Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is an English language historical military fiction novel by British novelist Tom Holt, published in 2019 under his pen name K. J. Parker. It is written from the first person perspective of Orhan, a military civil engineer and logistician, and takes place during the siege of an unnamed fictional city at the heart of an empire, clearly based on Rome. Over the course of the narrative, Orhan finds himself in charge of ever-greater responsibilities in organising the defense of the city, with more and more power being transferred to him as those at the top of the patrician social class are stripped of influence or killed during bombardment by catapults and other siege weaponry. Orhan himself is loosely modeled off the ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, author of De architectura, the title of which is commonly rendered into English as The Ten Books on Architecture - an obvious inspiration to the title of Holt's novel. Orhan's personality is ticklishly unpleasant; he is a delightful character to dislike as a person, at the same time as the reader wants him to succeed, just to see what wild methods he will use to accomplish that success... and yet when he fails, it is just as fun to watch him fail, because he is a miserable enough individual that it usually feels like he had it coming. For those familiar with the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett, Orhan is like if the characters of Moist von Lipwig and Samuel Vimes were thrown together into a blender, then seasoned liberally with the driest possible British humour. Reliably funny and fairly relatable, Orhan faces ever-escalating stakes with complete gracelessness, and it feels appropriate that he should be so graceless and put-upon: the reader shares Orhan's frustrations with the inefficiencies of bureaucracy and politics.
Sixteen Ways has two sequels, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It (2020) and A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (2022), which follow different protagonists from the first novel, looking at the events of the siege and its aftermath through the eyes of other citizens. Each book in the series features a main character who finds himself in the unenviable position of having far more power than he wants, while thousands of other citizens are eager for someone convenient to blame (and publicly execute) for their economic and political woes.
While the sequels are somewhat harder to get into, due to their abandonment of Orhan's point of view, and the attending "adjustment period" to the perspective of a new main character, I do consider all three books rather excellent, and I can readily recommend them to anyone who enjoys Discworld, as well as fans of progression fantasies and LitRPGs, who enjoy some meticulous realism and real-world-relevant social commentary in a fantasy novel. I would also especially highly recommend it to fans of Glen Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company, Sebastien de Castell's Greatcoats series, Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series, and Andy Weir's The Martian. These books are full of action and meticulously believable problem-solving (for believably complicated problems), and Sixteen Ways offers a synthesis of many of the narrative features which make these other works so engaging.
Iron Noder 2023, 8/30