James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s The Floating World is the first volume in Axie Oh’s Floating World secondary universe duology.

Ren and her adopted family (Auntie, Big Uncle, and Little Uncle) comprise a dance troupe that travels from village to village, performing. It’s a good life until a demon attacks Gorye village.

Big Uncle dies and Little Uncle is badly wounded before the demon itself is slain… by Ren. Ren knew she had magical gifts. Auntie had advised against using them in public, but needs must. The power of this particular manifestation came as a surprise.

The aftermath: Little Uncle isn’t healing from his wounds. If a cure cannot be found, he will die. Also, because Ren killed the demon with a blast of magical light, light visible over a wide area, she has attracted attention from people who do not have Ren’s best interests at heart.

Ten years earlier, Sareniya’s queen and her heir both died in what was proclaimed a perfectly mundane tragic accident. It cannot have been a double-assassination. Surely not. Public-spirited General Iljin of the Sareniyan army has stepped into the power vacuum to provide the empire with the firm guidance it needs. While Iljin is not an all-powerful autocrat (yet), few dare to test his hold on power.

Ren’s blast of light might mislead the gullible to believe that she is the presumed-dead heir. Surely Ren is just an undocumented descendent of the powerful celestial maiden who founded Sareniya. Surely it is mere happenstance that she is the same age as the long-dead royal.

The general dispatches bounty hunters to capture or kill Ren. This will prevent needless confusion.

The legions of bounty hunters converging on Ren soon realize that the fewer bounty hunters there are, the more likely that any given bounty hunter will collect the vast reward for capturing Ren. A pitched battle ensues. Among the few survivors is a young man named Sunho. A badly wounded Sunho encounters Ren, who is able to draw on her magic to heal him.

Now Ren has an ally… but one who has an inner demon that is hard to control. Well, that should make it easier to find a cure for Little Uncle, discover where demons come from, avoid the general’s armies, and quite possibly save the kingdom.

~oOo~

I selected this because of the cover.

The mutual near-total party-kill between bounty hunters had powerful One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night vibes.

World-building I could not cram into the previous synopsis: the Floating World is an island-sized body that perpetually levitates above the Under World. Rich and lucky people live on the sunlit, bountiful Floating World. Poor people live in the lightless Under World. Many people in the Floating World appear convinced that the luckless inhabitants of the Under World are born there thanks to their inherent moral depravity.

The Floating World levitates thanks to mithril and the empire’s mithril mines. The supply of mithril isn’t infinite. Relentless resource extraction will eventually result in the destruction of both Floating World and Under World, as the first falls out of the sky and crushes the second¹.

Surely if a nation became aware that their primary economic activity would eventually destroy them, it would have no choice but to restructure the economy. After all, the alternative is inevitable doom. The mithril plot seems pretty far-fetched given that Econ 101 teaches us that all people are perfectly informed rational actors. Don’t make me break out the Lipsey, Sparks, and Steiner²!

Alas, I was apparently not the right audience for this book. The plot struck me as boringly linear. Oh is adept at moving her pieces around, but I could always foresee the next moves. The characters are unremarkable, even if they are competently executed examples of their type. The target market must be young people for whom all of this is new, not nerds who have read thousands of fantasy novels.

The publisher is oddly coy about alerting readers to the fact that this is the first half of a duology. As I don’t hunt down publication information until I compose the review, I didn’t know this was part one. BUT, while there is clearly room for a second volume, this volume is a complete novel and can be read as a stand-alone. That is no small virtue.

Readers who do not care to treat this as a stand-alone, take heart. The sequel, The Demon and the Light, is due out in October 2025.

The Floating World is available here (Feiwel & Friends), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Whether the collapse of Floating Island would be good or bad depends on whether one is Sareniyan or a citizen of the nearby nations subject to Sareniyan imperialist ambitions. On that note, USA delenda est.

2: This is a hilarious economics reference.