 like that this isn't made of metal it's made of wood so I have to do the sword coming unsheathed noise on my own also hi this is the third time I have filmed this so if I sound tired and annoyed it's because I'm very tired and very annoyed this is the introduction song it's not very good but it's not too long okay so Empire of Man I recommended the first book in this series a couple of months ago it was a March Up Country I did a short saying hey this is good and at that time I had only read the first book now I've read the whole series and I can confidently say yeah it's still really good it's a brilliant piece of military science fiction it's about a prince who is traveling through space with his contingent of marine bodyguards and they wind up getting stranded on a backwards barbarian planet which does have intelligent life on it but they've barely invented gunpowder and they need to walk like halfway across the planet from where they land to the only spaceport there so that they can finally get home and it takes them literal months and the whole way through they're fighting they're trading they're negotiating they're gathering allies it's like you might hear the term military sci-fi and think okay it's just an endless series of battles but no not at all and while this series doesn't quite stick the landing I'll talk about that in the spoiler corner it is still really good you know it's still a very solid adventure I say adventure but that always feels weird when talking about stories like this which are pretty serious and at times very grim but it's also the best word I can think of like it it's a very good adventure has a lot of heart to it more than you might expect and I just I really enjoyed it so this series is four books long it's March Up Country March to the Sea March to the Stars and We Few and the first minor spoiler the first three books are the Marines and Prince Roger just traveling to the spaceport and then the last book is actually where they realize okay even after we get off planet we're still gonna be in trouble because of some shenanigans that have gone down and so that's them dealing with that but the vast majority of this series is them trapped on the planet it's called Marduk and the people there are called Mardukans by the way and it's mostly just them traveling to this one goal and if you think that it sounds I don't know unsatisfying to have characters just be walking and occasionally running into trouble for three books I mean if that's not your thing that's not your thing but that's also what Lord of the Rings is you know when you distill something down to its bare essence and strip all context from it yeah it doesn't sound that good and like I said this isn't just an endless series of battles because again you hear Marines with advanced technology going through you might think okay they just shoot their way through every problem but no because their technology gives them a massive massive advantage yes but number one they're snuffing out sentient life like Mardukans again they are intelligent they have civilizations they're just not nearly as advanced as humans at this time and number two they do not have the resources to just power through everything you know like sure the Mardukans are mostly resort mostly stuck to using swords and spears against them with their advanced rifles and cannons and such but they don't have infinite ammunition and also there are times where the Mardukans can just overwhelm them with numbers and the Mardukans have distinct physical advantages which I'll talk about a little bit in a minute now if you don't like military sci-fi just as a genre number one I disagree with you because I really like it I think it's a very fun genre but if you don't like it I don't think Empire of Man will change your mind because even though again there's a lot of stuff besides battles in there it is still largely focused on them you know it's focused on battles it's focused on the weapon technology and how it works it's focused on tactics it's focused on logistics like just the ways that wars work which is what people who read in the genre are going for I don't know why my camera is like tracking this thing's face for some reason but it is it's doing it and it's really bothering me I'm looking at the little screen recorder here and it's it's irksome what sets this apart from a lot of other entries in the genre though is the fact that it is much more character focused because that's always been one of the weak points of military sci-fi and I think a big part of what turns a lot of people off from it is that characters are less than two-dimensional a lot of the time like you won't even get a hair color for a lot of the main characters here like they are just people who are there to be idiots be hyper competent or to fight oftentimes they're just there to do stuff rather than to be any sort of real characters they don't have much personality they don't go through development really and so yeah if you're just looking for explosions and such then it's still a fun genre to get into but if you're looking for something a little more substantive then yeah that can be very frustrating that said Empire of Man again does not fall into that trap because this series has a pretty large character cast and it is full of all kinds of really distinct memorable characters like the main one to talk about is Prince Roger himself he's the protagonist of the series he's pretty young at the beginning he's only like 22 or 23 and he's also not the heir to the throne like his mother is the Empress but his he has two older siblings and his brother has children so they are all in the line of succession ahead of him so he doesn't seem that important and people also just don't like him and it's hard to see what it's hard to not see why you know because one they go into some details regarding like political maneuvering and his father later on in the first book but also he's just kind of a sour-puss and he's kind of annoying to deal with to the point where even his bodyguards hate him but over the course of the story he becomes like a proper leader and you realize like okay yeah I would be okay with this guy being a prince and being in charge of something now part of that is realizing that he wasn't that bad to begin with like realizing okay yeah he had a lot of useful stuff to say and do all along and people just didn't give him the chance like you realize okay he's he's pretty smart he knows how to fight pretty well he is an amazing sharpshooter because before the events of the books he actually went big game hunting on a bunch of planets and was hunting down very dangerous aliens all the time so you know he knows what he's doing and he is much better suited to this long-ass trek through the wilderness than people gave him credit for but also he does just get better over the course of the story you know he learns and grows and just becomes more conscious and conscious conscious might be a better word for it that was hard to say of the fact that people's lives are riding on him and his responsibility is to them just as they have a responsibility to him so again you really get the feeling that yeah this guy is good leadership material however they do occasionally go overboard with it and make it so that Roger is like not at all a Mary Sue because he does screw up plenty but he's just a little too good at some things like they mentioned he's a Kenjutsu expert at one point and it doesn't even make sense for him to be an expert because it's mentioned that he skipped a lot of his classes and kind of tried to blow it off but whatever and they mentioned that okay at one point in the books they start picking up Marduk and weaponry because they're trying to conserve ammunition so the humans start using you know spears and swords and such and one of the weapons they pick up is a really big knife now Marduk ins are substantially larger than humans they also have four arms like on average they are over three meters tall maybe three and a half on average and so Roger picks up what to a Marduk in is just a particularly big knife but to a human it's the size of a sword that's why I actually have been holding this thing this whole time and Roger is able to use it as a katana and okay again he's gone through some training and stuff I believe that but he is able to fight these battle hardened Marduk ins who have been training and fighting as warriors for years and he's able to fight them one-on-one and come out on top almost every time like he is just a little too good at this you know what I'm saying and again consider how big something would have to be for this to just be a knife to them and you realize how much of a disadvantage a person would be at in terms of like reach and strength and size and it becomes even more unbelievable and the only other character I want to talk about in any depth is the leader of the Marines whose name is Captain Armand Ponner and he's great too you know he doesn't have as much depth to him as Roger I don't think but he is still very fun to watch because he's very very good at what he does he's not just a brilliant military commander but he's a great negotiator and I feel like in another life he would have been an amazing politician or king or something you really get the feeling that nobody else could have led these guys through all these difficult dangerous situations than Armand Ponner and so watching him do his thing is great but he's also not perfect he does occasionally screw up and there is a human underneath that you know he does feel fear and anxiety and stuff he just tries not to let it show and throughout all of this you really get the sense that he is just undyingly loyal to the Empire and by extension to the Imperial family including Roger himself so even though he really doesn't like Roger at the beginning of this series he will do anything to keep him alive because that's the job he signed up for and other than that I don't want to go into a lot of detail about the character cast but just know there are literally dozens of them you know good guys bad guys they have big roles and small roles there are humans mardukens there's a couple of other alien species we run into and that there's dozens of them and they are all very distinct and a little bit memorable that's why I'm saying like this is much more character driven than most military sci-fi and I'm gonna remember these characters for a while like I'm gonna remember Kord who is a marduken he's an honor-bound warrior who winds up leading or excuse me not leading but guiding the humans pretty early on in the story but also in spite of him coming from a literal Stone Age tribe he's one of the most intelligent people in the series and he adjusts remarkably quickly to his new circumstances like I remember Portenya who is the armor that the Marines bring with them and how he's very foul-mouthed and the audiobook narrator gives him a mildly racist accent let's not let's not get into that and how he's just remarkably good at his job and how he knows not just about armor stuff and stripping down their technologically advanced weaponry and such but he also knows about carpentry and other things that come in handy over the course of the journey and I remember how he's just a really crazy gambler who is constantly trying to meet new people that he can teach new games to so that he can beat them and win money from them like that's just a thing he does I remember that there's a lot of these you could I could go on all day about them like even the villains got some weirdly poignant moments and in spite of all of these people all having personality none of them are safe you know because there's a lot of stuff where people have said excuse me it feels like oh no one is safe anyone could die at any moment in the past few years that has just become a popular thing but in this series it really does feel that way because again there's a lot of characters who we all grow to know and at least like a little bit over the course of the story but on top of that a lot of them die along the way you know it's not just faceless grunts who get killed during these many many dangerous battles it is named characters it's important characters who you grew to like and sometimes they go out in a brilliant blaze of glory and they like hold the line and prevent the enemy from coming in and allow their friends to retreat before they finally bite it and they get this big heroic last stand other times they just die very unceremoniously off-screen and the other characters just come across their corpses and they're like oh yeah they they just died I haven't talked much about the battles but suffice to say they're all pretty great like there's only one or two big ones per book with a couple of smaller ones thrown in throughout but they're all great because none there's not a single one where the humans just blast their way through with pure brute force like they have to think their way out in just about every situation because again they're not just trying to blast through this one group they realize they have a very long journey ahead of them and as time goes on they run lower and lower on resources like food and ammunition and they take more and more casualties so there's just less of them to deal with it and it's just it becomes more and more desperate so the fights continue getting more and more tense even though in some ways the characters are just more prepared because they're more familiar with the planet and everything and none of these are just battles for the sake of having battles the final goal is always in sight and it's always clear they're there to get to the spaceport and get off the planet and then after that they have a different thing now I've been saying this book's praises for a while or saying this book's praises is it saying or singing the praise whatever not important I've been singing this book's praises for a while now what are some of the issues I have with it well number one is that there's just way too much exposition here like some of it is important to the story but a lot of it isn't and it goes on for a very long time like I thought I was going to be in for a rough ride when early on in the first book one character shoots another and it spends what must have been like half a page just describing how their gun works and I was like is this whole series gonna be like this and yes but it's not as bad as I feared it also takes a while for the story to really get going because I think it's about 20% through the first book before the actual story begins like before the Marines and Roger crashed on the planet Marduk and like again that's the setup that's just the inciting incident for the main plot the main journey so again it could have been condensed a bit I feel like David Weber maybe got away from his editor a bit and the only other issue I have is again the ending which I'll go into a spoiler corner but suffice to say it's just it feels unfinished you know it feels almost like there's supposed to be another book but there aren't any but so it just it just ends there and so it just doesn't quite work I didn't think but that's all you know other than the ending kind of falling flat and a few issues throughout I thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed the Empire of Man series if you are at all a fan of military science fiction I would definitely recommend checking this one out if you don't like military science fiction I don't know if this will change your mind but you know the journey of Prince Roger is still very satisfying so maybe it will and if you're kind of on the fence about military sci-fi then I would definitely recommend giving this a go you know at least try it out and if you're just not into it by the end of the first book then you're probably not gonna be into the whole series but anyways that's about all so spoiler corner now okay the only thing I really want to talk about in this spoiler corner is the ending and in order to do that I need to give you some context so once they get near the end of the third book that is when the Marines are starting to approach the spaceport where they can get home and that's when they run into a couple of humans who have been staying on the planet Marduk and are just nearby the spaceport and that's where they learn that not only have they been presumed dead ever since their ship got shot down which they assumed for a while because they've been on the planet for like eight months at this stage not only that but while they were gone there was a coup or officially it was an attempted coup where some people tried to overthrow the Empress but they managed to hold them off and they managed to save the Empress and now she's totally not being held prisoner guys she's just away from public and you can't see her and these other people are totally not running things in her absence and you know so officially the coup failed but in reality it succeeded they take the Emperor prison Empress prisoner and they kill Rogers older siblings and his nieces and nephews so now he is the heir to the throne but everybody also thinks that he's dead and at the end of the third book while they're hijacking a ship so that they can get home Captain Ponner is killed and again it happens rather unceremoniously kind of out of nowhere it's not a heroic last stand or anything he just gets very unlucky and it's actually the saddest death in the entire series even though the series is full of like I said earlier a lot of very sad poignant deaths but Roger realizes okay I need to do a counter coup so that I can overthrow the people who are holding my mother prisoner and hopefully free her and then I guess I get to be Emperor one day and the fourth book is mostly just them doing that so like they do a lot of preparation they gather up allies they gather up weapons they scope out the political landscape and figure out how exactly they're gonna do it and then at the end there's like a big battle where they go into the palace they fight off some of the bad guys and they capture or kill some of them but the main one who was leading the Empire in while his mother was all drugged up and held prisoner he manages to escape and he goes back to his home system where he has a base of support and he actually has the support of a big chunk of the military as well and so you realize okay that there's gonna be a much larger conflict which arises from this like the Empire is just in a state of civil war but they do manage to rescue the Empress like I said but because of everything she's gone through she's just not mentally fit to be in charge anymore so she abdicates and leaves Roger in charge and then Roger is the Emperor he inherits a civil war and that's it that's where the series ends and it's like I said it feels unfinished because Roger like I guess what they were trying to go for was to show how this whole story was just the journey he took to becoming the type of person who was worthy of being Emperor and then it ends on kind of a note of yeah and then he ruled for many more decades and everything was great but I don't know again it just feels unfinished because there's like a whole war going on and everything I don't have anything else to add there really it's just unsatisfying and I would have felt weird if I didn't mention it but yeah that's about all I have to say again check out the Empire of Man series if it sounds at all intriguing subscribe to this channel and like the video and comment on it if you haven't already and also go subscribe to my second channel the other James I don't really talk about it but it's in the description of all my videos so go check that out that's where I rant about random bullshit that isn't really related to books and I think that's about all so I'll see you later good bye hey guess what well I mean you 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