A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine

I love space opera.  I particularly love post-colonial space opera of the kind that Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee have been writing.  So Arkady Martine‘s novel A Memory Called Empire (review copy from Tor) was always going to pique my interest.  Add to that a main character who is a diplomat, and this is right in my wheelhouse.  And I loved it.

Mahit Dzmare is sent from the tiny independent mining station of Lsel to be the new ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire.  Lsel is tiny, and Mahit’s main mission is to prevent her home from being swallowed up by the Empire, whilst investigating the mysterious disappearance and murder of her predecessor.  Mahit has been selected for her love of Teixcalaanli culture, and her knowledge of its society.  That and her psychological compatibility with the last ambassador, as she will carry an embedded device with a download of his knowledge and memories, adding her own to the store.

These themes of identity run through the novel extremely strongly.  Mahit is a product of her childhood on Lsel, and her study of Teixcalaanli culture, but she also carries the memories and reactions of her ambassador predecessor within her.  These rise up at odd moments, to the point where she sometimes struggles to disentangle her thoughts and feelings from sense memories and the reactions of her predecessor.  Much of that plays out through Mahit’s sexuality – she experiences flashes of her predecessor’s desire and his memories of sexual encounters, muddying Mahit’s own burgeoning feelings.

Mahit’s love for the Empire’s culture and her joy at being able to visit it and experience it at first hand wars with her mission to protect Lsel’s independence.  This tension runs throughout the novel, as Mahit is confronted with the difference between her experience and the reality of Teixcalaanli culture for those born and raised within it.  She regularly fails to appreciate the subtleties and nuances around her, never more so that when she is bewildered by the layering of sophistication of the Empire’s poetry.

Mahit finds herself plunged into the heart of a succession crisis for the Empire, as the aging Emperor’s health begins to fail and various rivals start jockeying for position.  War seems inevitable, with Lsel one of the possible casualties as the various rivals seek to cement their claims.  She has to navigate her way through this, brokering Lsel’s safety through political turmoil.  In this she is assisted by ambitious young civil servant Three Seagrass, who has been appointed as her liaison to the Empire.  Three Seagrass is herself walking a fine line between her loyalty to Teixcalaan, her own personal ambition, and her duties supporting Mahit.

It’s an incredibly satisfying novel that leaves me extremely excited about the next book in the series.

Goodreads rating: 5*

Luna: Moon Rising – Ian McDonald

The final volume in Ian McDonald‘s Luna trilogy, Luna: Moon Rising (review copy from Gollancz), was one of the books I was most excited to read this year because I had loved the first two hard.  And it did not disappoint.

This is a book that is as red in tooth and claw as the first two volumes in the series.  With all the hallmark kidnapping, assassination and destruction we have come to know and love from this series.  Luna: Moon Rising focuses on two key plot threads.  A battle between Lucas and Ariel Corta for control of the Moon and custody of the injured Lucasinho.  And a debate about the future of the Moon colony itself.

This debate about the future of the Moon is a fascinating one.  Each competing vision of what the Moon could be is plausible and compelling: automated provision of resources for a starving Earth, solar-powered data-centre, or jumping off point to colonise the stars?  Whatever choice i made, it will have profound consequences for Earth, Moon and the future of the solar system.

But it is in the Corta v Corta battle that the novel has its heart.  Where the previous novels have shown us the conflict between the Five Dragons and the consequences of that for Lunar society, here we are treated to the divisions within families.  With the Cortas struggling to rebuild and reclaim after the cataclysmic events of earlier books, this is an extremely personal story.  And McDonald resolves it beautifully in a thrilling climax.

I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the book.  But if you had any doubts, read this glorious trilogy.

Goodreads rating: 5*

Empire of Silence – Christopher Ruocchio

There’s a gloriously 80’s science fantasy vibe about Empire of Silence from Christopher Ruocchio (review copy from Gollancz), the first in his Sun Eater series.  This a Galactic Empire ruled by aristocratic houses genetically engineered so that their breeding is literally superior. They profit from indentured labour and are equipped with special swords. And there is an ongoing war against the alien Cielcin, who are slowly but surely encroaching on Empire space.

Hadrian Marlowe is the eldest son of one of those Houses – and one that feels very House Harkonnen – but succession to his father’s holdings is not guaranteed.  Marlowe is a sensitive son, more interested in art than warfare, and concerned about workers’ rights.  But Empire of Silence is told from the older Marlowe’s perspective, and we know that he turns into a famed leader who defeats the Cielcin but also commits genocide.  Presumably actions driven by his desire to understand the alien Cielcin and his conflicted feelings about the cruel Empire he has been born into.

This is a riches to rags and back to riches again intergalactic romp.  The impetuous young Marlowe runs away from home after a disagreement with his father, who wants him to enter into the Church where he might be able to use his power and influence for the sake of the family.  But Marlowe does not want to become a Church torturer.  During his escape, Marlowe gets robbed and ends up fighting as a gladiator on a backwater world, where he dreams of saving up enough money to buy a starship of his own.

Empire of Silence is tremendous fun, and a very promising start to an interesting new series.

Goodreads rating: 3*

Revenant Gun – Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee finishes off his Machineries of Empire trilogy in triumphant style with Revenant Gun (review copy from Rebellion Publishing).  Picking up shortly after the events of Raven Strategem, the novel plays out the endgame of Kel Cheris (carrying the memories and skills of maverick outcast General Shuos Jedao) and her rebellion against the Hexarchate as she uncovers the secrets at the heart of the Hexarchate.  But Nirai Kujen has a plan up his sleeve – reviving another instance of Shuos Jedao in a clone body to take on Kel Cheris.  Except this Shuos Jedao has the memories of only 17 years – and no recollection of the atrocities he committed in later life.

For those of you jumping onto this trilogy for the first time, it’s a brilliant piece of space opera, full of plotting, space battles and exotic weapons.  The Hexarchate is a galaxy-spanning Empire ruled by six houses, each built around a set of skills or professions, such as spying, mathematics and technology, diplomacy and the military.  The Hexarchate provides stability and prosperity for its citizens, but the exotic technologies that underpin  society depend on a particular set of exotic physics (known as the ‘high calendar’) that are maintained by strict observance of ritual, including the ritualised torture and murder of Hexarchate citizens.  For the Hexarchate, this is a price worth paying to avoid the poverty and instability of the past.

It is this system that Kel Cheris is seeking to overthrow.  It is responsible for the obliteration of her planetary culture as the expanding Hexarchate assimilated her home and obscured its customs and language.  A soldier with a strong talent for the mathematics that the Hexarchate is founded upon – as well as being possessed by the greatest general of all time – Cheris has the skills, creativity and vision to imagine an alternative future and put it in place.  She is consistently underestimated by the Hexarchate, yet exploits their prejudices and weaknesses, particularly the way that an entire sub-culture of robot servitors with its own priorities lives among and supports the human Hexarchate.

Lee is a transgender man, and the whole trilogy is notable for its strong inclusion of transgender, agender, non-binary and genderfluid characters.  The dysphoria Shuos Jedao and Kel Cheris feel from sharing a body must come from Lee’s own experience.

But most of all this is an extremely cleverly plotted trilogy of books stuffed full of ideas.  Fresh, exciting and an utter joy to read.

Goodreads rating: 5*

Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon – Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s new series, Luna (review copies from Gollancz), has all the red-in-tooth-and-claw politics and excitement of I Claudius, the Borgias and the Medicis rolled into one glorious bundle of politics, wealth and violence.  Both of the first two books, Luna: New Moon, and Luna: Wolf Moon (just published) are fabulous.

In McDonald’s world, the Moon has been colonised, and it is controlled by five powerful families, known as the Dragons.  These families control resources that an increasingly fragile Earth is dependent on, but they are bitter rivals, jockeying for position.  Many of those families are now on their third generation, with the physical changes wrought by the Moon meaning that individuals are trapped within its environment.  After two years someone from Earth is no longer able to return, but those born there are unable to survive elsewhere.  The Dragons are fabulously wealthy, but the gap between rich and poor is wide, with other individuals eking out an existence, competing for contracts to make a life.  This is a place run by contract, where there is no other civil or criminal law and disputes can be settled by trial by combat.

Both books follow the fortunes of the Corta family.  Founded by Brazilian matriarch Adriana Corta, the family has a monopoly on the production of helium, essential to power a failing Earth’s fusion reactors.  But the Corta family are seen as upstarts by their chief rivals, the Mackenzie family, which dominates the mining of rare metals, but is jealous of the more profitable helium industry.  The rivalries between the five Dragons are kept in careful balance by the Eagle, the representative of the Lunar Development Corporation, the governing entity in charge of the Moon, but the collapse of a planned dynastic marriage between Corta and Mackenzie triggers a chain reaction of events and reprisals that threatens to destroy the fragile lunar society.  It’s difficult to say more without spoiling a complex plot that is a roller-coaster ride of violence, destruction, adventure and heroism.

In McDonald’s hands, the Luna books are a powerful exploration of frontier life.  There are chances for great wealth and opportunity for those with the wisdom and determination to spot an opportunity and take advantage of it.  But existence is fragile, and small events can wreak drastic changes in the circumstances of an individual.  The Moon does not discriminate in who it offers opportunities to, or how it punishes them for their missteps.

McDonald’s Moon is a real melting pot of Earth culture and nations, all interwoven and viewed through a lunar lens.  The five Dragons represent Australia, Russia, Ghana and China as well as the Cortas’ native Brazil.  Sexuality is free and fluid within lunar society, and diversity is embedded in society.  That leads to a broad range of fantastic characters, from powerful matriarchs, to playboy heirs straight from Made In Chelsea, to roughnecks out on the lunar surface.

Chief among that cast of characters is the fabulous Ariel Corta.  High-flying divorce lawyer and society darling, she is charismatic, arrogant, vain and an alcoholic with a Martini habit.  From her vintage Dior to her vertiginous heels she exudes sophistication, but underneath she is fragile.  Her attention-grabbing professional persona conceals emotional neediness underneath it all.  It’s wonderful to see such a fully-realised and flawed character taking such a leading role in a novel.

Goodreads rating: 5*

The Promise of the Child – Tom Toner

I tried really hard to love The Promise of the Child, Tom Toner’s debut novel from Gollancz (review copy from NetGalley).  I love space opera, and a braided novel that combines high politics with epic space battles ought to be right up my street.

There is a lot to like.  The world-building is complex and rich.  A wealthy, immortal elite (the Amaranthines) rule the galaxy, but their numbers are diminishing as individuals slip into madness over time, and they are increasingly turning away from the world, consumed by their own internal politics.  The immortals are ruled by the longest-lived among them, and an individual has appeared who claims to be even older than their current Emperor.  Meanwhile, the post-human diaspora across the galaxy is becoming increasingly restless and rebellion is brewing.  A new super-weapon has been created and there are those who will stop at nothing to get their hands on it.  The themes in the book of small, wealthy and distant elites becoming increasingly distanced from the people they rule are highly topical, and the persistance of bigotry and racism in the far future was dealt with sensitively.

But the novel suffers from a lot of first-novel flaws.  The three strands to the novel are so tonally distinct that it interferes with the flow of the story.  The plotting is choppy at times, and there is an over-reliance on explaining after the fact what characters have been seeking to achieve, which takes the reader out of the story and jars with the third person perspective.  The world-building is rich, but at times becomes intrusive.  At times the writer pushes particularly cool bits of world-building to the fore to show them off, but it interrupts the flow of the story.  It would be better to let them sit in the background, adding depth to the world-building.  And I really struggled to connect with Lycaste, the protagonist of one of the three strands of the story.  The most beautiful Melius on his world, he’s lived an isolated existence at the very edge of the world.  He’s lonely, naive and suffers unrequited love for a neighbour until a bureaucrat from elsewhere arrives and turns his world upside down.  I must confess I struggled to find his lack of knowledge about the world convincing, or to care much about such an angry, petulant teenager.

Goodreads rating: 2* 

Central Station – Lavie Tidhar

I’m an unashamed fan of Lavie Tidhar’s work.  So, I was very excited at the opportunity to read his latest novel, Central Station (published by Tachyon Publications, who provided a review copy through NetGalley).  And every page was a delight.

Central Station is an amalgam of several previously published pieces of short fiction, woven together with new material into a composite novel.  All of the pieces are set in or around Central Station itself, a spaceport built just outside Tel Aviv, in a post-war, post-fossil fuel society.

For all its futuristic setting, Central Station speaks to the world we live in now.  This is a novel about borders and connections, emigration and diaspora and the families we are born into or create for ourselves.  Where people are blends of human and machine, and religion is a literal drug.

Humanity has colonised the stars, and Central Station itself is the jumping off point to those varied communities in space.  The community that has built up around the spaceport is a melting pot of cultures and races, living and working in an informal economy of shebeens, salvage and more and less legal bioengineering.  The novel follows several of the residents of that community as their lives cross and interact.

In Tidhar’s novel, the connections between family and community are manifested through The Conversation: an all-encompassing background chatter of intertwined social media, facilitated by devices implanted at birth.  For some, that level of connection is not enough, and one family patriarch, Weiwei Zhong, made a deal to ensure that his family and descendants will all share each others’ memories.  But the volume of memories are threatening to overwhelm the bootleg technology, leaving his son with the equivalent of dementia as he tries to manage and process the volume of data.  Boris Chong returns from the stars to assist his ailing father, but finds himself confronting the family drama he sought to escape by emigrating and reconnecting with a lost love, Miriam Jones.

The world left behind does not stand still for those emigrants and returners.  Relativity means those who leave and return have not aged as much as those left behind.  As always, the person who leaves expects the place they have left to remain the same, but is the one who often changes least, struggling to cope with a home that has not stood still since their departure.

Around Boris Chong and his family accrete a number of other vignettes of Central Station residents and visitors.  Miriam Jones’s brother Achimwene Jones is a collector and seller of antique books.  He has no node, making him deaf to The Conversation.  But his very isolation and distance from others makes him irresistibly fascinating to Carmel, a strigoi, and Boris’s ex.  Infected with a virus, Carmel is a data-vampire, gifted with the ability – and need – to feed on the knowledge and memories of others.  She becomes integral to a piece of digital performance art made by a god-artist called Eliezer.  In order to help Carmel, Motl, a homeless cyborg former soldier, supplies a drug called Crucifixation, creating tensions in his relationship with the fully-human Isobel Chow.  A relationship that in itself is a taboo.

Motl’s story speaks to how we treat and value the military.  With the conflict that they were created for long concluded, the former cyborg soldiers are discarded and treated as less than human.  Left to beg for scraps, they live on the very margins of society.  But these cyborg soldiers are not as disposable as was originally envisaged.  Their essential humanity persists.  Ostracised for their fusion with the mechanical, they watch from sidelines as, ironically, humanity becomes ever more enmeshed with the digital.

Central Station comes together to become a complex and multi-layered novel that speaks of family and the nature of humanity.  It’s a beautiful thing, and it would be a crime if it doesn’t get some award nominations next year.

Goodreads rating: 5*

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Becky Chambers

My Welsh sister-in-law taught me a wonderful Welsh word: cwtch.  It’s a hug, but not just any hug.  It’s the kind of warm, comforting hug that one gets from a close friend or family member, full of love and reassurance and the knowledge that there is always a safe space full of unconditional love.  The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is a cwtch in book form.

Cross Farscape with Firefly and add in a hefty dollop of life-affirming goodness and you have The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.  A multi-species crew travel across the galaxy under contract to build a new tunnel connecting the centre of the galaxy and the Galactic Commons, a collection of planets that have formed a loose alliance.

This novel is a love-song to the human condition, and our relationships with one another.  As the crew of the Wayfarer travel across the galaxy to the start point for their tunneling operation, we learn about them and their relationships with one another.  Everyone has secrets, but these are ones that expose their essential humanity – stories of love and loss that have shaped them as individuals.  Rosemary is coming to terms with her father’s arms dealing, Ashby with his love for an alien woman in a dangerous profession, Dr Chef wrestling with the self-destructive urges of his species and Ohan with the beliefs of their people that propel them on a course towards self-destruction.  And then there’s Corbin, the annoying flatmate we’ve all had to deal with at some point or another.

Although this isn’t the deepest or most complex of books (it’s a little too on-the-rails, with little sense of real peril at times), it’s one of those rare and special books that left me in tears.  Jenks’s love for Lovey, the ship’s AI, is real and intensely moving, and there are moments of real connection for all of the characters.  The visit to Sissix’s homeworld, in particular, reveals all that she has given up to travel with the crew of the Wayfarer.

The story of the novel itself is equally life-affirming: Chambers found herself out of work and short of money.  The generosity of strangers through a Kickstarter campaign enabled her to complete the book and self-publish it.  The success of the novel meant it was picked up by Hodder, a mainstream publisher.

Ultimately, what The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet teaches us is that we are all made of stardust.  All essentially the same, and capable of profound  connections with one another, regardless of how different we may seem.  We are enriched by our diversity if we are open-minded enough to appreciate it and let it blossom.  And I, for one, want to spend more time with the crew of the Wayfarer.

Goodreads rating: 4*