mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

In this sequel to A Memory Called Empire, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and her imperial liaison/maybe-kinda-girlfriend Three Seagrass travel to the front lines of an interstellar war on a mission to try to decipher the alien enemy's language and establish diplomatic relations. What Three Seagrass doesn't know is that Mahit is also on a covert mission to sabotage diplomacy and keep the Teixcalaan Empire mired in an endless, unwinnable war.

I was so-so on A Memory Called Empire. I would say I had a stronger reaction to the sequel, both positive and negative.

First, the positive: I loved Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada, new characters in this installment. She's the passionate, brilliant captain of the flagship, he's her loyal, cerebral first officer who adheres to a stoic alien philosophy. They deal with high-stakes ethical quandaries as the lives of millions hang in the balance, and they love each other with an intensity that goes largely unspoken. Is this aspect of the book pandering to people who love Kirk and Spock? Perhaps, but I had a great time being pandered to. I wanted the entire book to be about these two.

I mostly liked the stuff about establishing communication with the aliens too, which is also classically Star Trek in tone and approach. (It bugged me a little that the linguistics wasn't more realistic, but you rarely get that in SF and it isn't really the point here.)

Unfortunately, the things I liked were pretty definitively outweighed by all the half-baked themes, garbled political messaging, and many characters' infuriatingly stupid choices and baffling cluelessness. It wasn't quite throw-the-book-across-the-room level, but at certain moments it got close.

Ranting and spoilers

- How can it possibly take SO LONG for the characters to figure out that the aliens are a hivemind???? It's not just that it's a basic SF trope and obvious to the reader from literally the first page of the book. It's also that all the prompting the characters need to make the leap is right there in front of them the whole time! Mahit herself has Yskandr's mind in her head, there are the Sunlit guards and the Shard pilots who share their perceptions through technology... To these characters, the existence of a species with a shared consciousness shouldn't even be surprising. But it still takes them 400 fucking pages to figure it out, and they act like it's a galaxy-shattering shock. This makes no sense whatsoever and it makes most of the characters look inexcusably dumb.

- I don't get the way the Mahit/Three Seagrass relationship is written at all. In the first book, they liked each other from the start and then nothing happened with it until suddenly they kissed at the end. In this one, they have a stupid fight at the beginning and feel weird and uncomfortable around each other for hundreds of pages until suddenly they fuck. This didn't work for me. It especially didn't work because I felt like I was supposed to side with Mahit in their argument, but I didn't, because Three Seagrass doesn't know what Mahit is mad about and Mahit refuses to tell her. Mahit's narration is explicit that she wants Three Seagrass to know what's bothering her without being told, so basically she's punishing Three Seagrass for not being fucking psychic. Am I the only one who thinks it would have been more interesting if they'd actually ever talked about any of the issues between them, rather than just winding themselves up about it in their heads?? By the end I wasn't rooting for them to get/stay together at all, so when Mahit ran away from the relationship (again) I didn't even care.

- I felt the lack of gender stuff in the first book was a missed opportunity. In this book, the author seems to be strenuously trying to miss that opportunity as hard as she can. There is one scene where Mahit (in their shared consciousness) accuses Yskandr of not understanding fashion for "female-bodied people." It's brushed off. There's another scene where Three Seagrass says she wasn't sure if Mahit liked people of her "gender and sex," and several where Three Seagrass silently wonders if she had sex with Mahit, or with Mahit and Yskandr, or just Yskandr. No further discussion of these points. I truly don't understand what Martine is going for here. She chose to create a protagonist who is a woman sharing a mind and body with a man. She seems dimly aware that there might be interesting things one could say about this. She apparently doesn't want to say any of them.

- Even leaving aside the gender issues, I think there's a lot more that could have been done to explore the mindsharing scenario. Yskandr often reads like an invisible sidekick who just pipes up now and then to give Mahit some information, advice, or a snarky comment. What is his experience/consciousness/sense of embodiment like? We don't get his own internal monologue, just the things he "says" to Mahit. It doesn't feel as weird and alien as it seems like it should.

- Mahit and Twenty Cicada should have talked! He's assimilated to Teixcalaan in some ways but maintained his cultural distinctiveness in others; doesn't that seem like an extremely relevant perspective for Mahit to hear? The books act like Mahit is the only one in the galaxy who has mixed feelings about Teixcalaan, but surely she can't be.

- On a larger level, these books are about an absolutist expansionist empire and the vulnerable republic it threatens, and nothing about any of that is resolved or even really explored all that much. The child heir Eight Antidote is an interesting character and he's trying to do the right thing, but there's so much more going on here that can't and won't be resolved by a kid with some moral fiber taking the throne. Having a relatively nice emperor does not solve the problems of imperialism. In this book we learn more about how systemically fucked up Lsel is too, and nothing happens with that either. The plot doesn't even make it hard for Mahit to decide whether to stay loyal to Lsel, since there are power-mad authorities on Lsel who want to KILL HER. No wonder people were expecting a trilogy here; this book does not wrap up a single loose end.

Okay, that's probably more than enough of a rant. TL;DR: Book dances around a lot of interesting speculative and interpersonal possibilities and solidly lands on very few of them.

This is the fifth and final part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic. [Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.]


"Spyder Threads" by Craig Laurance Gidney (2021)

( Disabled fashion models keep disappearing after they work with a mysterious designer. )


"The Orb" by Tara Campbell (2021)

( An environmentalist cult creates an ever-growing, consuming entity. )


"We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle (2021)

( A homeless man hears voices from deep space. )


"Ruler of the Rear Guard" by Maurice Broaddus (2022)

( A Black American woman travels to Ghana to join a pan-African repatriation movement. )


the end

Though these last few stories weren't my favorites, the collection overall had some strong entries. It was noted that there was more group consensus about which stories we liked and which we didn't than there has been in some other books we've read, so the discussions ended up being a little shorter than usual.

The group plans to continue with This All Come Back Now, the first ever published anthology of speculative fiction by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors.

As this novel opens, fifteen-year-old Vern Riley is on the run from the Black separatist cult that raised her and forced her to marry its abusive leader. Alone in the woods, heavily pregnant and suffering hallucinations, she manages to evade capture and gives birth to twins, whom she then raises all on her own in the wilderness for years. If you're thinking this doesn't sound like something an ordinary teenager could plausibly do, you're dead right, and the same thought occurs to Vern. She realizes her body is changing—getting stronger, healing faster. But what she doesn't yet realize is that her strange powers are inextricably linked with the cult's origins and its secret purpose. To find answers she'll have to leave her forest isolation and, for the first time in her life, confront the wider world and its people.

I had mixed feelings about this book. Its themes are powerful, dealing with the exploitation of marginalized people's bodies on both interpersonal and systemic levels, and exploring possibilities for healing and connection in the face of that. Queer love, especially, is centered, and queer characters are allowed to make mistakes and to be really fucked up without being hopeless, powerless, or unworthy of happiness, and that was great.

But I felt the presentation of the material was uneven. Though I didn't disagree with any of the book's political points, they were sometimes made in a distractingly heavy-handed way, like the story had to come to a halt while the author delivered a lecture. Structurally, the pacing sometimes dragged, to the point where I'd be flipping ahead to see how much longer until the plot moved. And the plot itself was a little hand-wavey, despite some pretty big exposition dumps near the end.

spoilery plot discussion

It turns out the real power behind the cult is the US government, which infiltrated a Black separatist movement back in the '60s so they could establish this cult and use its members as test subjects for a program to create supersoldiers. Vern learns this with the help of a Lakota doctor she befriends and falls in love with, who also helps Vern understand the source of her powers. A fungus is growing inside Vern's body which, in addition to super strength and super healing, eventually gives her psychic powers including mind-control, an exoskeleton that can deflect bullets, and the ability to resurrect the recently-dead. She basically becomes so powerful that even the US military can't stop her, and she returns with her new allies to free the cult members from the compound.

In its broad strokes, this makes sense. But aspects that aren't explained include where this fungus came from, how it functions, why only certain people gain these powers from it, how the government knows who those people are, and why the government agents seem so unprepared to fight Vern when they should know her abilities and how much of a threat she is. (There was another fungal supersoldier in government custody with powers even more developed than Vern's, so they shouldn't be caught off guard!)

The book is definitely more interested in Vern's character development and relationships with other people than in the specifics of the premise. And yet, at the end of the book, the direction Vern's life will take next is left somewhat open-ended. It seems like the idea is that she's going to continue to use her powers to fight oppression, almost reading like a superhero origin story. (It reminded me a little of Unbreakable in that way.) But it's pointed out that now that she's turned the tables on the oppressors and she has the power, she will face the temptation of abusing her power too. I was relieved that this is a problem the narrative actually worries about, especially after getting burned by The Future of Another Timeline's gross mishandling of similar themes, though I would have liked to see it explored in more depth. It's also suggested that Vern would kind of like to have a peaceful life with her kids and girlfriend after all this shit has happened, which, again, is something a lot of superheroes can relate to! I felt like maybe the book could have used a "five years later" epilogue or something to bring a stronger conclusion to Vern's arc.

Overall, for me, this was a case of good ideas and iffy execution. Solomon has two other books, An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep, and I'm not sure if I want to try them or not. Anybody have thoughts on those?

In the near future, an android named Klara begins her existence in a retail shop, observing what little she can see of the outside world through the front display window where she is often placed. Eventually she is purchased as a companion for Josie, a teenage girl with a life-threatening health condition. Klara quickly bonds with Josie and comes to believe there must be a way to save her. But even with her keen observational abilities, there is much that Klara doesn't understand, both about the truth of Josie's condition, and about the fact that others may have different ideas than she does about what saving someone means.

This is a thematically complex and nuanced book that invites contemplation of what it means to be a person, what it means to love someone, and how people cope when the accelerating pace of technology leaves our human concepts of community and ethics reeling in the dust. It's also a very personal book with a sympathetic and fascinatingly nonhuman protagonist. Through Klara's limited perspective, we get glimpses that this is a dystopia, and that the development of androids has led to social upheaval, with mass displacement for many and a life of isolation for the privileged few. But the stakes remain personal—Klara isn't on a quest to fix the ills of the world, she just wants Josie to be okay.

( non-spoilery discussion of story elements and themes )

plot spoilers

Some of the human characters believe that science has disproven the existence of a soul as such (and it's not explained exactly how, because it's not that kind of book) which is why they perceive it as a valid option for Klara to not only take Josie's place in the family after her death, but to literally become Josie. The theory is that if Klara understands Josie so deeply that she can act exactly as Josie would in every situation, then there's no difference. Klara is initially willing to try this, but her eventual reasoning for why it wouldn't work was fascinating to me:

'Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That's why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn't have succeeded. So I'm glad I decided as I did.'

I think what Klara is saying here is that the soul is an emergent phenomenon that stems from your relationships with others. This seems akin to the message of The Velveteen Rabbit—that being loved makes you real.

The closest relationship Klara has in the book is with her god, the Sun, I think (hence the title). After finishing the book I spent some time thinking about whether the solar miracles in the story are meant to be real, or just coincidences. Klara believes the Sun saved the homeless man's life at the beginning of the book, and she certainly believes the Sun saved Josie at the end. And both of those characters do survive, and in Klara's POV there's no doubt about what happened. The uncertainty only comes from the reader's real-world "knowledge" that there are no miracles, or perhaps their genre knowledge that this is science fiction and not fantasy.

The conclusion that I came to is that it doesn't matter, because the important thing for the story is that Klara believes her prayers to the Sun were answered—her hope never wavers, and the narrative rewards her for that—and asking whether it was "real" only underlines that asking whether anything is "real" is sometimes the wrong question. Maybe the ambiguity of their respective realness is precisely why it makes sense for Klara and the Sun to have the connection that they do.

I really liked this book and I think there's a lot more that could be said about it. I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a long time. (Note to self: Nominate it if turingfest runs this year.)

Before he became a novelist, John Green was a book reviewer, and since that time he has noticed that everyone has become a reviewer and everything in the world has become a subject for reviews. That led him to write this book, which is a collection of essays in the loose form of reviews, taking for their subjects everything from Halley's Comet to air conditioning to viral meningitis.

He notes that reviews are often actually little memoirs, conveying the reviewer's personal experience of their subject. That's very true of this book—Green has chosen subjects with meaning to him, and the essays are often confessional, describing times of struggle and isolation, and of connection and joy. But he also shifts focus frequently and fluently from individual experiences to historical and scientific contexts and to our profoundly interconnected human society. It's a personal book, but not a navel-gazing one.

He quotes other writers a lot in the book, and in the afterword he wonders if it was too much. But I don't think it's too much; I actually think it's expressive of one of the book's core premises, which is that the human world, for better or worse, is something we experience together. There are no bystanders, only participants. And the more voices we hear and read, the better we understand that. (Green's moment of self-consciousness about the quotes also made me think of another quote, this one from John Hodgman: "You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.")

The book also makes a case, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, against despair. Sometimes life is shit, and we all know that, but sometimes it isn't, and if you shut yourself off to the joy and hope and compassion that also stubbornly continue to exist, well... Green describes hope as something that is not just nice to have, but something that, for him, is literally life-saving. As a person who deals with depression, I can relate to that.

A lot of human misery is fueled by cherrypicking only certain facts that reinforce our worst fears, and by thinking that only negative perspectives are intellectually honest. The truth is that the world and its people are complex, and the more you look at them the more complexity you find, such that it's actually really difficult to generalize about them without lying to yourself. Green has clearly learned this from hard experience, and again it goes back to everyone becoming a reviewer. I think the book tacitly poses the question of what kind of reviewer you want to be and how you want to frame your own lived experiences—essentially, how do you take a bunch of stuff that happened and make meaning out of it? We all have agency in how to do that, though sometimes it goes unused.

Green's reviews end with a rating on a scale of 1-5 stars, and the way he uses that scale adds another layer of commentary that I think could be worthy of an essay in itself, but I am not going to attempt to imitate it. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed the book.

For a hundred generations, a lineage of women called the Kibsu have lived on Earth, passing down advanced scientific knowledge from mother to daughter while secretly influencing the course of human civilization. Their mission is to turn humanity into a spacefaring species—by any means necessary.

In this book (the first in a planned trilogy), the Kibsu are closer to their goal than ever, manipulating events after the Second World War to encourage the incipient space race between the USA and the USSR. But the Tracker, a mysterious man bent on their destruction, is hot on their heels and getting ever closer to his goal too.

( Things I liked about this book )

( Things I did not like )

So yeah, this was quite a heady mix of aspects that I found exciting and fascinating, and aspects that I found offputting or way more disturbing than they needed to be. I am motivated enough to see the story play out that I do plan to read the second book. (The third isn't out yet.) Maybe I'll have a better time with it since at least I'll be prepared!