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[book post] A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
For the first half, this novel was a rollicking-fun ball of adventure-intrigue. A little predictable and on-the-nose, sure, but thoroughly fun with a lovable cast.
It suffers a bit from what a friend of mine called "the heist problem"—you need your cast to be clever enough that we're impressed by and pleased with them, but not so clever that it feels like the plot's been set up as a contrivance to demonstrate their cleverness. There are some confrontations early on that I like very much, but also feel... a bit contrived... but my badass faves DID get to be badass... so I'm torn!
It also suffers from the multiple-POV problem, where you just plain care more about some plot threads than others. In summary:
* Nine Hibiscus: hell yeah, give me badass lady starship captains doing war ALL DAY LONG
* Mahit: interesting enough; it's cool to see Lsel Station & chat with Yskandr
* Three Seagrass: her stuff ain't deep and doesn't really move the plot but.... it IS entertaining
* Eight Antidote: zzzz, don't care don't care don't care
Near the beginning, the switches between POVs were frequent enough, and each of the plot threads were interesting enough, that they served mostly to amp up the suspense and keep me turning pages.
Around the middle, though, I started getting annoyed (oh god another Eight Antidoe section just shoot me), and also I needed to sleep sometime, and I just wanted to know what the aliens' deal was, so I skim-read ahead to find out that deal...
...and then the ending made me TOO angry to fall asleep. Alas. I finished reading the book properly a few days later, and while I wasn't quite as furious with the ending in context, I didn't much like it either. (I think. I'm still chewing on it!)
Caveat: I liked Two Cicada so thoroughly and so immediately that it's possible I'm not being rational about him. This is my DW and not the damn LRB, so blessedly I can disclaim that upfront rather than unpacking all that.
Given that caveat, I'm still pretty disappointed by how they ended both him and the novel. The "eat the fungus and join the hivemind" solution is too tidy and works too quickly. Moreover, this solution ends Two Cicada, who had all the ingredients to become such a fascinating character. We know he's an Empire citizen (unlike Mahit) who's never quite fully assimilated (quite like Mahit!), and unlike Mahit he seems entirely comfortable with himself as a walking contradiction. If you really wanted to explore the themes that the Teixcalaan books seem to be interested (alienation, empire, identity), that seems like a character you'd want to dig into—really dig into. He's held at just enough remove that I'm not sure what his deal is, exactly. (Why is he so into his religion? Is he fully into the Empire or does he harbor some misgivings that we never see because he's just so competent at his job? Does he have any kind of community on the ship? etc)
But instead of exploring any of those angles, he's "killed" to produce a Very Sad Moment and to Very Conveniently Save The Day. Augh.
It's the kind of promising-yet-underdeveloped story element that I'm more used to from video game plots, frankly. (Which is not to throw shade on video games, exactly, just—the reason I habitually fic them is because they tend to leave so much unexplored, right? That's not exactly what I want in my books! You can use your words and explore things!)
Even on a thematic level, though I can see what Martine's aiming for, I don't think the ending quite lands. It's clear Martine wants to push on the whole "when do you start to regard someone else as a person" thing, by paralleling the shard-sight with the aliens' hive-mind with the Stationers' imago-memory, but it feels rather rushed (shard-sight isn't explored until near the end, and likewise the horror and taboo around imago-machines is only briefly touched on in this volume, in a rather distant way). And it's not entirely clear what Two Cicada has to do with these themes—I could headcanon something that makes sense, but, all that's on the page is, he had to die to make Nine Hibiscus sad. So.
Admittedly most of what I'm suggesting would make A Desolation Called Peace a much longer book, and it's already pretty long! But the tidiness means there's not much of a hope of exploring all that interesting potential down the line. Weh.
Overall I enjoyed it, but it's a more uneven, lumpy, weirdly-plotted novel than its predecessor—which means higher highs, but also lower lows.
It suffers a bit from what a friend of mine called "the heist problem"—you need your cast to be clever enough that we're impressed by and pleased with them, but not so clever that it feels like the plot's been set up as a contrivance to demonstrate their cleverness. There are some confrontations early on that I like very much, but also feel... a bit contrived... but my badass faves DID get to be badass... so I'm torn!
It also suffers from the multiple-POV problem, where you just plain care more about some plot threads than others. In summary:
* Nine Hibiscus: hell yeah, give me badass lady starship captains doing war ALL DAY LONG
* Mahit: interesting enough; it's cool to see Lsel Station & chat with Yskandr
* Three Seagrass: her stuff ain't deep and doesn't really move the plot but.... it IS entertaining
* Eight Antidote: zzzz, don't care don't care don't care
Near the beginning, the switches between POVs were frequent enough, and each of the plot threads were interesting enough, that they served mostly to amp up the suspense and keep me turning pages.
Around the middle, though, I started getting annoyed (oh god another Eight Antidoe section just shoot me), and also I needed to sleep sometime, and I just wanted to know what the aliens' deal was, so I skim-read ahead to find out that deal...
...and then the ending made me TOO angry to fall asleep. Alas. I finished reading the book properly a few days later, and while I wasn't quite as furious with the ending in context, I didn't much like it either. (I think. I'm still chewing on it!)
Caveat: I liked Two Cicada so thoroughly and so immediately that it's possible I'm not being rational about him. This is my DW and not the damn LRB, so blessedly I can disclaim that upfront rather than unpacking all that.
Given that caveat, I'm still pretty disappointed by how they ended both him and the novel. The "eat the fungus and join the hivemind" solution is too tidy and works too quickly. Moreover, this solution ends Two Cicada, who had all the ingredients to become such a fascinating character. We know he's an Empire citizen (unlike Mahit) who's never quite fully assimilated (quite like Mahit!), and unlike Mahit he seems entirely comfortable with himself as a walking contradiction. If you really wanted to explore the themes that the Teixcalaan books seem to be interested (alienation, empire, identity), that seems like a character you'd want to dig into—really dig into. He's held at just enough remove that I'm not sure what his deal is, exactly. (Why is he so into his religion? Is he fully into the Empire or does he harbor some misgivings that we never see because he's just so competent at his job? Does he have any kind of community on the ship? etc)
But instead of exploring any of those angles, he's "killed" to produce a Very Sad Moment and to Very Conveniently Save The Day. Augh.
It's the kind of promising-yet-underdeveloped story element that I'm more used to from video game plots, frankly. (Which is not to throw shade on video games, exactly, just—the reason I habitually fic them is because they tend to leave so much unexplored, right? That's not exactly what I want in my books! You can use your words and explore things!)
Even on a thematic level, though I can see what Martine's aiming for, I don't think the ending quite lands. It's clear Martine wants to push on the whole "when do you start to regard someone else as a person" thing, by paralleling the shard-sight with the aliens' hive-mind with the Stationers' imago-memory, but it feels rather rushed (shard-sight isn't explored until near the end, and likewise the horror and taboo around imago-machines is only briefly touched on in this volume, in a rather distant way). And it's not entirely clear what Two Cicada has to do with these themes—I could headcanon something that makes sense, but, all that's on the page is, he had to die to make Nine Hibiscus sad. So.
Admittedly most of what I'm suggesting would make A Desolation Called Peace a much longer book, and it's already pretty long! But the tidiness means there's not much of a hope of exploring all that interesting potential down the line. Weh.
Overall I enjoyed it, but it's a more uneven, lumpy, weirdly-plotted novel than its predecessor—which means higher highs, but also lower lows.
no subject
I personally liked Eight Antidote a lot, and I was impressed Martine managed to do a book like this where there wasn't really a protag whose sections I wanted to skip. To each their own, I guess!
Definitely agree on the ending, though--it felt like it was all going to build up to some massive clever conjunction of events, Vernor Vinge style, and then...whoomf, turns out all you need to do is Eat That Fungus? We didn't even get a climactic chapter of the hivemind trying to integrate Swarm, that somehow got relegated to the Epilogue!
And yeah, strong agree on Swarm being weirdly a cipher for someone who's so important to the plot and so interesting in the story's universe. I had this feeling of "mruh, am I supposed to be inferring more about his personality or something? I don't really Get Him and it feels like Getting Him is supposed to be a big part of reading the text."
That said, I thought a lot of the book was really well-done -- I'm impressed at how real the relationships and the world felt, and how much feeling it evoked in me.
no subject
i am curious to hear more about what you enjoyed about Eight Antidote, if you're willing to share! just because hearing what other people dig often gives me new perspective/appreciation/etc. there was something kind of conceptually neat about having a character who's simultaneously an observer/outsider (due to his age) and very much at the center of things (due to his status), and i got a vague feeling that the novel was trying to say something about the kind of empathy that comes from a place of quietude/detachment/youthfulness, though it didn't quite land for me.
re: Vernor Vinge: haiglehalgh i should really read his stuff! i've heard nothing but good things about A Fire Upon the Deep and A deepness in the Sky and they've both been on my to-read list forever, just, i'm such a slow reader alas!!! anyway i'm taking this as an excuse to bump them up the list a bit :P
re: Swarm: i'm so curious about (1) how much of Swarm's Deal TM Arkaday actually had mapped out in her head, and (2) how much of that was on the page and then had to be cut for editing/revision reasons... it seems like it's definitely possible Martine had more in an earlier draft, and just inadvisedly cut too much, and didn't realize that meant the reader just didn't have quite enough to go on for parsing him... i guess the more disappointing possibility is, Arkady just didn't have much of his culture/background/etc mapped out in her head, and thus there wasn't enough to actually put on the page, but that'd be disappointing :P i imagine the next book (if there is gonna be one) will be a long time coming, either way, so guess i'll have to content myself with idle speculation/fanfiction in the meantime, lol