Orhan, Colonel of Engineers in the Robur military, happened to be in Classis to get some rope when the city was attacked by pirates. He survived that, managed to get back to his Engineers, and went back to building bridges. On the way back to the Imperial city, he encountered a slaughtered Robur army. He then sneaked his Engineers into the city and ended up in command of the whole place, being the ranking military officer of a city ill-prepared for a siege. But being an engineer with a decent compliment of fellow engineers, Orhan and associates manage to hang on until help arrived in the nick of time. Unfortunately, not a happy ending for Orhan.

Now that I know that Tom Holt is writing as K. J. Parker, I will need to add a whole bunch more titles to my to read pile. What fun!

Usually it’s the plucky band of rapscallions who stage a breakout, and the plucky band of heroes who hold the defense. This time it’s the plucky rapscallions doing the defending! That’s the first, but far from the last, twist on pretty much everything you expect from this genre – and every other genre that it sends up, down or sideways during the course of the story.

At first, this reminded me in a very peculiar way of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books. Like I said, it’s peculiar. But that series is quasi-military SF told from the perspective of the people who keep things running – and not the people who usually take those things into harm’s way.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is more-or-less military fantasy told from that same perspective. Orhan is the Colonel of Engineers for the military of an empire that has subjugated not just his people, but pretty much every people around that is not themselves – and then keeps them down while looking for more people to conquer and subjugate.

The Robur Empire sounds a lot like the Roman Empire. I don’t just mean the two words are similar, I mean that the two empires are very similar. And use similar sounding names and offices and officers and procedures and well, it actually drove me a bit batty. It all sounds so much like Rome that I half expected something to explain the similarity – which otherwise makes no sense.

I don’t mean that the similarities of systems make no sense – Rome makes a great antecedence for how to and not to run an empire, I mean that the constant congruence of names for things and people and places made no sense. Although on my other hand, Orhan is the most unreliable of narrators it has ever been my media consuming pleasure to run across. And I’m including Varric Tethras in that tally of unreliability. Varric is more lovable, but he’s a shade more reliable. Or a shade less shady. Or both.

The story in Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City can be taken in multiple ways. Looking at it from one angle, it’s the story of an extremely unlikely hero who rises up and defends the besieged capital of an empire that treats him as a fourth-class citizen at best.

The problem for Orhan is that as an engineer, he can’t resist trying to solve this biggest of all problems. And that his friends are on the inside of the city. He’s not so much defending it as defending them – whether they appreciate it or not.

Another way of looking at the whole thing is from the perspective that the siege of the capital, and the dismantling of the empire that precedes it, is just all of the empire’s chickens, its nasty and terrible treatment of all of the many, many people it has subjugated, all coming home to roost in one giant pile of chickenshit.

With a bit of accelerant, manure burns really, really well. The empire has been providing plenty of impetus and accelerant for centuries – now it’s time to watch the explosion. Unless Orhan can manage to stop it from happening – one underhanded way or another.

Escape Rating B: This is a very mixed feelings kind of review. I loved the opening scenes of the story. The over-the-top snarkitude of the narrator was terrific and terrifically funny as well. It’s the sort of thing that makes a reader snerk and chortle every page.

Orhan has spent his career finagling the system in order to get the job done – but his internal dialog about exactly what he has to do, why he has to do it, and how easy it is to get it done because the system is so stupid, are good for a seemingly endless supply of wry chuckles.

But once the siege begins, Orhan, in spite of himself, becomes the authority – not because he wants to be but because he just can’t see that there’s any other way to survive. He’s dead certain – and more than occasionally nearly just plain dead, that anyone else would just get it wrong. Wrong-er. More wrong.

And while his many and varied attempts at getting all the city’s warring factions to work together make an interesting exercise in social engineering, they just aren’t as interesting as when Orhan and his crew were on their own. By himself, things going wrong until the last minute were funny. As the person in charge, it’s not funny at all.

The ending of the story, or rather Orhan’s end to the story, completely blew me away. But for this reader the middle went on too long. Your reading mileage may vary – no matter what units you use to measure it.

It’s been a good long while since I last read a K.J. Parker book, and he’s one of my favorites; so that’s kind of annoying. The most recent spate of story he pumped out prior to this book was the Two of Swords trilogy, which was originally released as a serial novel — meaning a small section at a time with oodles of sections. I wasn’t much into paying the exorbitant amount of money that serial novel would have cost me to get them all as they were e-published, so I put off purchasing them until they’d been happily compiled into three “books”. But, unfortunately, I’ve never gotten back to them. Need to rectify that, I know, but who has the time? Seriously. Maybe after Dark Age is finally out and my reading queue has settled down a bit.

SIXTEEN WAYS TO DEFEND A WALLED CITY (Amazon) is a stand-alone novel about the siege of the capital city of the Robur Empire. If you’re familiar with the works of this author, you’ll know that he loves to write stories about war, include loads of technical detail about engineering and forgery and coinage, and writes character that is so often just brilliant. I also happen to find his writing absolutely hilarious, which helps.

Orhan, is the colonel of a band of bridge-building engineers. They spend their lives, and the money of the empire, building bridges where they are needed. They travel much, build much, and really try their best to stay away from any actual fighting. Because, you see, Orhan is a coward. He also happens to be a liar and a cheater, and in common terms is sixteen ways not what you’d expect from a sympathetic main character. And yet his narration (explicitly accurate or not), about himself and his struggles to try and save the capital city from being destroyed by those that seek to see the Empire of the Robur crushed and eradicated from the world, is witty and sarcastic and darkly humorous in all the best ways. It never takes me more than a few pages to come across something that makes me chuckle, or guffaw, or stop and catch my breath as I laugh my guts out. I certainly spent my fair share of time laughing while ingesting this one.

The story is a “historical” account of the events surrounding the attack of the Robur Empire, as told by Orhan himself. An empire that has grown in size and prominence until it can barely contain itself. Despite Orhan’s best efforts to the contrary, the people surrounding him contrive to put him in such a position that there is no one else left to direct the defense of the city when an army comes knocking on their door. So he has to do it. And because there is no one else left, and the fact that he is so ridiculously practical about solving such problems, Orhan sets about to do exactly that.

This novel just flows really well. Pacing, world-building, character. One scene naturally leads into the next, and it’s ridiculously simple to find yourself reading past your deadlines. Whether they be set by you, someone else, or the setting of the sun. Past readers will notice plenty of easter eggs along the way as well. References abound from the single alternate world within which so many, if not all, of Parker’s tales are told. People and places and empires, histories. More and more he’s detailing an entire world, and the further I get into his books and his tales, the more realistic they all become. The level of familiarity I have with it all just makes it feel like the “more” that fantasy stories need to survive.

K.J. Parker books are some of the few non-speculative books I can read where I don’t find myself pining for something fantastical. Yes, they are technically fantasy, because they’re told in a made up world about made up people. There’s so very little of anything that you’d normally find in a more traditional fantasy book though. Things like dragons and magic and oodles of other made-up goodness. Just not there. Apparently he doesn’t believe in adding them to his stories, which normally I’d take umbrage with, but in this case am willing to give him fair license to write whatever he jolly well will.

There was actually only one thing that I felt this book was lacking — and some of my friends are going to get a huge kick out of this, because they’ve all talked to me about exactly this issue before — and that’s a decent ending. There was actually no kind of ending to this book, and honestly that kicked me in the face just a little bit. Still, as I mentioned in my previous review about still liking books where I enjoyed the read but the ending wasn’t all that hot, I can still say that I fully enjoyed reading this one. Granted, the “story” as it is, does come to some sort of a conclusion, but it’s a lot like the conclusion of Lord of the Flies, where everything just stops. You remember that one? Actually, that’s a pretty apt comparison, now that I think about it. Only I much preferred the details of the way this one stopped than that classic piece of literature.

If you’ve loved K.J. Parker’s stuff before, and like me can look past his frequent lackluster endings, this is very much a book that you will enjoy reading. It’s every bit the novel that I’ve come to expect from him. Her. Him. Ugh. Can you believe it? I still get that mixed up sometimes. This is a great example of the author’s work and really a fun read. Check it out.

Sometimes a book surprises you because it turns out to be completely different from what you expected, and in this case that surprise was a delightful one, indeed: I picked up this book on impulse, despite the scant information offered by the synopsis, because that unfathomable instinct that I’ve come to call “book vibes” was strongly drawn to it, and once again it proved to be right on target.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is the story of a siege, and also the story of the man defending the besieged city from the unknown assailants who are cutting through the Robur Empire’s territory like a hot knife through butter. Orhan is a colonel in the engineering corps of the Robur army despite being a “milkface”: the Robur, blue skinned and aggressive, have conquered Orhan’s people and look down on them as inferior, unworthy of consideration, the prime targets for slavery and abuse, but Orhan’s engineering skills have brought him to this favored position that allows him a modicum of freedom of movement and independence.

When a few pirate-like sorties against Robur military depots turn out to be a bold move by an unknown enemy, who is able to provision his army and turn the stolen ordnance and weapons against their former owners, Orhan understands that something dire is afoot and manages to close the gates of the empire’s main city before the invaders can storm the walls. Not a military man by a long stretch (his favorite catchphrase is “I’m just an engineer”), he is however able to shore up the City’s defenses and to give it a chance of surviving beyond the mere hours that would have been the foregone conclusion if the assailants’ ruse had worked – and he manages this feat despite the ineffective short-sightedness of the ranking officials and the social turmoil always brewing under the surface.

Orhan’s success in what looks like a desperate undertaking comes from the fact that besides his engineering skills, which are quite remarkable, he’s a self-declared liar and a cheat, and he knows how to deal with all layers of society acting as a middleman between apparently incompatible parties, as testified by his greatest feat, the truce he forces on the two rival underground factions, the Blues and the Greens, compelling them to work together for the common survival and making them see reason beyond the age-old enmities, at least for a while; he also knows how to turn to his advantage the scant resources at his disposal, paying for them with somewhat counterfeit coins and carrying on through misinformation and double dealing, which seem to come to him as second nature. A man more attached to the values of honor and integrity would not have managed to accomplish as much, while Orhan’s flexible standards grant him a far wider leeway – and success.

What’s truly amazing in Orhan’s achievement is that he keeps saving the City despite its inhabitants, who keep seeing him as a milkface interloper, an upstart who should know better than to try and rise above his station, and yet they end up being swept along by the man’s sheer force of conviction – and sometimes his fists, when needed. One of the driving themes of the story is that of racism and rigid social stratification, and despite the lightly humorous tone employed by Orhan’s first-person narrative it’s not difficult to see how the Robur rule has created the kind of social order in which the dehumanization of some strata of the empire has become an accepted fact of life, even by those who are its main victims. This is an element that plays an important part in the motivations of the invading enemy and in Orhan’s inner conflict once he learns the nature and identity of said enemy: I don’t want to delve deeper into this side of the story because it should be discovered on its own, but it’s interesting to note how the engineer’s apparently carefree approach to the question offers a great deal of food for thought and discussion on the subject of loyalty, even toward those who don’t deserve it.

Orhan’s personality is a deceptively simple one: on the surface, all he cares about is building things, his pride lays in a work well done and one that endures through time, so that the narrative of the siege is carried out in a humorous, self-deprecating tone that belies his true nature and his past history. In the course of events, we are made privy to the facts and incidents that made Orhan the man he is now, and as the details pile up we begin to understand that there is more under the façade of the “simple engineer”, including something of a mean streak – not that it comes as a surprise, in consideration of his lying and cheating, but some of those instances shed a very peculiar light on him. Ultimately, it becomes evident that Orhan is an unreliable narrator, not least because he’s the one dictating the story we are reading, and by his own admission he’s not averse to embellishing some of the facts to shine a more positive light on himself. Orhan gives a whole new meaning to the concept of reluctant hero, since he does not seem to mind embellishing some his deeds, but on the other hand he's trying his best to avoid the trouble that comes from doing what needs to be done.

One of the best features in this book is its narrative quality, a lightly witty mood that’s kept constant all throughout the story and attains that right balance that’s often so difficult to manage and that K.J. Parker handles with no apparent effort. This, together with a steady pace, made breezing through the book a joy, marred only by what seems an abrupt ending, one that left me with too many unanswered questions and a strong desire to know what happened next. It's the only blemish I can think of in this story that turned out to be so much more than I bargained for.

Entertaining and engaging fantasy novel. I laughed out loud a few times, which is something of a rarity. It's not to be mistaken for high fantasy (thank God), but fans of fantasy and even those new to the genre should enjoy it.

K.J. Parker is never better than when he's telling a story from the 1st-person viewpoint of a terrific character. The Saloninus books have been the best example of this. Until now.
This story is told by Orhan, son of Siyyah Doctus Felix Praeclarissimus, who is the Colonel of the Imperial Regiment of Engineers. He's good at his job, if for no other reason than that he knows how to get the things he needs, in a world of bureaucracy.
But we're also not sure how much to believe him. After all, as he himself tells us, "Lies have consistently and reliably done me far more good than the truth."
Through no choice of his own, Orhan is tasked with leading the defense of his city against invaders. It's not what he wants. "I'm not a soldier. All I ever wanted to prevail over was a few rivers." But he uses experience, ingenuity, and occasional dumb luck to keep the sieging forces at bay.
The book takes place in our far future (Orhan mentions a weird cult that sprang up around someone claiming to be God's son, who died and was resurrected after three days). And it takes place in the same world as at least some of Parker's other works (Saloninus is name-dropped). But it's utterly standalone--though I hope it's not alone; I would love to read more books about Orhan. Leave it to Parker to make being an engineer as exciting and fun as any great warrior. Highly recommended.

One thing I love about being a K.J. Parker fan is not only what a prolific author he is, but also his stories are consistently excellent and full of unique and innovative ideas. In addition, he’s a versatile writer, always testing his limits by venturing into different spheres of speculative fiction.

I went into Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City feeling optimistic, mostly because Parker rarely lets me down. Like almost everything these days, his stories may build upon the foundation of existing ideas, but I also felt confident that this book would not read like a checklist of fantasy tropes. No, this one is UNIQUE AS HELL. Parker brings his own brand of storytelling and creative concepts to the table.

This book is pretty dark bringing a lot of themes that deal with war as our main character Orhan, a chief of engineers, a misunderstood protagonist who looks back at his long and storied life. who has to defend the City against an unknown enemy that seems to have annihilated all the Imperial armies. Things get real interesting at this point. Pacing is swift as Orhan is shuffled through all kinds of tragedies, leaving me barely enough time to catch my breath between disasters. The highlight of the book for me was our protagonist’s brief stint as a colonel, hanging out with his fellow fighters and teaching them to fight effectively as a team.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a rock solid fantasy, It has superb character development and the sheer “unputdownability” of his storytelling to evident. Mark my words, this book is going places.