I loved the first book in this series: A Memory Called Empire. It grabbed me right away and carried me through until the end. This sequel, not as much. Maybe that "new universe smell" has worn off. Maybe I had forgotten too many details to get invested in the political intrigue, or maybe the interesting stuff doesn't really get going until about halfway through. Still, once A Desolation Called Peace does get interesting, it gets really, really interesting and expands some of the philosophical themes of the first one. So I recommend it to fans of the first one. In fact, you might benefit from reading this soon after reading the first one, rather than two years later like I did.
It's not that the first half of the book is bad. It just takes a long time to set things up. It also didn't help that I didn't entirely remember who's who or what's what, especially as we are introduced to several new POV characters. It's great that Martine is opening up the universe a bit, but it was not easy for me to get into, which probably wouldn't have bothered me if I weren't comparing this experience to my experience of reading the first volume. But, maybe this is more on me than the author. Your experience may (and probably will!) differ.
Once I got my bearings, it was some cool stuff! One of the new POVs is the young Emperor-to-be. He, along with Mahit and Three Seagrass, were probably my favorites. We also meet a military commander, who got more interesting as things went on.
As for the plot, there's a mysterious, and seemingly belligerent, alien species that the Teixcalaan empire is unable to communicate with. So Three Seagrass remembers her old friend Mahit Dzmare is great with languages and a bit of an alien herself, and goes to fetch her to try to communicate with the aliens. There's plenty of other intrigue in both Teixcalaan and Mahit's home station Lsel that's too complex to summarize here, but much of the plot is essentially a First Contact story.
For the philosophical bits, Mahit still has an "imago" of her predecessor in a nice science fictional example of two persons in one body (see also the recent Apple TV show Severance for a different version of that one) as they both deal with being people who love an empire that's not always great for their home station.
But the coolest thing about personhood has to do with the aliens. It would be a bit too much of a spoiler to explain it, but part of the key turns out to be wondering if, just as one body could contain two persons, there may be other ways of conceptualizing personhood that are required for communication. I was also reminded of the philosopher W. V. O. Quine's famous notion of the "indeterminacy of translation" along the way: how can you ever be sure you've got it right when encountering a language for the first time? And how much more complicated would this be with non-humans who may or may not be persons at all?
Queue more deep thoughts about language, personhood, and whether you can really communicate with people you don't think of as, well, people, and you get some good philosophical fun in addition to the fun space opera fun still with plenty of inspirations from Aztec and other cultures.
So while this one had a slow start for me, I ended up loving it in the end. Whether Martine returns to this universe or not, I predict she is a person whose career I will follow for some time.
PS: I was going to read this anyway as I loved the first one, which won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2020, but this is my first read for the 2022 Hugo nominees, and I'm happy to report that if the other nominees are this good, I'm off to a fantastic start! Stay tuned for more Hugo reviews in the next couple months.
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