Summer 2024 Reading
Sep. 2nd, 2024 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseThe Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty) (2023): I had a tough time with the audiobook - earnest dedication plus definitions plus slow-ish start - and switched to ebook when my hold came in. Overall reaction: "...it was fine." Amina al-Sirafi lived as a pirate; her pirate career ended in a bang involving a demon - incidentally her fourth or fifth husband - and a pregnancy. At the opening of the novel, al-Sirafi has settled down to a quiet country life with her daughter, her mother, and the occasional visit to her brother in the city. An Adenese widow offers Amina fantastic riches to track down and return her granddaughter to the ancestral mansion in Aden. By the end of the novel, Amina is sworn to seek out four magical artifacts - five, counting the Moon of Saba, the MacGuffin of the novel - the runaway grandchild is living as the scibe Jamal, one of the narrative frames of the novel, and Amina has had an adventure both piratical and fantastical.
The novel checks some boxes - fantasy that's not European-centric, middle aged female protagonist, queer representation - in a pleasant way. I found the definitions section superfluous; if less than ten definitions are too complex to be in-clued during the novel text, well, something isn't right. I got all the understanding I needed from context.
So would I rec this for awards? Probably not. Would I rec it as a pleasant read? Yes.
A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) (2019): "This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own..." slight sigh at the earnestness "...(And for Grigor Pahlavuni and Petros Getadarj, across the centuries.)"
This was another hard novel for me to get into. Somewhere in the last ten years, my patience with sf/f taking itself Very Seriously and being widely applicable to the human condition got a little strained. Sometimes the work speaks deeply to a very small subset of people, and that's okay! Sometimes you just need Muppets and an increasingly beat-up astronaut who will not stop referencing pop culture the rest of the crew doesn't know to make your point.
(I don't know why I have Farscape on the brain, except... oh yeah, I just figured it out. More on that later.)
My first try was in hardcopy after it was nominated for the Hugo, but I stalled before Mehit got on-planet in the Teixcalaan empire. This time I listened to the audiobook, read by Amy Landon, on the theory it's a lot harder to stall on a three and a half hour drive repeated multiple weeks running, and made it into chapter two before taking a break for an expectation adjustment.
The next stop was wiki. AnnaLinden Weller, better known under her pen name Arkady Martine... was born and grew up in New York City. Her parents are classical musicians of Russian Jewish heritage: her mother is a professor of violin at Juilliard and her father played for the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera; she has described herself as an "assimilated American Jew".
Well. That might be a start on that "devouring culture" thing.
Expectations adjusted, I charged through the rest of the novel.
Mahit Dzmar, at twenty six, is summoned to the Teixcalaan capital world as the new Lsel Station ambassador, after the unexpected passing of her predecessor at forty (almost forty-one). The novel takes place in the eventful week of her arrival on Teixcalaan, where she is plunged into intrigue at the highest levels of an acquisitive empire that may have its sights set on Lsel Station as its next conquest.
The novel's near-ceaseless motion has positively Cherryh vibes: within three days of arriving on-planet, Mahit's acquired massive sleep debt, culture shock, a murder investigation, an identity crisis, and some tid-bits about the previous ambassador's sex life that aren't making any of the above easier.
The identity crisis pulls in two directions: Mahit's negotiation of her Lsel identity in the capital of a culture she's studied and engaged with, both intellectually and culturally, since her pre-teen years; and her relationship with her imago, a piece of Lsel technology that gives her the memories and experiences of the person whose imago is implanted in the recipient. Mahit's fifteen-years-out-of-date imago of the previous ambassador was implanted in a rush job; further imago-related challenges manifest on Teixcalaan. Mahit would really like to lean on a friendly voice, as she plunges into Teixcalaan culture, politics, and current events, but that "imago line as friendly voice" thing doesn't go as planned.
After reading the novel, I looked up Pahlavuni and Getadar. Pahlavuni seems slightly better known, being involved with Byzantine religion during a time of upheaval (?). The first hit on Getadar was wiki; a number of the first page links were Martine, by penname or doctorate name, including this interview that validated the Cherryh vibes coming from A Memory Called Empire. "Thematically, A Memory Called Empire is a pretty direct response to the Foreigner series . . . I reread Cyteen every year or so, if that says anything."
Pahlavuni and Getadar add to the "devouring culture" thing, I guess.
Miscellaneous notes:
- where is the embassy staff? Sure, one Lsel citizen as ambassador, but where's the staff? Security, an office manager or errand-runner, anyone, local or from Lsel, who has worked at the Lsel embassy in the last ten years? Okay, great, Cherryh's Foreigner series is called out as inspiration, but that series went out of its way to set up a one person information channel. Empire just goes "the Lsel ambassador" and doesn't interrogate, lampshade, or otherwise explain the lack of support staff.
- "Yskander was so old!" Yskander was forty when he died. A twenty-six year old would think forty is old. It's a wonderfully age appropriate character moment.
- Imago tech goes on the "humans really thought this would never be abused by the Opposition and/or Designated Bad Guys, ha ha," list, along with Union drug-learning tech, Hexarchate formation instinct, the protomolecule, the separate technologies corporate space bundled to make SecUnits... probably some Octavia Butler and the speciMen developments in Nnedi Okorafor's novels too.
- The city AI gives me "gun on the mantelpiece" vibes. Is it a thinking algorithmic AI? What biases are unthinkingly encoded in its algorithms? What biases were actively coded into it? Did Ten Pearl leave a sysadmin back door into the production code? Come back, city AI! Someone run a Turing test!
A Desolation Called Peace (Arkady Martine) (2021): Read in audiobook, Amy Landon returning as narrator. "This book is for all the exiles..." not so quiet sigh at the earnestness, "(and for Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to disobey orders)."
Some people read the first novel and were blown away by Mahit's experiences in the first novel. I was in a much more neutral place at the end of the novel, but enthusiastic enough to load up the Desolation audiobook and give the cold open a try. "Well," I said, pausing after the prelude, "this can't be good," and cackled, because sometimes the cheap references targeted for people who probably haven't gotten into later novels of a completely unrelated series are the funniest.
It's a hive mind. It's a locality-breaking hive mind! It's a locality-breaking hive mind with tech more advanced than humans have that will eat you alive and turn you into something thinking but inhuman and this was absolutely the best fiction prelude that had happened to me in months.
And then the narrative turns to the humans. The four primary PoV characters are three women and an eleven year old boy: Mahit; Three Seagrass; yaotlek (war leader / admiral of the fleet) Nine Hibiscus; and Eight Antibody, Imperial Associate (aka heir to the throne of Teixcalaan).
The plot is: Nine Hibiscus runs into the aliens and asks for an Information Ministry specialist for translation; Three Seagrass assigns herself as the specialist and picks up Mahit for an assist (and some romantic pining); Mahit goes with Three Seagrass to escape Lsel Station politics aimed at her; they talk to aliens; they talk to Eight Antidote; Eight Antidote's precocious investigations at the War Ministry run into the alien problem, and everyone's pressing question, "Is The Other A Thinking Person", is solved by Nine Hibiscus's chief staff officer eating alien hive-mind fungus and so connecting himself to the alien collective consciousness. A tentative peace is negotiated. End novel.
I'm going to try to take Desolation on its own target goals. It starts its thesis as Exiles, Dude, Let's Talk About Exiles, and also quotes Tacitus and an academic tome on Incan-European first contact. But let's also talk about craft.
Usually I think of novels as being driven by plot or by character. Cherryh is my go-to for plot driving a novel; Bujold is the character-driven argument. However, theme can be a driver as well. This may explain why some novels absolutely baffle me: I can understand why plot drives what happens, I can grasp why characters drive what happens. But make theme the engine of story action and it's entirely possible I am going to miss the point, unless it's coupled to plot or character.
It's possible that Desolation is being driven by theme, which explains why it's so messy from other structural angles.
The four major protagonists / PoVs start in different settings - Nine Hibiscus on the warfront, Mahit on Lsel Station, Three Seagrass in the Information Ministry on Teixcalaan, Eight Antidote in the Teixcalaan imperial palace - but three of the four wind up on the same bridge of the same ship during the critical action. Only Eight Antidote is missing. It's unbalanced from a plot and character perspective. I'd expect that either some of the major protagonists would meet up in sub-groups, or all the PoVs would be in the same place, or all the PoVs would cross and split up again. Thematically, is it a grouping of associated positions? ...maybe, maybe not?
There's a lot of theme to go around, and it doesn't quite break down by protagonist or location. Mahit grapples with her identity as a stationer, but one who is in opposition to station leadership. Three Seagrass is pining for Mahit and cannot figure out what is up with Mahit's feelings. (As readers, we get a front-row seat to Mahit angsting about station loyalty vs sabotaging the first contact situation vs being in love with Teixcalaan high culture. Three Seagrass has to figure this out from Mahit's non-communications and/or communications.) Nine Hibiscus wants to shoot things, a lot, and also wants to avoid her own military intelligence people, but also would prefer not to also pick an unwinnable fight with the aliens. (A winnable fight would be much preferable.) Eight Antidote starts as a wandering precocious eleven-year-old, and ultimately is a stand-in for the idea that planet-killing strikes are bad, and some orders are bad and should be refused.
In the background of this is some kind of Lsel Station fight which is getting to be "Heritage versus Everyone But Heritage," which is a very loose end from a plot perspective. Maybe thematically it goes with the "refusing bad orders" theme?
So this is a way of interpreting sf/f that is, heh, alien to me. On the other hand, the themes are confusing too! Mahit's angst over exile starts when she's moping around Lsel Station actively avoiding friends, family, and Station Councillors. (Which is weird to me, Mahit's an extrovert in a culture with generous psychotherapy, why isn't she getting a prescription to Go Hang Out With Humans? But that's a plot/character/worldbuilding critique.) Three Seagrass, Civilized Person Discovering There Are Other Ways to Be Civilized While Pining, is so straightforward it feels like I'm missing something. Nine Hibiscus is a mouthpiece for stuff happening on the front, until Mahit and Three Seagrass show up. And then she's, IDK, the military perspective? Fighting a Third Palm vs Information Ministry Teixcalaan-internal fight during a military operation on or over Imperial borders? That's plot, not theme, unless it ties into "refusing orders" or "doing right" or something. Eight Antidote's themes are also straightforward to me; or I am glossing Eight Antidote as Martine reading Cyteen and really wanting to write her own precocious clone-child. All hail Ari 2's charisma! But that's a trope, not a theme.
One big miss, as someone who only intermittently cares about theme, is that Twenty Cidada would have been an interesting PoV character. He has an atypical (could one even say queer, or queered? Heh) relationship with the Teixcalaan empire. The pivotal plot resolution moment is his choice to join the alien hive mind. Echoes of Fifteeen Azalea, in the form of "secondary male-identifying character who is important to a PoV female character, who dies - or 'dies' - for the cause." Since much is made of Twenty Cicada's religion as cultural background, it would be interesting to reflect on whether that particular character trait made him more likely than the more standard-culture Teixcalaan military member(s) to throw himself on the hive mind sword.
Another worldbuilding miss is that Martine seems uninterested in the weirder relationships between time, mass, light, and causality. So there's no limiters set out for the "shard trick" or the hive mind communication. Yes, okay, there's specific reasons I'm on this train of thought, and y'alls are just going to have to come along for my very specific flavor of "who's got the datapackets" information / communication power-tripping.
Speaking of information, and almost getting back to theme, the alien communication about persons to bring to conference is presented in a way that reminds me of Justice of Toren One Esk declaring AIs to be Significant in Ancillary Mercy. Something about how the plot turns at the end, and how its request / demand is phrased. Maybe it's just me. And it gets sort of into communication as a theme? I guess?
I can't help but think that Lsel stationers who hold imago lines, the Sunlit, and shard pilots will not enjoy being lumped together by the aliens as "actual people who are like us", versus people not like the aliens (every other Teixcalaan or stationer citizen). Almost by definition, imago holders and thepolice Sunlit are likely to be some of the most conservative, tradition-compliant parts of the Lsel Station and Teixcalaan societies, so putting them in close contact is going to be... interesting.
A loose plot thread, which doesn't have an (obvious) theme connection, is that the alien stealth-tech advantage wasn't addressed by the end of the novel. They still have that overwhelming first strike advantage in space combat. What Darj Tarats missed when yelling at Mahit about failing to sabotage the first contact negotiations is that "please don't murder us with your inexplicable alien tech," is exactly the sort of threat that encourages alliance. Lsel Station might resist Teixcalaanli incursions when it's Lsel vs Teixcalaan, but when it's Lsel looking at the We's shaky grasp of un-networked bodies as thinking entities behind one gate and Teixcalaan behind the other, a Teixcalaanli cultural and political incursion that doesn't involve subsumation into a hive mind as an endgame might look like the lesser threat.
Or maybe Lsel Station and Teixcalaan will scramble to acquire and harness said inexplicable alien tech faster than their human opponent(s), which I'm sure won't involve anyone being deemed an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good. Nope, that's sarcasm: the Heritage Councillor and Nineteen Adze have already demonstrated they'll either go for exactly that resolution or stand aside for others to go there.
So, yeah, I'm not doing a great job at taking Desolation on its own goals. I have so many "why would you not put the [redacted] in your best shot at BSL-4 until biosafety concerns, including allergens, are ruled in/out," questions.
I think Mahit's exile angst jumped the gun. Third culture vs expat vs exile experiences are not the same! But Mahit jumped to anxiety about exile long before she was told to leave and never come home, in about so many words. Note the difference from, say, John Crichton's journey from seeking home, to discovering You Can't Go Home (see: the "merry frelling Christmas" incident), to framing his "no wormhole knowledge for anyone!" exile as sticking with his new home and family.
Other protag/PoV-focused thoughts:
Three Seagrass trying to date across cultures, and bungling it, was magnificent. This felt like someone reflecting on the idiocies of their twenties. (We are all idiots in our twenties.) A+ evocation of being young and smart and not wise at all.
Nine Hibscus is doing so much plot work that the themes tied to her get lost, I think. Also Twenty Cicada steals some of her thunder. A follow-up novel about Nine Hibiscus, loyalty, and picking fights with the Third Palm of the War Ministry would be awesome.
Eight Antidote... I can't get past the Ari 2 vibes. This boy needs almost-as-precocious friends his own age. He also needs to avoid being a mouthpiece for high level ministry intrigue. Looks like Science, War, and Information are in for a ride.
I am really, really not allowed to think that what this universe needs is Three Seagrass hanging out with Twenty Cicada and the We hive mind, alternately working on the Life And Diplomacy With Aliens issue and moping about Mahit while Twenty Cicada pulls together dating/pining advice scrambled from ex-human-it's-complicated life experience and the hive mind consensus opinion. Nine Hibiscus moping in the background about whether her bestie is still a person, all Teixcalaanli-like, while taking out her feelings on military intrigue, would be an A+ addition.
The novel checks some boxes - fantasy that's not European-centric, middle aged female protagonist, queer representation - in a pleasant way. I found the definitions section superfluous; if less than ten definitions are too complex to be in-clued during the novel text, well, something isn't right. I got all the understanding I needed from context.
So would I rec this for awards? Probably not. Would I rec it as a pleasant read? Yes.
A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) (2019): "This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own..." slight sigh at the earnestness "...(And for Grigor Pahlavuni and Petros Getadarj, across the centuries.)"
This was another hard novel for me to get into. Somewhere in the last ten years, my patience with sf/f taking itself Very Seriously and being widely applicable to the human condition got a little strained. Sometimes the work speaks deeply to a very small subset of people, and that's okay! Sometimes you just need Muppets and an increasingly beat-up astronaut who will not stop referencing pop culture the rest of the crew doesn't know to make your point.
(I don't know why I have Farscape on the brain, except... oh yeah, I just figured it out. More on that later.)
My first try was in hardcopy after it was nominated for the Hugo, but I stalled before Mehit got on-planet in the Teixcalaan empire. This time I listened to the audiobook, read by Amy Landon, on the theory it's a lot harder to stall on a three and a half hour drive repeated multiple weeks running, and made it into chapter two before taking a break for an expectation adjustment.
The next stop was wiki. AnnaLinden Weller, better known under her pen name Arkady Martine... was born and grew up in New York City. Her parents are classical musicians of Russian Jewish heritage: her mother is a professor of violin at Juilliard and her father played for the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera; she has described herself as an "assimilated American Jew".
Well. That might be a start on that "devouring culture" thing.
Expectations adjusted, I charged through the rest of the novel.
Mahit Dzmar, at twenty six, is summoned to the Teixcalaan capital world as the new Lsel Station ambassador, after the unexpected passing of her predecessor at forty (almost forty-one). The novel takes place in the eventful week of her arrival on Teixcalaan, where she is plunged into intrigue at the highest levels of an acquisitive empire that may have its sights set on Lsel Station as its next conquest.
The novel's near-ceaseless motion has positively Cherryh vibes: within three days of arriving on-planet, Mahit's acquired massive sleep debt, culture shock, a murder investigation, an identity crisis, and some tid-bits about the previous ambassador's sex life that aren't making any of the above easier.
The identity crisis pulls in two directions: Mahit's negotiation of her Lsel identity in the capital of a culture she's studied and engaged with, both intellectually and culturally, since her pre-teen years; and her relationship with her imago, a piece of Lsel technology that gives her the memories and experiences of the person whose imago is implanted in the recipient. Mahit's fifteen-years-out-of-date imago of the previous ambassador was implanted in a rush job; further imago-related challenges manifest on Teixcalaan. Mahit would really like to lean on a friendly voice, as she plunges into Teixcalaan culture, politics, and current events, but that "imago line as friendly voice" thing doesn't go as planned.
After reading the novel, I looked up Pahlavuni and Getadar. Pahlavuni seems slightly better known, being involved with Byzantine religion during a time of upheaval (?). The first hit on Getadar was wiki; a number of the first page links were Martine, by penname or doctorate name, including this interview that validated the Cherryh vibes coming from A Memory Called Empire. "Thematically, A Memory Called Empire is a pretty direct response to the Foreigner series . . . I reread Cyteen every year or so, if that says anything."
Pahlavuni and Getadar add to the "devouring culture" thing, I guess.
Miscellaneous notes:
- where is the embassy staff? Sure, one Lsel citizen as ambassador, but where's the staff? Security, an office manager or errand-runner, anyone, local or from Lsel, who has worked at the Lsel embassy in the last ten years? Okay, great, Cherryh's Foreigner series is called out as inspiration, but that series went out of its way to set up a one person information channel. Empire just goes "the Lsel ambassador" and doesn't interrogate, lampshade, or otherwise explain the lack of support staff.
- "Yskander was so old!" Yskander was forty when he died. A twenty-six year old would think forty is old. It's a wonderfully age appropriate character moment.
- Imago tech goes on the "humans really thought this would never be abused by the Opposition and/or Designated Bad Guys, ha ha," list, along with Union drug-learning tech, Hexarchate formation instinct, the protomolecule, the separate technologies corporate space bundled to make SecUnits... probably some Octavia Butler and the speciMen developments in Nnedi Okorafor's novels too.
- The city AI gives me "gun on the mantelpiece" vibes. Is it a thinking algorithmic AI? What biases are unthinkingly encoded in its algorithms? What biases were actively coded into it? Did Ten Pearl leave a sysadmin back door into the production code? Come back, city AI! Someone run a Turing test!
A Desolation Called Peace (Arkady Martine) (2021): Read in audiobook, Amy Landon returning as narrator. "This book is for all the exiles..." not so quiet sigh at the earnestness, "(and for Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to disobey orders)."
Some people read the first novel and were blown away by Mahit's experiences in the first novel. I was in a much more neutral place at the end of the novel, but enthusiastic enough to load up the Desolation audiobook and give the cold open a try. "Well," I said, pausing after the prelude, "this can't be good," and cackled, because sometimes the cheap references targeted for people who probably haven't gotten into later novels of a completely unrelated series are the funniest.
It's a hive mind. It's a locality-breaking hive mind! It's a locality-breaking hive mind with tech more advanced than humans have that will eat you alive and turn you into something thinking but inhuman and this was absolutely the best fiction prelude that had happened to me in months.
And then the narrative turns to the humans. The four primary PoV characters are three women and an eleven year old boy: Mahit; Three Seagrass; yaotlek (war leader / admiral of the fleet) Nine Hibiscus; and Eight Antibody, Imperial Associate (aka heir to the throne of Teixcalaan).
The plot is: Nine Hibiscus runs into the aliens and asks for an Information Ministry specialist for translation; Three Seagrass assigns herself as the specialist and picks up Mahit for an assist (and some romantic pining); Mahit goes with Three Seagrass to escape Lsel Station politics aimed at her; they talk to aliens; they talk to Eight Antidote; Eight Antidote's precocious investigations at the War Ministry run into the alien problem, and everyone's pressing question, "Is The Other A Thinking Person", is solved by Nine Hibiscus's chief staff officer eating alien hive-mind fungus and so connecting himself to the alien collective consciousness. A tentative peace is negotiated. End novel.
I'm going to try to take Desolation on its own target goals. It starts its thesis as Exiles, Dude, Let's Talk About Exiles, and also quotes Tacitus and an academic tome on Incan-European first contact. But let's also talk about craft.
Usually I think of novels as being driven by plot or by character. Cherryh is my go-to for plot driving a novel; Bujold is the character-driven argument. However, theme can be a driver as well. This may explain why some novels absolutely baffle me: I can understand why plot drives what happens, I can grasp why characters drive what happens. But make theme the engine of story action and it's entirely possible I am going to miss the point, unless it's coupled to plot or character.
It's possible that Desolation is being driven by theme, which explains why it's so messy from other structural angles.
The four major protagonists / PoVs start in different settings - Nine Hibiscus on the warfront, Mahit on Lsel Station, Three Seagrass in the Information Ministry on Teixcalaan, Eight Antidote in the Teixcalaan imperial palace - but three of the four wind up on the same bridge of the same ship during the critical action. Only Eight Antidote is missing. It's unbalanced from a plot and character perspective. I'd expect that either some of the major protagonists would meet up in sub-groups, or all the PoVs would be in the same place, or all the PoVs would cross and split up again. Thematically, is it a grouping of associated positions? ...maybe, maybe not?
There's a lot of theme to go around, and it doesn't quite break down by protagonist or location. Mahit grapples with her identity as a stationer, but one who is in opposition to station leadership. Three Seagrass is pining for Mahit and cannot figure out what is up with Mahit's feelings. (As readers, we get a front-row seat to Mahit angsting about station loyalty vs sabotaging the first contact situation vs being in love with Teixcalaan high culture. Three Seagrass has to figure this out from Mahit's non-communications and/or communications.) Nine Hibiscus wants to shoot things, a lot, and also wants to avoid her own military intelligence people, but also would prefer not to also pick an unwinnable fight with the aliens. (A winnable fight would be much preferable.) Eight Antidote starts as a wandering precocious eleven-year-old, and ultimately is a stand-in for the idea that planet-killing strikes are bad, and some orders are bad and should be refused.
In the background of this is some kind of Lsel Station fight which is getting to be "Heritage versus Everyone But Heritage," which is a very loose end from a plot perspective. Maybe thematically it goes with the "refusing bad orders" theme?
So this is a way of interpreting sf/f that is, heh, alien to me. On the other hand, the themes are confusing too! Mahit's angst over exile starts when she's moping around Lsel Station actively avoiding friends, family, and Station Councillors. (Which is weird to me, Mahit's an extrovert in a culture with generous psychotherapy, why isn't she getting a prescription to Go Hang Out With Humans? But that's a plot/character/worldbuilding critique.) Three Seagrass, Civilized Person Discovering There Are Other Ways to Be Civilized While Pining, is so straightforward it feels like I'm missing something. Nine Hibiscus is a mouthpiece for stuff happening on the front, until Mahit and Three Seagrass show up. And then she's, IDK, the military perspective? Fighting a Third Palm vs Information Ministry Teixcalaan-internal fight during a military operation on or over Imperial borders? That's plot, not theme, unless it ties into "refusing orders" or "doing right" or something. Eight Antidote's themes are also straightforward to me; or I am glossing Eight Antidote as Martine reading Cyteen and really wanting to write her own precocious clone-child. All hail Ari 2's charisma! But that's a trope, not a theme.
One big miss, as someone who only intermittently cares about theme, is that Twenty Cidada would have been an interesting PoV character. He has an atypical (could one even say queer, or queered? Heh) relationship with the Teixcalaan empire. The pivotal plot resolution moment is his choice to join the alien hive mind. Echoes of Fifteeen Azalea, in the form of "secondary male-identifying character who is important to a PoV female character, who dies - or 'dies' - for the cause." Since much is made of Twenty Cicada's religion as cultural background, it would be interesting to reflect on whether that particular character trait made him more likely than the more standard-culture Teixcalaan military member(s) to throw himself on the hive mind sword.
Another worldbuilding miss is that Martine seems uninterested in the weirder relationships between time, mass, light, and causality. So there's no limiters set out for the "shard trick" or the hive mind communication. Yes, okay, there's specific reasons I'm on this train of thought, and y'alls are just going to have to come along for my very specific flavor of "who's got the datapackets" information / communication power-tripping.
Speaking of information, and almost getting back to theme, the alien communication about persons to bring to conference is presented in a way that reminds me of Justice of Toren One Esk declaring AIs to be Significant in Ancillary Mercy. Something about how the plot turns at the end, and how its request / demand is phrased. Maybe it's just me. And it gets sort of into communication as a theme? I guess?
I can't help but think that Lsel stationers who hold imago lines, the Sunlit, and shard pilots will not enjoy being lumped together by the aliens as "actual people who are like us", versus people not like the aliens (every other Teixcalaan or stationer citizen). Almost by definition, imago holders and the
A loose plot thread, which doesn't have an (obvious) theme connection, is that the alien stealth-tech advantage wasn't addressed by the end of the novel. They still have that overwhelming first strike advantage in space combat. What Darj Tarats missed when yelling at Mahit about failing to sabotage the first contact negotiations is that "please don't murder us with your inexplicable alien tech," is exactly the sort of threat that encourages alliance. Lsel Station might resist Teixcalaanli incursions when it's Lsel vs Teixcalaan, but when it's Lsel looking at the We's shaky grasp of un-networked bodies as thinking entities behind one gate and Teixcalaan behind the other, a Teixcalaanli cultural and political incursion that doesn't involve subsumation into a hive mind as an endgame might look like the lesser threat.
Or maybe Lsel Station and Teixcalaan will scramble to acquire and harness said inexplicable alien tech faster than their human opponent(s), which I'm sure won't involve anyone being deemed an acceptable sacrifice for the greater good. Nope, that's sarcasm: the Heritage Councillor and Nineteen Adze have already demonstrated they'll either go for exactly that resolution or stand aside for others to go there.
So, yeah, I'm not doing a great job at taking Desolation on its own goals. I have so many "why would you not put the [redacted] in your best shot at BSL-4 until biosafety concerns, including allergens, are ruled in/out," questions.
I think Mahit's exile angst jumped the gun. Third culture vs expat vs exile experiences are not the same! But Mahit jumped to anxiety about exile long before she was told to leave and never come home, in about so many words. Note the difference from, say, John Crichton's journey from seeking home, to discovering You Can't Go Home (see: the "merry frelling Christmas" incident), to framing his "no wormhole knowledge for anyone!" exile as sticking with his new home and family.
Other protag/PoV-focused thoughts:
Three Seagrass trying to date across cultures, and bungling it, was magnificent. This felt like someone reflecting on the idiocies of their twenties. (We are all idiots in our twenties.) A+ evocation of being young and smart and not wise at all.
Nine Hibscus is doing so much plot work that the themes tied to her get lost, I think. Also Twenty Cicada steals some of her thunder. A follow-up novel about Nine Hibiscus, loyalty, and picking fights with the Third Palm of the War Ministry would be awesome.
Eight Antidote... I can't get past the Ari 2 vibes. This boy needs almost-as-precocious friends his own age. He also needs to avoid being a mouthpiece for high level ministry intrigue. Looks like Science, War, and Information are in for a ride.
I am really, really not allowed to think that what this universe needs is Three Seagrass hanging out with Twenty Cicada and the We hive mind, alternately working on the Life And Diplomacy With Aliens issue and moping about Mahit while Twenty Cicada pulls together dating/pining advice scrambled from ex-human-it's-complicated life experience and the hive mind consensus opinion. Nine Hibiscus moping in the background about whether her bestie is still a person, all Teixcalaanli-like, while taking out her feelings on military intrigue, would be an A+ addition.