Cliffs,” which to my mind makes two key improvements over the tale told in the Iliad. First, it describes urban combat, an inherently more interesting setting than the thin strip of sand over which the Greeks and Trojans fought.

Second, the combat itself is more interesting. The dirty secret of the Iliad is that large stretches of it are relatively monotonous, like a video game with an endless series of near-identical mini-boss fights and an impoverished combat system: one warrior will take a spear in the throat, the next in the groin, and there’s not much more variety than that.²

Unlike Homer, Thaliarchus can and does take advantage of the full panoply of possible mecha weaponry, as in these lines in which Kin-Bright describes piloting her mecha “Caprice of Prickthorn” against an opponent:

Caprice descends, by fate or judgement fine,
direct onto her armour—her usual steed,
the Fane Tormenting—and I with scream
Caprice’s drills unleash: a set of four
flexible arms unrolls; they whip and catch
from different points oblique, and when
they land the drill-bits howl and shriek for falling Tar,
and inwards work. Some muffled shock I hear
on open comms before I mute the link.

Now that’s the way to do it!

Book IV, “Family Resemblance,” sees Kin-Bright’s people reach their original home system and attempt to reestablish themselves on one of its planets. Throughout Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright Thaliarchus includes various extended similes, in homage to their use in other epics. Most of these are based on nature (albeit an alien nature, as the author notes and a careful reader can discern); however, the following, one of my favorites, is from the world of technology:

At once the fleet the proffered course pursued,
and thrusters through the gathered ranks out-flared
 in groups, that each and every ship might keep
to station same when fiery burn was done;
as when a power-field that drinks from star
its myriad panels turns to heaven’s view,
when solar farmer knows the cleaning done—
the line of shifting planes as ripple runs
in half a minute’s span before the eye,
each panel straining cells the light to suck,
the energy from falling rays to wring—
just so, the nation-fleet to void-road turned.

(“Void-road” is a nice touch here, incidentally, echoing the use of “whale-road” for the ocean in Beowulf.)

A major theme of Book IV is the “first contact” between Kin-Bright’s people (not to mention Qwerthart’s) and a people living under a form of representative democracy. This is a favorite topic of mine, so I’ll briefly rant:

If we view things objectively, the heroes of epic poems—Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, and their fellows—were basically glorified thugs running a “force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system” (as the economist Brad deLong has characterized it). The same is true of Kin-Bright, as Thaliarchus notes in their afterword (downloadable from the main CWKB page):

Kin-Bright is not presented as a model: she is a terrible warrior-aristocrat who lords over other insiders and kills outsiders. . . . At root, she is someone who exploits the great mass of the Taru population for her own comfort and in order to kill her enemies.

We look past this, however, as we look past the thuggery of Achilles, Odysseus, et al. As Thaliarchus also notes,

Risks would lie in writing about terrible warrior-aristocrats if other ways offered themselves, but I’m not so sure that they do. A story becomes anti-egalitarian as soon as one starts handing out names.

Readers want their protagonists to have real agency, and such agency is hard to come by if the action is primarily driven by nameless bureaucrats and parliamentarians. So in reading Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright we unconsciously come to view things from the perspective of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart, thugs though they may be, and when they feel disrespected and dishonored by the treatment they receive at the hands of this new people’s government, we can’t help but share a bit of their contempt ourselves.

Of course, if Kin-Bright’s people were to act on their feelings and in future wage war on this democracy, then if history is any guide it’s quite likely that, though they might achieve some initial victories, they would ultimately be crushed in the same manner as were the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, and the Third Reich. But no one wants to read an epic poem about the military superiority of an advanced democratic society with mass conscription and a robust industrial base.

On to Book V, “Among the Tents.” In this book Kin-Bright and Qwerthart re-enact an episode from Beowulf, albeit with a happier outcome, and a coup begins to be plotted. Since Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is still being written, Book V isn’t a conclusion but rather setting the stage for events yet to come.

How many events? The Iliad has 24 books and over 15,000 lines, while Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright in its present state is about a fifth the size in both number of books and number of lines. So depending on the author’s ambition and stamina we could be reading about the adventures of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart for some time to come—a happy prospect.

Thus far I’ve discussed Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as epic poem and as mecha tale. Unfortunately, I think the third aspect of the work, namely yuri, is not as strong as the other two, for two reasons:

First, there hasn’t been a lot of development in the yuri relationships. Kin-Bright’s first companion is encountered only briefly in retelling the story of the fall of Tar, and unless I missed something in my reading I don’t recall her relationship with Qwerthart advancing that much since Book I. To the extent that there’s a romance embedded within the overall plot, it’s a relatively slow burn. Whether and how that changes in the upcoming books is an open question.

Second, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright poses a puzzle: The society in which Kin-Bright lives appears, like those in many series set in the future (e.g., Dune), to be modeled on past European societies of the “dark” and “middle” ages, with future versions of peasants, clans, minor and major nobility, and monarchs. Given that, it’s difficult to imagine Kin-Bright fighting as a warrior and being (previously) married to a woman. It seems more likely that, lesbian or no, she would have been married off to a man on orders of her family’s patriarch, in order to cement some sort of political alliance. One could claim that Kin-Bright is “special,” as (say) Jeanne D’Arc was special, but that simply provokes the question, “what makes her so?”

One could also claim that this particular society is special, and in fact Thaliarchus does just that in the afterword (linked to above), providing an explanation of sorts regarding how Kin-Bright’s people view gender and sexuality. But to be candid I found it to be a bit hand-wavy, and (more important) I don’t recall that explanation being embedded in or emerging from the poem itself—which is really the only text that matters. I know this is a poem and not a treatise, but I would have liked at least a bit more comprehensive explanation rooted in the history and nature of Kin-Bright’s society.³

(To compare Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to The Witch from Mercury: the latter is set in a society that can be interpreted as a plausible evolution of our own, some centuries in the future. Given the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in today’s developed countries, it’s easy to believe Miorine when she tells Suletta, “that sort of thing is commonplace here.”)

My final judgment: despite the quibbles I expressed above, overall I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an entertaining read. It’s well worth trying out if you’re a fan of epic poetry curious about how it might be used to tell a tale of the far future, or a mecha fan open to reading a genre story cast in a different form. If you’re a fan of both, you’re definitely in for a treat. On the other hand, the yuri I consider a bonus but not essential to the experience, like sprinkles on ice cream. If I were rating it on a five-star scale I’d rate it as four stars out of five: not perfect by any means, but well worth reading. I look forward to enjoying future installments.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-07 22:31

This is so awesome, thanks for sharing! VOID-ROAD

thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-07-22 11:27

This is a really generous and thoughtful review—thank you!

Thoughtful and thought-provoking: I shall have to see if I can work up some kind of fuller exploration of some of these thoughts. But if I do, it won’t be like a defence or a rebuttal, only a further line of conversation!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-22 12:21

You’re quite welcome. I really liked the poem, so I tried to put some thought into the review.