The Fall of the Kings

By: Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman

Narrated by: Ellen Kushner, Nick Sullivan, Neil Gaiman, Simon Jones, Katherine Kellgren, Robert Fass, Richard Ferrone, Tim Jerome

Audie Award Finalist, Multi-Voiced Performance, 2014

Audie Award Finalist, Audio Drama, 2014

Award-winning author, narrator, and screenwriter Neil Gaiman personally selected this book, and, using the tools of the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), produced this work for his audiobook label, Neil Gaiman Presents.

A few words from Neil on The Fall of the Kings: "In the Riverside chronology of events, The Fall of the Kings takes place a generation after Swordspoint. If you are new to the world of Riverside, I hope the richness of this book will surprise and delight you, with multi-voiced scenes set like jewels in the gold of Ellen Kushner's narration…."

In this stunning follow-up to Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword and the Audie-award winning Swordspoint, co-author Delia Sherman (The Freedom Maze) joins Ellen to return to that world of labyrinthine intrigue, where sharp swords and even sharper wits rule. This time, they explore the city's University, where a troubled young nobleman and his scholar lover find themselves playing out an ancient drama destined to explode their society's smug view of itself.

In a city grown decadent, myth and magic begin to seep through the ancient stones. Generations ago the last king fell. But the blood of kings runs deep in the land - and the key may be Theron Campion of Tremontaine, a louche beauty of questionable morals seeking to escape his family heritage in the University lecture halls. When he and renegade scholar Basil St. Cloud come together, they discover that the price of uncovering ancient history may be to be forced to repeat it....

Sue Zizza of SueMedia Productions creates some truly stunning sound elements, including a full score of original music by composer Nathanael Tronerud commissioned for this series... with a full supporting cast who bring to life the rich tapestry of passionate University scholars, noblemen in brothels and Riverside lowlifes, in the sophisticated urban setting that Kushner's many fans have come to love.

To hear more from Neil Gaiman on The Fall of the Kings, click here, or listen to the introduction at the beginning of the book itself.

Learn more about Neil Gaiman Presents and Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX).

©2003 Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman (P)2013 SueMedia Productions

Critic reviews

"The authors tap into fantasy's genuine source of drama, its ability to haunt, appall, transform. A powerful fantasy that rises above the crowd with a vivid setting, complex characters, and elegant prose." ( Locus) "[W]itty dialogue, prose as precise as a blow to the heart... magic with a true aura of numinous danger, thrilling fights, thrilling scholarly debates, old books, swashbuckling aunts, exquisite clothing, ancient rituals, hot chocolate, female pirates, erotic paintings.... [I]t leaves one with much to consider after the book is closed." (Rachel Manija Brown, Green Man Review) "A virtual treat for all the senses! For those who like their fantasy soaked in intrigue, history and romance . . . one of the bawdiest and most intellectually stimulating novels of the year!" (Gavin Grant, BookPage)

Imaginative

I have become a fan of Riverside over the years and found this book in the true spirit of the Kushner/Sherman world. A little period, a little erotic, a little intrigue, a lot of the history of that paaartiiicilarrrr time (Swords Point Joke, Sorry). A person who likes Riverside and its surrounding world may like a wider lens of that world. If eroticism or homoeroticism are not your thing, there will opportunities for disappointment in this book for you. Though not very explicit, ubiquitous in this novel. Enjoy!

Story goes nowhere, slowly and without purpose

Kushner's style is very very very dialogue heavy, I know that. This book was even more so. The story went nowhere and it went there very slowly. This story felt like a soap opera, all smut and no substance. The characters that were engaging were rare and had small parts. Then suddenly all the action happens at the end and no one really talks about anything. It's like the writers had a deadline to finish the book.

The performances of the readers are the only reason to listen to the audio. Even with such great readers, you'll find yourself struggling to stay until the end.

to clarify other reviews

I feel other reviews tried but ultimately failed to warn or prepare one with their comments that this book is about wizards fucking, so I will now attempt to clear that up for you.

This book is *about* wizards fucking. wizards fucking is the plot of this book. How often did wizards fuck? WHO did wizards fuck? Who was the top or bottom in the wizards fucking arrangement? were the wizards into bondage? were the evil wizards fucking the cuck virgin kings? the POINT of this book is, in every way, wizards fucking. wizards fucking is what this book is about.

to be fair to this book, I will say that it only began to read as ridiculous when the author tries her level best to make the mating habits of wizards very serious and hotly debated by scholars and people in government, where it was very clear, at least to me, the author was desperately trying to convince the reader that wizards fucking wasn't silly and was in fact politically and emotionally interesting. (I personally do think wizards fucking is a wonderful subject, but the author relentlessly begging me to take it seriously made the whole thing cheap and annoying.)

do with this review what you will! happy hunting.

enthralling!

i was so wrapped up in the climax of the story i drove right past my exit.

really great but the ending upset me

the ending was sad, so I feel like I can't give it 5 stars lol but a fantastic book!

surprisingly good

Very pleasurable listen while working. Light enough to do other things at the same time and at the same time captivating!

Rich, lush, sensual historical fantasy

It's no secret that I absolutely adore Ellen Kushner's "Riverside" series, and "The Fall of the Kings" is perhaps the deepest and richest of the three. Co-written with Delia Sherman, "The Fall of the Kings" depicts the fine lines between history and legend, science and magic, obsession and love.

Theron Campion, elegant young nobleman-about-town, has recovered from his unhappy love affair with a scandalous artist, and is ready to indulge in a new romance with the idealistic young magister of history, Basil St Cloud. But St Cloud has an obsession of his own: the study of the ancient kings, their wizards, and their magic. But such a study is forbidden in the City, and Basil and Theron's passionate affair has dangerous ramifications neither could imagine.

The story in itself is glorious – I've never wanted so desperately to visit the City as I do now that the University district has come alive in such richness and vivid detail. As often as I've read and reread the Riverside books, it's always a treat to hear Ellen Kushner reading them! She knows just where to put the emphasis, and her narration is alternately gentle, amused, dreamlike, and sensual. (The romance here is between two men, so if that is something that might bother you, be forewarned.)

Ms Kushner has described the aesthetics of the "illumination" as, "You're listening to me read you the story, and then you start to dream it, that it's come to life...", and that's a perfect description. Nick Sullivan, whom I loved to hate as the villain in the other "Riverside" books ("Swordspoint" and "The Privilege of the Sword") is eminently swoonworthy as the idealistic Basil St Cloud, while Ryan McCabe conveys Theron's peculiarly innocent qualitities perfectly. The Student's Ensemble made me laugh out loud – they got it so very right! And Nate Tronerud's fabulous music adds so much depth and color to the tapestry. I think this has got to be my favorite of his three "Riverside" scores.

Listening to this audiobook was like a happy dream, but one which I'll get to enjoy over and over. Thank you, Ellen and Delia, for writing this book, and thank you, Neil Gaiman, for adding it to your Audible series! It will be a joy for years to come.

loved it!

this story was an fantastic mix of victorian age like intrigued and the world building of master craftsman that had me ingrossed in to a point I didn't want to stop .

wonderful

Ellen Kusher has written a series of books full of some of the most human characters I've ever run into in fantasy literature. I am not certain I've ever run across the mannerpunk subgenre before running across the Neil Gaiman Presents collection of audiobooks. By his endorsement alone I would have tried the series, but then I realized I'd run across one of her short stories in an anthology. After giving it a listen I was completely hooked. The world of Swordspoint is charming, addicting, and most especially, so very very viscerally human. 10/10 highly recommend every last one of them.

Kings and Wizards on Intimate Terms

Imagine Gandalf and Aragorn as lovers, the wizard choosing, advising, and sexing the king, the pair exchanging bodily fluids to make the land fertile! In The Fall of the Kings (2002), Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman queer the typical fantasy genre relationship between kings and wizards. Is their novel a bracing revision, a political passion, an unsavory folly, or just a well-written steamy same-sex romance fantasy about history, authority, truth, duty, art, love, and family? Maybe all of that.

Taking place about sixty years after the events of Kushner's earlier Swordspoint (1987) and about 45 years after those of her later The Privilege of the Sword (2006), The Fall of the Kings is set in her Elizabethan-esque secondary world centered around an anonymous city growing outward from its ancient island of origin, Riverside, home to a demimonde of pickpockets, prostitutes, artists, and the like now that the nobles have moved to the Hill across the river. The book begins with Theron Campion, the posthumous son of Alec, the Mad Duke Tremontaine, being dumped by Ysaud, a gifted artist who's finished using him as a model for a series of paintings featuring scenes from the legendary past, a man murdering his king-lover, a man staring at his stag reflection in a pool of water, a band of nude young men dancing around a fire, and so on. Will Theron find a new lover after having his heart broken? And will he find a way to balance his duties as future Duke with finding his bliss? Meanwhile, the wannabe intelligencer lordling Nicholas Galing yearns to be of use to the mysterious Serpent Chancellor Lord Arlen, who seems to be concerned about some possible royalist plotting in the city (two-hundred years earlier the nobles killed the last king and established a Council of Lords). A third plot strand features the university doctor of ancient history Basil St Cloud, who is practicing and teaching a revolutionary method, that of discovering new truth about history by examining primary source documents instead of rehashing the work of past authority figures. St Cloud's fixation on proving that kings were good, wizards benign, and magic real won't prove treasonous, will it?

Kushner and Sherman interestingly introduce the possibility of magic into the unmagical world of Riverside, develop the university, and detail the rich history of the city as far back as 500 years ago when the northern and southern cultures united. Unfortunately, the novel could have been shorter without harming its virtues, over-full as it is with portentous dream after portentous dream, provocative scholarly find after provocative scholarly find, intense confrontation after intense confrontation, bawdy seasonal festival after bawdy seasonal festival, aristo society event after aristo society event. The climax does not quite live up to its promising and lengthy build up, and the resolution left me feeling, "Is that all there is?"

In Kushner's earlier Swordspoint, I liked the relationship between young Alec Campion (the Mad Duke to be) and his swordsman lover Richard St Viers, and had no problem with their tasteful sex scenes, because Kushner wrote them sparingly and I liked the characters. In The Fall of the Kings, Kushner and Sherman posit a secret centuries-old northern ritualistic tradition by which the old king is sacrificed and a new king chosen by wizards from among his young male "companions" in a stag-hunt climaxing in group sex in a sacred grove, all of which was ostensibly to confirm the tie between king and land. Fair enough. But Theron imagining becoming a stag to rut with a stag (instead of a doe) to make the land fertile seems odd. And there is just so much sex alluded to or discreetly depicted in the book, the majority male-male, with a bit of female-female and male-female tossed in for spice, that it began to numb me (almost as much as too many violent action scenes do in typical genre fantasy). Perhaps the most fantastic thing here is that no one ever catches any STDs.

Theron's half-sister Jessica, "the Pirate Queen," injects new life into the novel and there are great moments in it, including one where a set of paintings becomes a sacred grove and another where Basil tries a magical text: "The letters lay dark and heavy on the page. Basil stared at the secret tongue. It teased him, dared him. . . He picked out the letters, and spoke two syllables aloud. They felt strange in his mouth, as if he were picking up pebbles or nuts and trying them on his tongue." Although Theron is rather shallow, self-centered, and lame (to me), other characters are interesting, like the unlikeable Henry Fremont, the obsessed Galing, and the brilliant and impractical St Cloud. The texture of secondary world creation is dense and intriguing. And I tip my cap to Kushner and Sherman for attempting to revivify the typical wizard-king relationship.

As with the audiobook versions of the other two Riverside novels, this one is "illuminated," Kushner reading most of it, and a handful of other men and women doing character voices in key scenes. I'd prefer either to hear the entire book read by the excellent Kushner or to hear it all read by the various readers. And although the music enhances the moods of the scenes, the redundant sound effects, from the striking of a "lucifer" (match) to the cheering of a crowd, disturb the immersive listening experience. After hearing someone knocking on a door, I don't then need the narrator to say, "a soft knock at the door heralded Terrance."

Finally, readers new to Kushner's Riverside books should read them in internal chronological order, Swordspoint followed by Privilege of the Sword, because although each book can stand alone, The Fall of the Kings is less satisfying than the others.