Prepare yourself for The Ascent to Godhood, the fourth book in Neon Yang's silkpunk Tensorate series, a wide-ranging, imaginative, engaging playground that the New York Times lauded as "joyously wild."
Finalist for the 2020 Locus Award
The Protector is dead.
For fifty years, the Protector ruled, reshaping her country in her image and driving her enemies to the corners of the map. For half a century the world turned around her as she built her armies, trained her Tensors, and grasped at the reins of fate itself. Now she is dead. Her followers will quiver, her enemies rejoice.
But in one tavern, deep in rebel territory, her greatest enemy drowns her sorrows. Lady Han raised a movement that sought the Protector's head, yet now she can only mourn her loss. She remembers how it all began, when the Protector was young, not yet crowned, and a desperate dancing girl dared to fall in love with her.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
July 30, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781250165879
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781250165879
- File size: 1297 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 6, 2019
A rebel commander in a complicated fantasy world recalls her triumphs and struggles in Yang’s superb fourth Tensorate novella (after The Descent of Monsters). Lady Han, leader of the antimagic Machinist faction that has just assassinated the tyrannical Protector, drinks heavily while recounting her life to an unnamed listener. When she’s 12 years old, her desperately poor rural family sell her to a man who gives her the name Huarong. He delivers her to the capital city, where she proves herself a clever, industrious courtesan trainee. She catches the eye of Hekate, a secondary heir to the throne, who recruits her to help topple a political rival through minor espionage. Following their success, Hekate renames her Lady Han and invites her to join Hekate’s household, where she becomes a blend of servant, confidante, and lover for the calculating Hekate. Lady Han gets a close-up view of the personal tragedies that launched Hekate’s ruthless ascension to Protector—until the discovery that Lady Han, too, has been betrayed. This thrilling adventure stands alone, as well as providing moving, complicated backstory for the earlier books in the series. Both fans and newcomers will be enthralled. -
July 1, 2019
The latest entry in Yang's Tensorate series (after The Descent of Monsters, 2018), set in an Asian-influenced fantasy world dominated by Tensors who can manipulate the strands of an ethereal force known as the Slack, focuses on the early years of the tyrannical Protector, mother and antagonist of the twins Akeha and Mokoya from previous volumes. Presented as a story told by the drunken rebellion leader Lady Han on the night of the Protector's death, this slim novella chronicles not only Protector Hekate's rise to power but also their meeting when Hekate remained an uncrowned princess and Han was a courtesan and dancing girl. The vicious and deadly court intrigues of this volume provide a deeper exploration of the interior life of the Protectorate court than previous volumes. While this novella only barely advances the overarching plot-line of the series, its combination of engaging queer characters and a well-wrought and diverse fantasy world are sure to please fans of Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Winterglass, 2017), Laurie Marks (Air Logic, 2019), or of exciting queer fantasy writing in general.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
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