Codex Hyperboreanus (Apophenia) Paperback – May 26, 2019

If you have high expectations after reading the first volume of this series, the second one won’t disappoint you. That doesn’t mean it’s just a collage of already successful tricks. While there are occasional links to previous stories and the action takes place in the same world, this book stands on its own and needs no “previously on…” intros. The structure is a bit different. The tales are nested in two overarching narratives.The first one begins as a medieval lesbian romance between a tyrannical queen and her “vizirienne”. It resembles that of Harun Al Rashid and Shahrazad from the Arabian Nights, with a bit of a twist because the servant’s goal is not to escape death but to convince her cynical master that love is more powerful than fear. The romance almost imperceptibly turns into a philosophical battle with grandiose political implications and the ending will definitely come as a surprise.The second narrative is a chronicle of an empire in the fashion of Asimov’s Foundation stories, but adapted to the comic fantasy genre. It follows an isolated civilization that sprung out by accident in an otherwise inaccessible frozen ocean, from its early egalitarian phase to its ascent as a powerful monarchy. Its rulers become obsessed with imperial expansion into the wilderness that surrounds them until one day their conquests are stalled by the limitation of the very device that enabled them. In its core this story is a treatise in geopolitics and just like the first part of the book, it’s peppered with enough humor and witticisms to not only make such a subject interesting for the common fantasy reader but hilariously entertaining.