sophia_sol | Entries tagged with author: arkady martine

Whew, coming in just under the wire, here's my voting plans for the Hugo best novel! Obviously She Who Became The Sun is required to win, but in any other year both my #2 and #3 choices would be strong contenders for first place in my mind, and it's just too bad they can't all three get awards! Links to my full reviews in the titles of the books.

1. She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

I cannot vote anything but this for first place because it's perfect in every way.

2. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

It may not reach the same degree of delighting-me-on-every-level that A Memory Called Empire did, but it's still a fascinating and compelling book and very well done.

3. Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

A book that's doing its own thing, haven't really seen anything else like it, and I am HERE for it.

4. A Master of Djinn, by P Djélí Clark

Not as strong as his novella in the same world (The Haunting of Tram Car 015), especially in terms of development of character for the protagonist, so I was disappointed -- but it was still good, and I do love the worldbuilding.

5. The Galaxy and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers

Usually I love Chambers' approach of writing plotless novels about disparate characters interacting and being generally hopeful, but this one focuses on themes of children and parenthood and reproductive choices, and those are just not themes that inherently speak to me, so instead of finding it cozily enjoyable I was just bored.

6. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Andy Weir doesn't understand how humans work, doesn't understand how the soft sciences work, doesn't understand how communication works, is a little too into leaders being autocratic, and mostly just cares about expositing at length about science things he thinks are cool. I'm glad he has found his niche, and I am charmed by how much he loves science, but I did not like this book.

When I read A Memory Called Empire I absolutely adored it and was blown away by it, and so when this sequel came out I a) bought it immediately, and then b) failed to read it for a year and a half because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the first one.

And.....hm. A Desolation Called Peace is an excellent book, a five star book, doing many interesting things. The kind of book I want to pick into pieces because it has so many pieces TO pick; it's doing lots of things, and it's interesting and compelling and I care very much about all the characters and what's happening. But I don't love it to the degree I loved A Memory Called Empire.

I think I'm more confused about the ultimate themes that underlie everything this one is doing, is part of the problem. The first book was, among other things, about what it means to always be an outsider for whom belonging and fitting in isn't possible; about degrees of assimilation and whether they're inevitable or not, desirable or not. The sequel both continues some of that AND seems to be trying to say that there are always connections and similarities between people, no matter how different they seem, and that sometimes assimilation is the way forward. And the way they're implemented in this book makes it feel to me like those two themes were working against each other, instead of building together.

I love the thing where everything a book is doing all works together so perfectly that it creates something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and I feel like the first book did that beautifully, and this one not so much, as great as all its parts are. And it's disappointing! I think if I didn't have the first book to compare it to I would be writing a much more gushing review of this book.

I did really love many things! The complexity of the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass, everything about Eight Antidote and how he relates to the people around him and to the kind of world he is ensconced in, TWENTY CICADA omg he's so interesting I want to know everything about him, the subversive comic Mahit picks up in Lsel Station (I want to know more about the political teen artist stationers!), and so much more! And Martine is also just really good at writing prose that makes you want to keep reading.

I don't know. Talk to me about this book! If you've read it, what do you think? Did the management of the themes work better for you than it did for me? Am I missing something or misunderstanding something? It's possible that I just haven't cogitated over this one enough, but the hugo voting deadline is end of day TOMORROW so I wanted to get my thoughts up asap!

Well, time for me to talk about the Hugo novel nominees as a group. You may notice I have not posted reviews for all of them. This is because I did not even finish most of them! The novel options this year contain a lot of books that are just not to my personal taste.

The bottom two books in my ranking are ones I never would have bothered even picking up and trying if they weren't on the Hugo list, and the middle two probably would have languished on my tbr list forever due to there being so many other books that sound more appealing to me to prioritise. On the other hand we also have one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever written on the list this year, so hey, can't complain too hard!

My voting order is as follows. I've linked the book titles to my full review for the ones where I did read the whole book.

1. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
Absolutely brilliant in so many ways and I completely adored it.

2. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Mostly very compelling and I really liked it, but given that I'm too much of a wuss for horror, it was rather much for me.

3. The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
I read about a quarter of it and got the distinct impression that it's very like the other Anders novel I've read: very well written, interesting, and unusual, but I can't quite actually LIKE it. So I didn't really feel inspired to continue.

4. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow
I read the 100 page sample provided to voters. The ideas had potential but I bounced off of the narrative voice. Having a distinctive voice can be a gamble because either it really works for the reader or it really doesn't, and I admire the attempt, but this one's not for me.

5. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
Read more than a third in the hope that maybe at some point it would stop being boring but that was as far as my patience could take me, and honestly I'm impressed I made it that far. I'm told it does get more interesting once you get more into the meat of the plot, but if it takes that long to get there then you've lost me. Which is too bad because the time travel element at least sounded kind of interesting.

6. Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Read about a quarter of it and just.....did not care. Evil people manipulating children in order to take over the world is just not a plot I am interested in. And the child characters themselves were also not particularly compelling to me, even if I could have otherwise been interested in hearing about psychic friendship.

By all reasonable assessments I should not have found this the least stressful book by Frances Hardinge I've read so far. It is set during the British Civil War and involves murder and ghosts and murder-by-ghosts and a girl with an extended family who intend to do really nasty things to her. I couldn't even finish reading Hardinge's book A Face Like Glass because it was too stressful. And yet! This one was fine. I didn't have to go anxiously googling for spoilers even once.

(I think this is evidence that I find death way less scary than being caught in social situations where it's not clear what's going on and what to do....)

Anyway! A Skinful of Shadows is a very Hardinge book, as all books by Hardinge tend to be, and it is as always excellent.

But oh dang reading this book so soon after A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine was so interesting because there's something integral to the premise of each that has remarkable parallels but with which the authors do very different things!

( The stuff below this cut tells you things about the premise of both books that is not clear right away in the book, but are major things in the book that are made clear relatively early on, so I don't THINK it really counts as spoilers but it's up to you whether to click. )

( This is maybe now into the realm of more spoilery for A Skinful of Shadows? )

Anyway other things happened too and I also liked Makepeace's relationships with James, and Helen, and Morgan, and her mother. But the stuff about the parallels with A Memory Called Empire was apparently what I wanted to talk about the most. Whoops!

I've been hearing about A Memory Called Empire since long before its publishing date, as the online SFF world has been talking about it. And everything I heard about it made me so excited to read it, to the point that when I finally got my hands on it I couldn't make myself begin for two weeks because I was so nervous about it not living up to my dreams of what it could be.

Well, my fears were entirely unfounded: it was everything I could possibly have hoped for and more. It's just. It's just SO GOOD. As I said on twitter when I was partway into reading it: It is absolutely outrageous how much I am loving A Memory Called Empire, it is like this book was written specifically as a gift to me personally and I can't handle how much I am into it!

So let's see how much of this review I can write without spoilers, in order to attempt to entice more people to read it! (all spoilers will be behind cuts.)

A Memory Called Empire is a space opera, in all the best senses of the term. (The author has called space opera "vivid emotionally and vivid conceptually." Which. Yep.) A representative from the backwater independent republic Lsel Station on the edges of an ever-expanding empire is sent to the centre of Teixcalaan space to act as Lsel's ambassador, after the previous ambassador is no longer able to continue in the role. The new ambassador, Mahit, has to navigate intricate political systems in a culture and language not her own, in a time when the situation is particularly high-stakes. She's young and inexperienced, but also smart and capable and well-educated and with good instincts.

Who can she trust? What's going on? What really happened to her predecessor Yskandr? What political shenanigans was Yskandr up to for the last 15 years that are about to get dropped on Mahit without warning? These are just some of the questions Mahit has to begin her ambassadorial career with, and it gets worse from there.

But the book isn't only focused on the suspenseful plot. There's also like a zillion other interesting intersecting themes and priorities that all are carefully and beautifully woven together into a coherent whole.

Such as: Themes of identity! Empire! Otherness! Friendship! Complicated relationships! State control! The inherently biased nature of algorithms! Political poetry! The self-referential nature of a culture's body of literature! And so much more! (Also there are queer people!)

I love the careful, thoughtful way Arkady Martine depicts empire in this book: not the unexamined background radiation of the universe, or the monolithic evil antagonist, which are both so common for depictions of empire in SFF. But instead it's clear how empire can be seductive and appealing while at the same time being hugely toxic and dangerous.

Like, the way that Mahit has grown up loving and admiring Teixcalaanli literature, and can't help but be thrilled to actually be THERE in the CITY at a POETRY ORATION CONTEST like she'd read about!!! while also knowing that the empire is a real and present danger to the home she loves so much and also to her personally and specifically. And knowing that no matter how long she lived in the City she'd never actually manage to fit in and be one of them and belong in these cultural trappings she loves. Even from Teixcalaanlizlim who genuinely like her, she still gets those reminders on a regular basis that she'll always be an outsider, always be other, always be a barbarian who's learned how to play along.

But Mahit also does make real and genuine friends among the Teixcalaanlizlim (as well as making uneasy alliances, enemies, and more). I loved Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea so much! Three Seagrass's ambition, dedication, and embarrassed interest in barbarians was so great. And Twelve Azalea cracked me up with his total delight in getting to play spy games, and then ( I'm cutting the rest of this sentence for spoilers. )

And I loved how the pacing of the book wasn't just a madcap dash from one emergency to the next - I mean, it was, but it also made room for some realistic breathing space, like the brief nap and ice cream in the park amongst mildly-seditious students. A person can't just go forever, and these characters did fall apart when sleep-deprivation got to them, as even highly-competent people eventually must.

And the relationship between Mahit and Yskandr - oh dang, so interesting. ( And okay literally everything about this needs to go behind a cut )

And the book is full of this, honestly, of people who clearly have full lives and priorities and perspectives of their own, their own complexities, their own story. We see more of some than of others, but they're all there, and it's clear that the main characters of the story we're shown in this book are not the only characters who it would be worth following. Even Nineteen Adze, who's one of the most major secondary characters in the book, still clearly has a whole bunch more going on outside of what Mahit sees and experiences of her.

Something else I loved was the care Martine took in setting things up worldbuilding-wise so that when they later become relevant it's "OH WOW I didn't realize this is where that was going!" rather than "what the heck this is out of nowhere." For example: ( yeah this has to go behind a spoiler cut too. And this one is a really big spoiler so watch out if you don't want that for yourself. )

And then there's the cool way this book demonstrates the roles literature can play within a culture, from being a vector of imperialism through imports to other cultures, to being a source of self conscious inspiration behind one's actions, to being something you can have fun playing with amongst a group of clever friends, to being something that's used to exclude people who are "other" for not having grown up steeped in the same base assumptions of familiarity, to being something you can use for political gain, to being something you simply enjoy for being really really good.

I still haven't covered nearly everything I loved about the book but I'm finding myself running out of things I can coherently describe or explain so I think I'd better end myself here. And just say: This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, and alongside all the above verbiage it's also just fun and exciting and captivating and I cared about the characters and I always wanted to know where the author would take me next.

Also I cannot wait until the sequel is published next year!!!!!!