The Annotated Baru Cormorant

The Baru Cormorant series, by Seth Dickinson, is an epic fantasy, a political treatise, a queer character study, a real-world mirror; and every page fizzes and bubbles with secret meaning.

As I read I was nascently aware of details slipping past me. Thoughtful worldbuilding. Historical allusions. Unsolved (but solvable) murders. Hidden agendas abound… double, triple, even quadruple agents wind their way through the plot.

Inspired by Andrew Plotkin’s Draco Concordans (for John M Ford’s similarly excellent The Dragon Waiting), I present to you the Annotated Baru Cormorant.

The goal is to document everything a reader might miss. Much of this may be unnecessary. My hope is to, at least, provide a deeper understanding to all the hidden aspects of these books.

I have also strived to reproduce author commentary, mostly from this series of blog posts. This commentary is also intentionally incomplete; Dickinson avoids alluding to significant twists or later reveals, preferring instead to remark on small worldbuilding details or linguistic turns.

This annotated copy will contain spoilers. Particularly, there will be spoilers for all three books from the very first chapters of the first novel (The Traitor Baru Cormorant). Say again: do not begin reading The Annotated Baru Cormorant unless you have read all the way to the end of The Tyrant Baru Cormorant.

Other sources that were essential in the creation of these annotations:

• canmom’s excellent series of essays on the series
• Sid Jain
• the author’s q+a
• this interview

Before beginning, a general observation: Baru is a severely unreliable narrator. I have tried to makes notes with this in mind.

Where not quoting other writers, all opinions are my own.

• The Traitor Baru Cormorant