A Desolation Called Peace

Arkady Martine's intensely political take on space opera with added poetry gets its second entry. The first of the Teixcalaan novels was an impressively polished debut - beautiful prose, interesting plot and a clever new feeling take on Sci-Fi. It was a deserving Hugo winner. This follow up had a tough act to follow, but Arkady has knocked it out the park again.

The themes carry over from the first novel to a certain extent - culture and identity are the over-riding questions being examined. Firstly on the culture side we have the conflict between being a member of a small and relatively culturally minor society going to live in a big dominant culture - how much of your own cultural identity do you preserve? Where does assimilation begin and culture loss occur? Secondly we have identity - one of Arkady's best concepts is that of an Imago machine - a device that stores the memories and experiences of your predecessors and allows you to approach a given task with much more knowledge than would be available otherwise. The question here is how much of yourself gets overwritten by the memories of a previous person?

A Desolation Called Peace adds in a first contact tale. We move away from the capital of Teixcalaan and into the Lsel station and ultimately the Teixcalaan fleet. This starts to delve into the topics of jingoism and military intrigue.

Martine has a great ability to portray these challenges and conflicts but leave them open to interpretation - you don't have black and white answers. The characters are complex, nuanced and believable.

When it comes to Teixcalaan - believe the hype. This is superior space opera. Clever and erudite without being overly densely written. Weighty topics dealt with subtlety and nuance, written in an easily digestible style. One of my top reads of the year