A Desolation Called Peace

What follows is the review of a sequel. I avoid spoilers for this novel, but can’t talk about it without mentioning plot points from A Memory Called Empire.

Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire won last year’s Hugo Award for best novel, kicking off a vast new space opera centered on the conflict between the Lsel Station and the Teixcalaanli Empire. I only read one of the other finalists for the award but found A Memory Called Empire the vastly superior of the two and a worthy Hugo winner. The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, is significantly better than the debut.

A Desolation Called Peace picks up several months after the events of A Memory Called Empire. Nineteen Adze’s accession to the throne has stabilized Teixcalaan even as the war against the unknown aliens has begun with the dispatch of six legions under the leadership of newly promoted Yaotlek Nine Hibiscus — a woman dangerous enough that observers wondered if the new emperor hopes she will die. Eight Antidote, the young clone of the deceased emperor and imperial heir, has begun training with the military establishment. Meanwhile, Three Seagrass, a functionary with the imperial intelligence has dispatched herself to the front lines, albeit with an unscheduled pit stop on Lsel to pick up the ambassador Mahit Dzmare — who is herself in political hot water and suspected of selling out Lsel secrets to Teixcalaan.

Martine deftly weaves numerous threads of political scheming throughout A Desolation Called Peace: Mahit against several different Lsel councillors; Eight Antidote who Nineteen Adze has begun calling little spy, Nine Hibiscus and her second, Twenty Cicada who she called Swarm, against potentially seditious subordinates. These plots give the novel pacing something like that of a political thriller. The reader sees each of these schemes unfold in roughly real-time as each chapter skips from one point of view to another.

However, the political machinations are not the core of A Desolation Called Peace.

This is a novel about first contact and what defines civilization. The latter themes were present in A Memory Called Empire where the two civilizations had vastly different attitudes toward memory, with Lsel relying on imago technology to implant the expertise from one generation to another and Teixcalaan nominally prizing “natural” memory preserved through poetic allusions. The tension between Lsel and Teixcalaan remains extant in A Desolation Called Peace, but now Martine introduces aspects of Teixcalaanli hypocrisy and both cultures are facing an alien enemy that is distinctly not human and clearly does not have the same values. They have potent technology, but it is unclear to the humans whether the nauseating screeching that they intercepted even constitutes language.

It is this mystery that Three Seagrass and Mahit must unravel even as the political conflicts rage behind and around them. At the same time, the war continues. Small vessels appear out of the darkness of space to inflict casualties on the Teixcalaanli legions and Teixcalaanli scouts probe into the unknown seeking a target that they can strike. It is a race to determine which approach will win out even though no one is certain that either one will work.

The overriding tension between the two approaches builds on and supersedes the other political dramas and makes for a compelling story. Even better, though, are Martine’s answers. As the novel raced toward its end, I couldn’t help but see it as an answer to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. In that classic novel, Ender is a brilliant child raised and reared for the purpose of guiding humanity’s war against an alien race, the Formics, that had once attacked earth. After the crucible of the Battle School, the expectation is that Ender will have the capacity to do the unthinkable in order to win and thus save humanity. Faced with a similar existential threat against an unknown enemy in A Desolation Called Peace, the outcome is much different. Most of the humans remain narrowly focused on their own desires such that engaging warfare that could result in xenocide seems like a nearly inevitable outcome.

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My reading has been all over the map of late and I am not going to write about everything. Since my last book post I finished two non-fiction books Kim Ghattas’ Black Wave, which was an incisive look at sectional conflict in the Middle East and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. I also have finished three other novels, Eric Ambler’s early spy thriller Epitaph for a Spy, Toni Morrison’s brilliant The Bluest Eye about a young black woman who dreams of being white, and H.G. Parry’s A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians. This last one was alternate history featuring magic that received some buzz for being like Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, but I found it more than a little disappointing in that it sacrificed Clarke’s gift for inserting magic into the shadowy corners of our world in favor of giving real characters and events a veneer of magic.