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Title: Debt of Deceit
Series:
Empire Rising #17
Author: David Holmes
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages:
478
Words: 183K
Publish: 2023
The Void War – 440 pages August 2015
A King’s Ship – 490 pages August 2016
Return to Haven – 495 pages December 2016
The Price of Liberty – 566 pages May 2017
Firestorm – 456 pages April 2018
Siege of Earth – 720 pages June 2019
Mutineer – 530 pages November 2019
Empire’s Doom – 544 pages April 2020
Empire’s Birth – 487 pages August 2020
Imperial Command – 487 pages December 2020
Counterstrike – 525 pages April 2021
Last Stand – 522 pages September 2021
Empire’s Gambit – 746 January 2022
Burden of Command – 557 pages May 2022
Into the Breach – 579 pages September 2022
Shadow Strike – 693 pages February 2023
Debt of Deceit – 718 pages June 2023
Call of Honor – 626 pages October 2023
Battle of the Wilds – 726 pages March 2024
Empire’s End – 609 August 2024
Inheritance of War – 560 pages January 2025
Empire Divided – 696 pages May 2025
*new series
The Voyage Home – 572 pages November 2017
Voyage into Darkness – 531 pages November 2018
That is 24 books in 10 years. That is just under 14,000 pages in 10 years. To put that in perspective, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen was 10 books long, was approximately 11,000 pages long and took 12 years to complete. The complexity and pure pigheadedness shown by the obvious obfuscation of characters and events in Malazan could only have been done by a human. I am still not convinced that DJ Holmes wrote this Empire Rising series on his own, without the help of AI to do all the heavy pushing.
Whether AI was utilized to write this series or not doesn’t affect my decision to finish it. However, it does influence whether I will continue to read anything else by Holmes (that’ll be a big ol’ “NO” in case you were wondering).
This is not bad writing, but neither has it changed in the 10 years that “DJ Holmes” has been writing it. The characters are exactly the same, just with different damaged parts and being “older”, mainly shown by phsyical things. There is no character growth, which means Holmes hasn’t improved as an author either. This will be the first book I’m giving the tag “AI Written”. I am concerned it will not be the last :-(
★★★☆☆
