Arkady Martine won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel for A Memory Called Empire, the first in what is now the Teixcalaanli series of stories involving a character who has the memories of the man who preceded her as ambassador implanted into her brain. I despised it for its pretentiousness and its lack of character development, so I wasn’t exactly pleased to see the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the same award this year. It offers more plot than the first novel did, and has one new, interesting character (giving it one more than its predecessor), but suffers from the same pretentious style and emphasis on all the wrong things.
Mahit Dzmare returns from the first novel as the ambassador from the outpost Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli empire – you know we’re in outer space, because the letters are all in the wrong order! – but the story here goes well beyond her. Where Memory was a bit of a whodunit, as she tried to find out who assassinated the previous ambassador – and that’s whose memories she has in her brain, although it’s not just memories, but his entire persona. She’s part of a bigger story this time that involves an unknown species that has attacked Teixcalaanli settlers on a remote mining world, eviscerating the victims for no apparent reason, and then attacks a fleet of military ships with some sort of viscous substance that eats through metal and might be ingesting (dissolving?) the pilots. Mahit’s superiors want her to sabotage any Teixcalaanli attempts to negotiate peace with the aliens to protect Lsel’s interests and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the heir to the Teixcalaanli throne, a precocious eleven-year-old boy, finds himself involved in the discussions that ensue around how to proceed against the unknown enemy.
One some level, A Desolation Called Peace didn’t stand a chance coming in, because the same elements I found so pretentious in the first novel are still here. The constructed language is back, with the same overly complex grammar and unpronounceable or just plain weird phonemes, like “ezuazuacat” or “yaoklat.” So are the Teixcalaanli names, which involve a number and usually a noun, like Nineteen Adze, Eight Antidote (the heir to the throne), or Three Seagrass. It’s showy, except that it’s not showing anything. This is the stuff I would have found extremely cool when I was a teenager, but that’s not a compliment here – it’s a sign that the entire endeavor starts from the wrong place.
However, the story here exceeds that of the first novel, both in construction and in interest. It’s part Ender’s Game, part Imperial Radch series, part Star Trek: The Next Generation, and nothing here is all that original, but it’s at least reasonably entertaining. Eight Antidote, the future Teixcalaani emperor, is the best character to appear in either novel, which is also a low bar to clear, but given how uninteresting Mahit Dzmare is – which is quite a feat, given that she’s simultaneously two people – it’s a huge improvement. He’s not just some imp, nor is he a savant; he’s a smart kid, doing smart kid things, getting into trouble, but also finding his way through an adult world that he knows, one day, will revolve around him. Martine divides the story into three interwoven plot lines, one around Eight Antidote, one around Mahit Dzmare, and one around the military discussions.
The other saving grace of A Desolation Called Peace is the resolution, where all three storylines converge in a reasonably satisfying conclusion, albeit one that’s a bit derivative of one of the works cited above. Even with the mediocre writing, with heavy use of archaic or esoteric terms that have common equivalents, and the bizarre nomenclature of Teixcalaanli characters, it’s pretty quick-moving. I also appreciated the de-emphasis of Mahit Dzmare’s character and her implanted predecessor, which got old very quickly in the prior book. If you enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, you might enjoy this one even more, even though I’m still not a fan.
Next up: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.