There are many ways to write a sequel and many ways to tell an epic story. IMMACULATE SCOUNDRELS, the first SCALEBORN NOVEL, was a rogues-eye view of a new world, a very "in-your-face" Wuxia-meets-Western-meets-80s-Sword-&-Sorcery film that only in its final chapter drew back the curtain on a larger vista.
In TIMES NEVER CHANGE, Fultz begins to show what lies across those vistas; the machinations of Empire, and of the mysterious Empress, who, depending on whom one asks, is either a murdering usurper or fierce defender of her dead husband's throne and a joint vision they shared. To weave this tale, we leave the doughty crew we met in SCOUNDRELS behind and instead step right into the world of the imperial court, and the mysterious Empress herself--both as she is now, and whom she was decades earlier. In these juxtapositions we learn the Empress has been a peasant, a changeling, a merchant-prince, an assassin, a stepmother to two Scaleborn foundlings and the architect of a plan so bold it shouldn't be revealed in a book review!
Meanwhile, a rival party, determined to see the Empress overthrown, arrive at distant mountain hermitage where a near-immortal monk has spent centuries meditating, an all but living statue. Rousing the monk from his trance we learn he is the dead Emperor's young brother, a master warrior and sorcerer who has renounced magic, a figure of great virtue and great tragedy haunted by some past deed that his long meditations have not let him escape. But now he is needed to avenge his brother, and save the realm, or so he is told.
As these two giants move into an inevitable clash, we move back and forth the timeline and more and more of the history of the Scaleborn, the human sorcerers who conquered and enslaved them, and the Empire that rules them, are revealed. This is epic stuff, yet packed into a slim novel and told again with the intensity of Western or wuxia. If there was a fair bit of Peckinpah and the 60s gritty western told through a Tarantino-style lens in SCOUNDRELS; TIMES NEVER CHANGE is more UNFORGIVEN-meets-CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.
That's a big shift, and the fact that it works almost perfectly is a big credit to Fultz as writer--and of course, saying your prose can channel the stylings of Peckinpah, Tarantino, Eastwood and Lee, all in one series and create a thematic whole is nothing to dismiss. This is a complex robust world, and it is the world and the Scaleborn as a people who are the characters; it is obvious the author knows exactly what he is about in its unfolding and I'm in for the journey.
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