This is a sequel to 2011’s Final Days, in which humanity has spread out across a number of exoplanets after losing the Earth to an artefact brought back through the wormhole network they had been exploring. But all that – an alien network of wormhole tunnels created billions of years earlier by an unknown race (an idea last seen in Williams & Dix’s Geodesica: Ascent and Geodesica: Descent a decade ago, not to mention Alastair Reynolds’ The Six Directions of Space from 2009) is pretty much just background in Gibson’s novel. It’s more about one of the two human interstellar polities which has formed in the wake of Final Days‘ events. The Tian Di was founded in revolution, and the revolutionary council grew until it numbered one thousand – hence the title – but now power is pretty much concentrated in the hands of Father Chang, the council leader (after a coup a century or two previously), and the council members are just a hugely powerful elite, sort of a cross between the One Percent and Saudi princes. They even have their own secret planet, where they maintain luxurious estates untainted by proximity to the unwashed masses. When a council member is murdered on that secret world, Luc Gabion is asked to investigate, and though he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to solve the crime, he does learn a lot more about politics inside the council – which at that point is concerned chiefly with the Tian Di’s possible response to diplomatic approaches from the other human polity, the Coalition, after more than a century of isolation – and it all ties into a move to make the Tian Di even more repressive a regime than it currently is. This is heartland sf, full of well-polished tropes deployed with assurance. If it all feels a bit disposable, it’s not because it’s not done well but perhaps because it’s done a bit too well: familiar ideas given an interesting spin, prejudices given a little tweak just so readers are reminded they have them, and a plot which gallops forward at a pace that discourages too much close scrutiny. ( )

This sequel to Gary Gibson's 2011 novel "Final Days" takes the setting forward a few centuries to explore humanity's reaction to Earth's destruction, with a storyline structured around a murder investigation conducted by protagonist, Luc Gabion (whose surname reminds me of the author's own, perhaps deliberately). After a fairly action-filled opening raid, the story then slows down considerably as the investigation/mystery portion of the story proceed, and finally accelerate violently once the villains and victims are established. Aside from FTL wormhole transportation used in a strict government-controlled way, and ubiquitous non-sentient robots, the everyday technologies Gibson writes for Gabion's world is only very cautiously advanced from our own. He reserves the wider SF ideas and ambitions for a second society, called the Coalition, and resembling Iain M. Bank's Culture, glimpsed briefly in the ending chapters.

With a quick opening lesson excerpted from a fictional history text, Gibson explains the division of society into two separate civilizations representing the opposing approaches to Earth's final disaster. On one side is the fearlessly progressive Coalition, which continue to explore and study the alien Founder's Network of wormholes and artifacts that brought about the cataclysm, and which culturally parallels the Western culture of our own society. In self-imposed isolation from these, we find the worlds of the Tian Di, a strict empire which takes a more conservative position by outlawing such investigation, and which suffers from technological and political stagnation. It is within this Tian Di society that our story unfolds, and though the eyes of a Tian Di commoner character that Gibson progressively acquaints us with his wider story universe, allowing the reader to experience the same surprises and discoveries.

The story's conclusion hints at a future installment to the series which will hopefully be set in the Coalition, and will have a more cosmic, space-opera outlook. Unanswered questions regarding some of the characters from 'Final Days' can be addressed, and perhaps a multi-character perspective can break up the narrative again. Even without these elements from the first book, (not to mention the fascinating acrobatics with time paradoxes), I found 'The Thousand Emperors' to be an enjoyable five-star read, which can incidentally be enjoyed as as a standalone story, apart from the earlier novel. ( )