Reddit reviews Wolfhound Empire (The Wolfhound Century)

Okay, this one is going to need some context. There's this trilogy of fantasy novels, sold in an omnibus edition under the title Wolfhound Empire, by a Brit named Peter Higgins. It's mostly set in the city of Mirgorod, capital of the Vlast, a country modeled on both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In fact, the entire trilogy is a meditation on the history of the Soviet Union told with recontextualized history and fantasy elements. Anyway, in the first book Wolfhound Century, the Vlast was described as being in the process of losing a war against a coalition of nations to the west known as the Archipelago. By the second book, Truth and Fear, the strategic situation has completely collapsed, the Archipelago have landed in the Vlast itself and are besieging Mirgorod itself with artillery and bomber raids. In the midst of the chaos the terrorist Josef Kantor, one of the trilogy's main antagonists, acquires a general's uniform and false papers, reinvents himself as "Osip Rizhin", and personally takes command of the defense of Mirgorod. In due course the Archipelago sends General Carnelian, one of the commanders leading the offensive on Mirgorod, to parley with Rizhin. She explains that the Vlast's government has abandoned the city, the defenders have no hope of repulsing the invasion, and the Archipelago has the means and ability to both demolish the city and slaughter its entire remaining population. However, if the defenders surrender, the Archipelago will not only spare the city, they will also rebuild it and make it a junior member of their alliance of nations, and Rizhin himself will be able to retire in comfort in a villa somewhere overseas. Given how the Archipelago do not seem to share any characteristics with the Nazis, the deal seems for all intents and purposes to be genuine.

Rizhin listens intently, then tells Carnelian that she's full of shit. He goes on:

> "You and I, what we are fighting for here is a city. A capital city. If Mirgorod is not the capital of the Vlast it is nothing, it is meaningless, it no longer exists. You won't burn it. What use to you is a million stinking corpses? What use to you is five hundred square miles of ash and rubble in a marsh on the edge of a northern ocean? This threat of burning is nothing. It's shit. I could burn it myself more easily than you could. Fuck, I would burn it myself to stop you having it. But to destroy it is to lose it. You burn Mirgorod and you obliterate the idea of it, and it's the idea of Mirgorod we're fighting over here, not some piss-and-vinegar diplomatic compromise.

> So, you want my city, you come and get it. You fight for every inch, or you can fuck off somewhere else and let the Archipelago find themselves a general who can."

When Carnelian reiterates that Rizhin cannot save the people of Mirgorod, Rizhin replies:

> "You haven't been listening. You should try paying attention. I don't want to save the people of Mirgorod, they are of no interest to me. What I want is a victory. And I'm going to have one. You're going to give me one."

On the one hand, Rizhin understands with perfectly clarity the meaning of the conflict, the stakes for which he is fighting, and he has the unshakable certainty and the strength of will to drive the men and women under his command to triumph. On the other hand, he's operating under an apocalyptic worldview in which both sides fight without let or hindrance for survival, and where the human cost is not a consideration.

I want to end this with another quote from Rizhin at the end of the book, after he has liberated Mirgorod with a fitting (yet familiar) apocalyptic weapon and discovered that another of the book's antagonists has gone silent:

> "I am free of it. Free of it and alone. I am the voice of history. I am the mile-high man."

(Oh and yes, Kantor/Rizhin is pretty much fantasy Stalin with the brakes off.)