The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

[This review was requested by reader Greg Sanders, winner of the LGM fund drive auction. Thank you to Greg for the contribution, and for selecting an excellent book!]

In the middle of the night, in a dilapidated, lonely estate surrounded by swampland, eighteen-year-old Maia is woken by the arrival of a messenger from court. Maia’s father, emperor Varenechibel IV, and his three eldest sons, have all been killed in an airship explosion. Maia, the unloved, unthought-of son of Varenechibel’s exiled goblin wife, is now emperor of all the elflands.

When Katherine Addison published The Goblin Emperor in 2014, she had already had a decade-long career, under the name Sarah Monette, as a respected, award-nominated author of fantasy and fantasy-mystery novels and short stories. Emperor was something of an entirely different order. Nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus awards (winning the last of them), it remains, a decade after its publication, one of the most beloved and enduring fantasy novels of the 21st century. 

Rereading the novel for the third or fourth time in preparation for this post, I was struck, first of all, by how effortlessly accomplished it feels. How its plot flows and carries you along despite being made up mostly of meetings. How expertly Addison hints at the rich, complex history of the elflands and its neighbors without drowning the reader in backstory. How, in a genre that often defaults to pseudo-Tolkienian, high-falutin’ language that sounds canned and awkward, Addison creates an entire mode of speech that feels both believably antiquated and suited to its fantasy setting. And how, in Maia, she has created a character who is at once modern and old-fashioned: kind-hearted, deeply wounded by the mistreatment of his childhood and adolescence, at times almost overcome by loneliness; but also governed by an ironclad sense of justice and duty.

There’s a scene early in the novel that encapsulates both the complexity of the character and the uniqueness of Addison’s project with him. Hours after receiving the news of his accession, Maia and his guardian Setheris board an airship to the capital. An embittered, self-important man who has taught Maia impeccable court manners and a profound respect for law and tradition while also abusing him both physically and emotionally, Setheris has grasped what Maia still does not: that being acclaimed emperor is not the same as being treated like one, and that Maia must establish his own power base at court as soon as possible, or risk remaining the plaything of those who already have that power. Maia, on the other hand, sees things that his guardian doesn’t deign to notice: that mere hours after an airship failure that not only caused the loss of dozens of lives, but irretrievably altered the course of every life in the empire, the captain and crew of the airship he’s about to board are feeling a bit anxious about carrying yet another emperor. “On impulse, when the captain greeted him with a mumbled ‘Serenity’ at the foot of the mooring mast, Maia stopped and said quietly, ‘We have nothing but confidence in you and your crew.'”

It’s an exchange that tells us a great deal about our hero. First, that he is observant and kind, even in the midst of his own inner turmoil. Second, that he doesn’t mistake kindness for familiarity; he understands that the way to alleviate the captain’s anxiety is not through shamming false camaraderie, but through reinforcing their respective roles, and reiterating his confidence in the crew’s ability to carry out theirs. And third, that this understanding, however buttressed by manners and training, is instinctual.

Those same instincts serve Maia well as he seeks to understand the scope of his newfound power and the means of exerting it. Much of the first part of the novel is concerned with Maia’s attempts to disentangle himself from Setheris, who expects to maintain his psychological power over his former ward, and to be placed in a position of authority in his administration. But though the effects of Setheris’s abuse linger over Maia long after the man himself is gone—he continues to hear his mocking, belittling voice in his head, and to flinch from expected violence when people act displeased or angry at him—so too does a superego that tells him that to indulge in either that fear, or a desire for vengeance, would be disastrous. “He has done no wrong,” Maia explains to his courtiers as he tries to find Setheris a role that recognizes his contributions while removing him from Maia’s presence, and then muses that “The memories of a thousand separate cruelties mocked him, but no one save Maia himself had ever counted those as wrongs, and it was unjust to have them declared wrongs now, merely because he could.”

The novel of manners has been a mainstay of fantasy and science fiction writing since at least Lois McMaster Bujold’s iconic Miles Vorkosigan series, which follows its Horatio Hornblower-esque hero from battlefield to ballroom to the halls of power. More recently, authors like Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, and Arkady Martine have stressed the role of manners and tradition in both shaping and reinforcing the power of an imperial system. Addison works in the same vein, but arguably in a harder mode. There are conflicts in The Goblin Emperor—Maia must detach himself from Setheris; he must overcome an attempted coup on behalf of his nephew; and he must learn the reason for his father and brothers’ deaths. But these crises are less the point of the novel as they are inflection points in Maia’s process of asserting and cementing his power as emperor Edrehasivar VII, a process that is rooted primarily in politics, diplomacy, and logistics. This is a novel in which Maia’s near-assassination by a treasonous nobleman is immediately followed by a discussion of what to do with the traitor’s underage sisters: how to secure their fortune and future without placing their family’s resources in the hands of enemies of the crown. Even the novel’s title proves deceptive. The conflicts between elves and goblins turn out not to be very central to its plot, or to Maia’s ability to master the politics of the court.

Much of that ability hinges on Maia’s kindness—this is, in fact, one of the things the novel is known for, as both a unique approach to high fantasy in its own right, and a harbinger of the recent “cozy” trend in science fiction and fantasy. Maia goes out of his way to be kind to people even when they can’t do anything for him, and to think about their hardships even in the midst of his own. This earns him loyalty—he elevates the messenger who delivered the news of his accession to the position of his personal secretary, and finds in him a diligent, intelligent ally—and makes friends of those who were initially suspicious of him, as when he refuses to force his intelligent, scientifically-curious sister into a marriage she doesn’t want. And sometimes, it simply soothes his soul, reminding him that being emperor gives him the power to help people simply because he can.

At the same time, one of the most interesting things about The Goblin Emperor is how it recognizes the limits of kindness. Being kind doesn’t cement Maia’s path to power, for the simple reason that the people whose allegiance he requires aren’t the ones in need of his kindness. No amount of eternally grateful pageboys and ladies in waiting will make up for a skeptical, or even hostile, foreign secretary. And sometimes, kindness even backfires. One mess that Maia must address in the wake of the airship explosion is the question of what to do with his middle brother’s fiancée, who lacks the status of a widow but can’t return to her father’s household. Alone among all the men in her life, Maia asks this woman what she wants, and then allows her to join the household of his oldest brother’s widow, who is one of his staunchest enemies at court. In another story, this would gain Maia an ally, but instead, when the former crown princess launches a coup against him, the woman Maia showed kindness to helps her.

The Goblin Emperor‘s middle segment finds Maia in a funk. He’s addressed some immediate problems and got his household up and running, but his progress in cementing power has stalled. He’s engaged himself to an aristocrat’s daughter—the best and most politic of a limited range of options, with whom he hasn’t exchanged more than a few words. He is mostly ignored in government meetings, and spends his evenings with a crowd of bright young things who clearly would have nothing to say to him if he weren’t emperor. The solution, when it comes, is found not in personal connection, but in a realignment of how he understands his role.

He remembered the moment when his thoughts had inverted themselves—that shift from not being able to please everyone to not trying—and the way that change had enabled him to see past the maneuverings and histrionics of the representatives to the deeper structures of the problem; it was the same with the [ministers]. The surface of their words, which intimidated him so much he had all but given up, was not what he needed to see. 

Being emperor, Maia realizes in a burst of illumination, does not mean understanding every problem or knowing every bit of the system of government—that’s what his advisors and ministers are for. It means steering the ship, and knowing how to select staffers and underlings who are trustworthy and can carry out his vision. This realization—which sets Maia on a path that makes it possible for him to defeat subsequent challenges to his reign—is a political coming of age as much as it is an emotional one.

If Maia’s conclusions sound familiar, I will direct you to a blog post I wrote, many years ago, in which I argued that The West Wing can be profitably read as a work of fantasy on the topic of how to find, and be, a good king. There is something profoundly Sorkinian in how The Goblin Emperor approaches politics, its belief that individual goodness—by which it means not only kindness but a strong sense of duty and responsibility—when married to an effective, well-run system, is not only the best, but perhaps only, means of achieving meaningful social change. Some of its observations on how a wise ruler deals with having absolute power—”An emperor who breaks laws is a mad dog and a danger, but an emperor who will never break a rule is nearly as bad, for he will never be able to recognize when a law must be changed”—feel particularly relevant to our present moment.

It’s perhaps for this reason that The Goblin Emperor bucks the trend of much of the epic fantasy (and space opera) of the last decade, in being about empire without arguing for its dissolution. In the hands of another author, Maia’s response to being placed in control of the system that had victimized and abused him might have been to dismantle or overturn it, not even out of vindictiveness so much as from a recognition of the system’s inherent, perhaps irresolvable flaws. This is what his enemies at court fear, and what they perceive in the quite modest reforms that he enacts. Instead, and despite recognizing the many things that are wrong with the elflands—racial prejudice, profound gender inequality, classism and the abuse of the working classes, queerphobia–Maia is arguably more devoted to them (or to some idealized version of them) than his opponents. When they try to replace him with his nephew, his arguments against their plan are rooted first in the law, and second in his knowledge that a regency is likely to be unstable and chaotic. Rather than being radicalized over the course of the novel, Maia spends it in a process of political maturation, realizing that while he can embody good values on a personal level—supporting his sister’s pursuit of an education, or elevating commoners to positions of trust and power—the real work will be done on the level of the empire itself, and there it will require slow, careful reform. 

There is a profound distrust of radical action in this novel—on the one hand, on the part of Maia’s enemies at court, who believe they can discard the law and seize power without destroying the very thing they claim to be saving; but on the other hand, on the part of the group who turn out to have been responsible for Varenechibel and his sons’ deaths, who espouse a philosophy of radical equality and class war that is dismissed as “a cloud-fancy … for it requires men not to desire power.” When Maia speaks to the architects of the airship explosion, they are to a one fantasists and fools, with one exception—the one who acted radically, but only to achieve a realignment of the system.

“It is the nature of all persons to hold on to power when they have it,” Shulivar said. “Thus it stagnates and becomes clouded, poisonous. Radical action is necessary to free it. And if you look, you will see that it is already working. If I had not done what I did, a half-goblin such as yourself would never have gained the throne of the Ethuveraz.” 

Maia opened his mouth, then closed it again. On that point, Shulivar was right. 

“I can already see the changes,” Shulivar said. “You do not hold on to power as your father and grandfather did. You are not afraid to let it go. And you have new ideas, ideas that no emperor before you has ever had.”

Unlike Bujold—and despite peppering the end of the novel with hints of where its story and characters might go—Addison has not built out The Goblin Emperor into a series. When she returned to the world of the elflands seven years later, it was with a mystery series that viewed its setting from the ground up. As I noted in my review of the second of these books, The Grief of Stones (2022), and as Jake Casella Brookins observed in his review of the third, The Tomb of Dragons (2025), these books, even as they acknowledge the profound rot at the heart of their society, still believe in incremental reform and individual justice rather than radical upheaval. Rereading The Goblin Emperor, it is clear that this was the view Addison was putting forward from day one. Maia, who is not merely kind but also proper, who believes in the law and in custom even though he understands that sometimes they have to be superseded, is not a character who will ever seek to tear it all down. As he muses in the novel’s final sentences, his fate—his great hope—is to spend his reign building bridges.