A Desolation Called Peace

I was much impressed with this book while reading it for the first time. It's written with assurance and a fluent mastery of sf as a genre.

Plenty is going on, with a variety of characters each pursuing his or her own objectives in multiple threads, helping or more often hindering each other. The characters are good, the story-telling is good, the world-building is a little eccentric but well done, the aliens seem very alien.

As I neared the end, I was wondering how the situation set up in the story could be resolved; I had no idea what to expect. Then the ending came, and I found it an anticlimax. It's not a bad ending, it's quite acceptable, but I was expecting this impressive book to end with some surprising flourish, and instead it peters out rather quietly. The resolution of the situation is mildly surprising, but the main surprise is that it works. I come away thinking, “Oh, was it that simple, after all?” For me, the ending is the weakest part of this book.

On second reading, of course I found the ending less surprising, but the final chapters still seem weaker than the rest of the book. It's not just the sense of anticlimax; I'm not convinced that the method used to resolve the situation would work.

Although we don't get to know even the main characters in depth, and I don't think I have anything in common with them, I do feel the urge to go on reading about them; as I often do when a good story ends. But it seems that Arkady Martine has no plan to continue this series any further.