(Originally posted on FB two years ago)

A Desolation Called Peace (2021, USA) is the second book of a duology and, I think, more lauded than the first, with nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA Awards; and winning the Hugo, which the first book in the duology, A Memory Called Empire (2019, USA), also did . So you would expect high-quality science fiction from the two books, and more so from the second. But, of course, awards are not about quality, and never have been, despite the use of the word “best” in their names.

A Desolation Called Peace follows on directly from A Memory Called Empire. Mahit Dzmare has returned home to Lsel Station, but is unwilling to be debriefed as she knows it will destroy what she is: herself, and two corrupted imagos, or memory imprints, both of her predecessor in the ambassador’s role. (His murder kickstarted the plot of the first book.) Meanwhile, the Teixcalaani empire has encountered an alien species and their failure to communicate with it has triggered a war. This was what Lsel Station wanted, of course – the ambassador before Dzmare had traded imago-technology for Lsel Station’s independence, but his superiors had always planned to keep the Teixcalaani empire at bay by embroiling them in a war with the mysterious aliens.

Dzmare’s lover, Three Seagrass, gets herself assigned as a language specialist to the fleet fighting the aliens, dragoons Dzmare into assisting her, and the two actually manage to open communications. Meanwhile, there are factions in the war ministry who think the only solution is ending the war by bombing the shit out of the (an?) alien home world. This does not sit well with the commander of the fleet sent to resolve the alien menace.

So, lots of politics, lots of gooey eyes between Three Seasick and Dzmare, lots of interiority and info dumps, but not, sadly, much description. There’s a lot here that reminds me of Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels, although given A Desolation Called Peace reads more like a love-letter to Three Seagrass than anything else that’s perhaps less than expected, given the set-up. The big reveal behind the aliens’ inability to communicate with humans, despite communication and language being a major feature of the two novels, and even numerous mentions of an earlier alien race contacted by the Teixcalaani empire, and several embarrassingly bad passages from the aliens’ POV… Despite all that, the big reveal is something that cropped in a recent sf trilogy – and no doubt we’ll see it again over the next few years.

I thought A Memory Called Empire had its moments – some nice world-building, an interesting plot – but A Desolation Called Peace dials back on both. While it introduces a couple of interesting new characters, they’re not enough to overcome a dawning sense of familiarity, or the way Three Seasick begins to take over the narrative. The first book was an interesting spin on space opera, at a time when interesting spins on space opera were du jour. The second… well, either the moment has passed (it has), or it reads too much like the two books were a single novel padded out to a duology and the second book got the worst of the deal. Disappointing.