The Sun Eater

The Sun Eater series is set in a distant future where humanity has colonized the stars and established a vast interstellar empire known as the Sollan Empire. The story is narrated by Hadrian Marlowe, who recounts his life as a reluctant hero and the events that led to his infamous title, "the Sun Eater."

Ruocchio began writing novels in 2011 while at university. After signing with a publisher in 2016, he published Empire of Silence, the first book in the Sun Eater series. The fourth book was split into two separate books, Kingdoms of Death and Ashes of Man, to compensate for rising paper costs.^[2]

Ruocchio was influenced by classical literature and history, as well as authors like Frank Herbert and J. R. R. Tolkien.^[3]

The series has received praise from critics for its scope, worldbuilding, storytelling and characterization.^{[4][5][6][7][8]} Rob H. Bedford, in a review for SFF World compared the first entry Empire of Silence to Herbert's Dune, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind.^[1] Stephen Hubbard of BookReporter commented that the writing quality and depth improved with later instalments in the series.^[9][10]

Ruocchio has attributed a large increase in the series' popularity starting in 2023 – several years after first publication – to positive coverage by BookTube creators making it go viral within these circles. According to Ruocchio, this increased the demand for the series to the point of prompting DAW Books to issue reprints of the hardback edition, in a situation described by him as "unprecedented" for the publisher.^[11]

Ruocchio has also published the novellas The Lesser Devil (2020),^[12] Queen Amid Ashes (2021),^[13] and The Dregs of Empire (2023), along with the short story collections Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 1 (2021), Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 2 (2022), Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 3 (2023), and Tales of the Sun Eater Vol. 4 (2025).