To not think language
Dec. 22nd, 2021 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn my big stack of library books I got Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to her excellent A Memory Called Empire. In this one, the Empire is fighting a war with some incomprehensible scary aliens over just outside Lsel space; Mahit is moping around Lsel Station trying to avoid the Councilor for Heritage; and Three Seagrass is bored at her office job–at least until she gets a request that the Information Ministry send someone good with languages to try to broker a first-contact negotiation with the scary aliens, all the way over right outside Lsel Station. Three Seagrass instantly appoints herself and scoops up Mahit on the way for diplomacy and linguistic consulting reasons and definitely not any other reasons than that. From there, things go poorly for everyone, including a bunch of new viewpoint characters–Eight Antidote, the eleven-year-old heir to the Empire; Nine Hibiscus, the yaotlek in charge of the fleet fighting the aliens; and various Lsel Councilors.
I didn’t have as easy a time getting into this as I did the first book, which probably has at least as much to do with my focus and headspace right now as it does with the book itself. I did find it perfectly interesting when I was able to put my phone down and actually read it. I had some questions like “why did it take everyone so fucking long to find out that the alien’s big secret is that they’re a hivemind; they’re always a hivemind” but perhaps that is just me being too achy and cranky to remember to keep that fourth wall up in my brain. The sex scene is fine but all the scenes after the sex scene that reference it are very funny because everyone involved is about to die at any given moment and yet they are very distracted reminiscing. Sixteen Moonrise is an extremely hateable villain; she’s not the highest-ranking villain and is not even the primary driver of villain-ness in the story (that comes higher up in the relevant Ministry) but she’s in Nine Hibiscus’ (and therefore the reader’s) face being nasty and aggro and generally infuriating all the time, so it’s cathartic when she is, shall we say, defeated. The other secondary characters are fun, too; I really enjoyed the eleven-year-old Eight Antidote’s adventures in learning how to become a spy and attempting to figure out grown-up politics. Twenty Cicada is the kind of weird secondary character that you wish you got to learn more about–definitely the sort of thing I could see Martine writing a short story about, as a special treat for all us fans of Tor.com disaster-queers-in-space books.
Anyway, I don’t know if there’s supposed to be a third book? This one’s main plotline seemed to wrap up nice and neatly but a bunch of the subplots didn’t quite. We shall see, I suppose.
I didn’t have as easy a time getting into this as I did the first book, which probably has at least as much to do with my focus and headspace right now as it does with the book itself. I did find it perfectly interesting when I was able to put my phone down and actually read it. I had some questions like “why did it take everyone so fucking long to find out that the alien’s big secret is that they’re a hivemind; they’re always a hivemind” but perhaps that is just me being too achy and cranky to remember to keep that fourth wall up in my brain. The sex scene is fine but all the scenes after the sex scene that reference it are very funny because everyone involved is about to die at any given moment and yet they are very distracted reminiscing. Sixteen Moonrise is an extremely hateable villain; she’s not the highest-ranking villain and is not even the primary driver of villain-ness in the story (that comes higher up in the relevant Ministry) but she’s in Nine Hibiscus’ (and therefore the reader’s) face being nasty and aggro and generally infuriating all the time, so it’s cathartic when she is, shall we say, defeated. The other secondary characters are fun, too; I really enjoyed the eleven-year-old Eight Antidote’s adventures in learning how to become a spy and attempting to figure out grown-up politics. Twenty Cicada is the kind of weird secondary character that you wish you got to learn more about–definitely the sort of thing I could see Martine writing a short story about, as a special treat for all us fans of Tor.com disaster-queers-in-space books.
Anyway, I don’t know if there’s supposed to be a third book? This one’s main plotline seemed to wrap up nice and neatly but a bunch of the subplots didn’t quite. We shall see, I suppose.