sixthlight

I just finished The Hands of the Emperor myself. I had a very similar reaction to it -- there were a dozen places where the author covers essentially the same material twice over, and it's not just a paragraph, it's pages and pages, even whole chapters worth. I found it vaguely frustrating that we're told endlessly how brilliant the main character is, but there are precious few details about how his perfect government works, and how he manages to pay for it, and how incredibly lucky he is that he just happens to have worked under the one all-powerful God-Emperor who's just fine with turning his empire into and anarcho-syndicalist commune. And the cannibal bit made me wince; it reeked of white-author-over-compensating.

I remember loving the Darwath Trilogy back in the 80s, but I remember almost nothing about the plot except that it was Excessively Cold for some reason, and it sounds like it hasn't aged well.