A Desolation Called Peace

Took me a while to get going on this on – picks up where the previous one left off, which apparently was after the Emperor of Teixcalaan performed a ritual suicide on live TV and aliens representing an existential threat were unveiled. I still have a hard time remembering who is who – everyone from Teixcalaan has a number noun type of name, like Three Seagrass or Nineteen Adze or Sixteen Moonrise, unless they are from Lsel, like the ambassador to Teixcalaan, Mahit Dzmare.

This novel isn’t really sure what it is – at once a palace intrigue novel, space opera, culture clash novel. It never really rises above the sum of it’s parts for me, in part because nothing really seems to happen in it’s nearly 500 pages. A few plots swirling: Mahit Dzmare has come home to Lsel after leaving Teixcalaan, only to find herself embroiled in some petty political intrigue with a few of the 6 Ministers in charge of the station. Nine Hibiscus, newly designated yaotlek, or fleet captain, is battling the existentially dreadful aliens on the fringes of the empire’s boundaries, and is dealing with near political maneuverings of those in her command. Three Seagrass, undersecretary of some office or another, is sent to the front lines with Nine Hibiscus to make first contact with the aliens. And finally, Eight Antidote, the 11 year old previous emperor’s clone and heir to the current throne behind Nineteen Adze, does stuff in the capital.

It feels like the book is on the cusp of saying interesting things about self, identity, language, and culture, but it never really says anything interesting about those topics, instead just allaying them via plot points and allowing the reader to make their own conclusions. The plot moves steadily along, and reviewers have called this second novel “more cerebral”, but I found it all just middling. All the plot points have been done elsewhere – first contact with a hivemind, this new fascination with a sort of proto-Aztec future society, space colonialism, etc. The book isn’t bad per se – I cruised through it, it just didn’t blow me away.

I keep coming back to a review I once read that talked about what science fiction felt safe to take as a topic. Is it a matter of how much of the human drama is the plot? How much of the technology factors? Is it just, anything in space with aliens is science fiction, the scale inevitably humongous? Always an existential threat to humanity, but some of my favorite science fiction narrows scope, deals with the intimately human. Need to think more on this.