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Karen Lord’s novel The Blue Beautiful World (to be published on August 29, 2023; I got to read an advance copy through Netgalley) is the third in her “Cygnus Beta” series of science fiction novels, following The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013) and The Galaxy Game (2014). (Lord has also written a series on novels based on West African and Caribbean folktales: Redemption in Indigo (2010) and Unraveling (2019), with at least one more forthcoming.

In any case, The Blue Beautiful World is the first book in the Cygnus Beta series to be set on Earth, rather than on other planets. The series as a whole takes place in the near- to mid-range future, on a number of planets that contain humanoid life, all of which are more technologically advanced than we (Earth) are. The planets all orbit stars that are relatively near us, in galactic terms: Vega, Fomalhaut, Pollux, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Tauri, and 16 Cygni B. Most of these stars are within 25 light years of the Sol system — though Epsilon Tauri is considerably further away (147 light years), and has been quarantined from the others. Lord is careful about most of her cosmological details, although the two least likely aspects of her set-up (both of which are necessary to the novels) are only hand-wavingly explained: the method of FTL travel, and the genetic similarity between Earth humans and the near-humans on other planets. The Blue Beautiful World in fact shares some characters with the earlier novels, but it can be read independently from them.

It is not easy to describe what The Blue Beautiful World is about — it has a sort of wavering quality that is central to its charm. All three of the novels in Lord’s series work on multiple levels. The Best of All Possible Worlds begins with a shocking incident of planetary genocide; but gradually it turns into something like a romance novel combined with an anthropological tour of multiple cultures. While there is nothing that extreme in The Blue Beautiful World, it also plays with a similarly disconcerting mix of levels and themes. A lot of readers on Goodreads and similar sites seem to find it ‘confusing’ — which simply means that its plot is not entirely linear, and there are changes of focus throughout. That is to say, the elements that other readers complained about are precisely what delighted me about the book.

The Blue Beautiful World starts (after a single-page preface) with a pop star named Owen, who is extremely charismatic and is the most popular entertainer on Earth. But it shortly turns out that he is not actually human (i.e. he comes from one of the other humanoid planets), and that his mission is not just fame and popularity, but has political elements to it as well — he seeks, either to take over our planet (not literally, but in a manner of speaking), and/or to produce the conditions which will make it possible for Earth to enter the galactic commonwealth with the other inhabited planets.

After a few chapters with Owen, and with his human manager Noriko, who is eventually initiated into the ways he is more than just a pop star, the novel jumps forward a decade or two, and focuses on a different set of characters (though Owen and Noriko eventually reappear). These are young people (20ish) from around the world who have been chosen for a sort of junior diplomatic corps (actually, their mission will be to provide diplomatic representation for Earth to the other planets, only they don’t know this yet). Owen and the other passing-for-human extraterrestrials are trying to manage the gradual entry of Earth into galactic society. But it turns out that the Earth is already being exploited, in a covert but clearly neo-colonialist sort of way, by capitalist cartels from one of the two habitable planets of the star Vega. A covert war is going on throughout Earth. Eventually this bursts into the open, and the entire population of the Earth suddenly receives the unexpected message that they are not alone in the galaxy. All hell breaks loose, but the more benevolent people from non-Earth planets do their best to manage the situation.

In describing the plot in this way, I am not doing a good job of conveying the mood or affect of the novel. Part of its brilliance in my eyes is the way it juggles different levels of action. The Blue Beautiful World is a First Contact novel, but it remains focused on individual characters who are affected in their personal, private lives by the grand events, without quite being actors in them. Actually, that is not quite a correct description either, since Owen is centrally involved in the grand politics and economics of the novel, and the young people in the latter part of the book also find themselves centrally involved with those politics. But the book mostly gives us the ways in which these grand events are not depicted in themselves, but make themselves known through the ways they filter into, and affect, the everyday lives of people. The novel is very canny and creative in the ways it fluctuates between backgrounds and foregrounds, mutating each into the other in various ways. I know what happens in terms of the plot, but the shifts and different interiorities are so subtly blended together that I find it hard to qualify the novel tonally — and this is a big part of why I find it so wonderful.

There are a number of other aspects of the book that need mentioning here as well, ranging from discussions of cuisine and clothing, to a subplot involving an intelligence deep in the Earth’s oceans that is willing to negotiate with us, the surface dwellers, but remains wary of being victimized by human exploitation in the way many human beings have been by the British and other empires. Also, there is something about the texture of the novel that I find it difficult to convey: some chapters are quite meditative, while in others events spiral and multiply frantically, and yet it all seems to hang together.

Karen Lord is from Barbados — and I saw a reading/inteview with her, over Zoom, where she talks about the positionality of being from a largely Black small island country that is nonetheless connected to other parts of the world in all sorts of ways. It is both isolated, and a kind of international crossroads. And it is part of the Commonwealth, which both benefits them economically and reminds them of the British colonial subjugation and exploitation from which they have historically suffered. Lord emphasized that she sees her work as not just science fiction or speculative fiction but also as “sociological fiction”, referring here to C. Wright Mills’ notion of “the sociological imagination” — which for Lord translates into equal consideration of “the personal concerns of the characters, the public issues of their community, and the historical context that has produced both the community and the characters.” Lord also cited the idea of what Brian Aldiss called “cozy catastrophe”, meaning apocalyptic stories that nonetheless provide comfort for their middle-class bourgeois readers. Lord said that she wanted to address issues of great scope, including the most horrific ones, and yet still provide the reader with a certain “cozy” sense nonetheless.

Lord’s general comments seem to me to apply quite well to the way that The Blue Beautiful World — like her previous science fiction novels — is as shifting and as subtle as it is in its movements and especially in its continually modulating tonalities. Coming out of this novel, I had a strange lingering sense that something important had really happened, but that it would take me a while to sort it all out and to get a sense of just what it was that moved and affected me.

It is difficult to write a biography — to assmeble the traces that somebody has left behind them, and use those traces to reconstruct, in words, the person in question. It is very difficult to get to know another person, even if they are still alive and you are close to them. It is even more difficult, once the person is dead. But it is equally difficult, albeit for different reasons, to know oneself. The immediate acquaintance I have with myself, in the first person, is always filled with distortions and blind spots. The attempt to know myself is inevitably bound to fail — although the effort might in fact lead me to transform myself, which is perhaps a more important thing than to know myself.

These dilemmas are central to Kathy Acker’s writing; and they are also central to Jason McBride’s new biography of Acker: Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker. There are many reasons why Kathy Acker, who died just about twenty-five years ago, was one of the greatest writers of her time, and why her work remains so relevant today. One of them is that Acker’s novels involved cotinual explorations of, and challenges to, the very idea of personal identity. Acker understood our world to be one in which originality of any sort is rare and difficult (a situation which is ironically expressed through the exaltation of originality and innovation in every domain of social and cultural life). This is part of the reason why Acker’s own texts are continually engaged in the appropriation, remixing, and reworking of previously existing texts; but the “texts” in question here are not just books that Acker had read, and movies that she had seen, but also her own familial and personal history. None of these fragments are “true” and “authentic” in their own right, but the very process of working through them produces something that, in its very provisionality and mutability, might be described as truer and more authentic than any more literally accurate statement could have been. For all of Acker’s mystique as a punk feminist rebel, she was also deeply literary, deeply committed to and embedded in the processes of reading and writing. The hard thing is to grasp how these two aspects are not in fact radically opposed, but different aspects of the same molten process (in something of the same way that, for Spinoza, mind and body are two aspects of the same substance). Acker’s tattoos and bodybuilding and sexual adventures were forms of writing, and her writing was a form of being embodied in the world.

Acker’s novels and other texts still exist for us, and they certainly haven’t been taken up, appreciated, and reworked in their own terms as they deserve to be. Bur I cannot dissociate them, at least in my own mind, from the person who Kathy Acker was, and who passed a quarter of a century ago. I only knew Kathy Acker casually, and not deeply or well; but she is the only person I have known in person (writer/artist or not) of whom I could say (as Norman Mailer said of William Burroughs) that she “may conceivably be [or, in this case, have been] possessed by genius.” The phrse is right, because genius is not something that anybody has, but something that a few rare people may be possessed by, at certain occasional moments in time. It is tied up, not with identity — there is a reason why Acker titled one of her novels In Memoriam To Identity — but with how it slips aside and transforms, so that it is never whole and accomplished, but also never negligible or inexistent either. It is not a something, but not a nothing either (as Wittgenstein might say). It is always both consolidating and slipping away; it cannot be grasped substantially, but it also cannot be grasped dialectically — but only obliquely. To quote Wallace Stevens (a poet in whom, as far as I know, Acker was not in the least bit interested), the author must escape from being “too exactly himself” [sic], and instead somehow manage to utter “speech we do not speak.”

In all this, I am saying both too much, and not enough. I think that what I have written above is fairly accurate, as far as it goes, about Kathy Acker; but it only says the tiniest part of what she was about, or what she made, what her texts do and say. Though I have written about Acker’s texts before, this is not a task to which I feel adequate. Yet I think that Jason McBride’s book definitely helps in this regard. It is hyper-aware of all the issues that I have been raising — issues that are front and center in Acker’s own texts — and yet it gives us some sense of who Acker was, what she was like — despite the acknowledged difficulties of apprehending either other people or oneself. It seems to get the facts mostly right, as far as I am able to be aware; my only corrections are extremely picayune. Beyond that, it does give me something of a sense of Acker’s living presence (even if that phrase can only hold partially and ironically, for reasons that I have already said).

If Kathy Acker had not died twenty-five years ago, she would be seventy five years old today. While I do not believe that wisdom somehow comes with age (at least not in my own case), I cannot help missing what Acker might have said, had she still been among us in this schizophrenic time. Not a month goes by when I do not think of her (or think of her absence), and McBride’s biography has made me feel this all the more intensely.

Neon Yang’s The Genesis of Misery is an intriguing and twisty space opera. Yang is a nonbinary speculative fiction writer from Singapore.

The book is apparently the first volume of a trilogy, the idea behind which Yang has described on twitter as “Joan of Arc, BUT GUNDAM”. That is a pretty accurate characterization. We have a galactic empire, with travel between star systems provided by wormholes. But it all has a basis that seems more religious than scientific — in this way, the novel tends more towards what is sometimes called “science fantasy” than towards “hard” science fiction.

The novel’s backstory is that, centuries ago, when human beings first explored interstellar space, they became mentally and physically ill as a result of contact with, or contamination by, what they call the “nullvoid”, which seems to be something like the “quantum foam” or “dark energy” of spacetime itself. The nullvoid first foments madness, and then causes physical deterioration. The first human beings to explore interstellar space were also betrayed by their spaceship’s AI. which (HAL-like) sought to pursue the mission by killing all the human beings conducting it.

But the human explorers were saved by the intervention of some apparently godlike agency called the Larex Forge or the Demiurge. The survivors of the mission, now remembered as “Saints”, or as the eight Messiahs, were blessed by dream visions, which taught them how to manipulate certain materials known as “holy” stones to fend off the nullvoid. The various types of holy stones now run nearly all human technology; AIs of any sort are banned. The result is a despotic galactic empire dominated by the two (secretly conflicting, or jockeying for power against one another) authorites of Church and State. There are also enemies, known to the Faithful as Heretics, who deny the divine and seek to find scientific explanations for all these phenomena (and also seem to be less phobic about AI). The Faithful and the Heretics are engaged in a perpetual war.

As for the spaceships — or at least the space warships — in the novel, they are all more or less giant mecha (hence the Gundam premise). The are described, at least on the Faithful side of the confilct, as “seraphs” or “archangels.” A pilot is ensconced in a ship, and binds with it so that they feel like the the ship’s limbs are extensions of their own (except they often have six or eight limbs instead of four). Space battles (of which there are a good number in the course of the novel) are an odd sort of physical combat. Nothing happens at a distance. Instead, the mecha ships grapple with one another, their limbs physically bashing and trying to cut into one another. Not having been a gundam/mecha fan in my childhood, I am not really sure about the emotional resonances of all this; I am sure there are aspects of it that I am not catching. But the space battles are described grippingly enough that it still works for me without this extra layer of understanding.

The novel’s protagonist is a young woman named Misery Nomaki, presumably the novel’s Joan of Arc analogue. I love the twist of having her first name be “Misery”. She’s a young queer woman from a mining colony moon in some distant star system. She starts hearing voices and hallucinating apparitions that claim to be divine, and that prophesy her status as the next Messiah. She also has the power of being able to manipulate, with her mind, all the “holy” stones on which the civilization runs. Initially, Misery is really punk in sensibility. She’s been screwed over by everyone, and she hates it. She comes to the capital of the Empire, cynically determined to use her special abilities to get ahead. She assumes that her hallucinations and powers are a fraud, the result of nullvoid contamination; this means that her life will not be long, but in the meantime she hopes to do as much as she can.

In the course of the novel, however, Misery has a conversion experience. She has a mystical vision of union with the cosmos, and as a result comes to believe that all the things she has cynically pretended to be are in fact literally true. She is now confident that she actually is the Ninth Messiah, called by the Larex Forge to liberate the Empire from the destructive threats of the nullvoid and of the Heretics. United with her archangel mecha, she thinks she is invulnerable and can win every space battle. She and her lover Lightning (the ferocious sister, and bitter opponent, of the current Emperor) resolve to save the world (or worlds) together.

And this is where questions of narration come into play. Misery’s story is told in the third person, but very vividly, in the present tense, and with the narrator closely identifying with Misery and expressing her inner feeelings. (There are short sections called Interludes, narrated more objectively, and containing information that Misery doesn’t necessarily know; but these constitute less than 5% of the text). The narrator is themself a character in the narrative, however, as is revealed in a Prologue and Epilogue framing the main story. To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal who the narrator is, though this does prove consequential for the narrative as a whole).

When Misery has her conversion experience, the content of her thoughts changes, but the style of narration does not. So, as we move from Misery’s punk cynicism to her absolute militant fervor, we are inclined to still give her the credit that we did from the beginning. We are strongly seduced into completely identifying with Misery’s zealotry; but at the same time, I also started to feel an uncomfortable, nagging sense of doubt. Things just don’t feel quite right. Indeed, Misery herself starts at some point to feel that things aren’t quite right — albeit for different reasons than the reader feels this. Misery never doubts her religious certainty, but she begins to doubt to what extent the universe really conforms to that certainty. I cannot be more specific about this without recounting the ending of the novel in detail; there’s a surprising shift of perspective there that puts a new light on everything — but that I remain uncertain about, and that will only be resolved one way or the other by the succeeding volumes of this trilogy. The official publicity for the book states that the trilogy as a whole is “a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.” This self-reflexivity is entirely merited in the current volume, since the novel both solicits our belief in the protagonist and in her beliefs, and yet steps back and makes us question that at the same time.

I will end with some more general points. The Genesis of Misery — like a lot of recent speculative fiction — presents a world, or a cosmos, in which queerness is taken for granted and not stigmatized. A good number of the characters are (by our early-21st-century standards) queer or trans in one way or another, but (unlike today) this is entirely normal or expected within the world of the diegesis. I am inclined to see this as a kind of utopian element; however these novelistic worlds are messed up and oppressive in all sorts of ways, gender identity and sexual orientation are not parts of the problem. Writing speculative fiction in this way does two (seemingly incompatible) things at once. On the one hand, it gives readers plenty of opportunities for identification, rather than demanding default identification with a white, cis, heterosexual protagonist as older genre fiction all too often tended to do. At the same time, and on the other hand, struggles for gender equity and sexual equality are not in any way the focus of these novels, because the struggles have already been resolved, and in an entirely liberatory way; this leaves the author free to both be affirmatively queer, trans, or non-binary, and yet at the same time to address all sorts of other issues as well.

This leads me to larger questions as well. My friend Jason Read wrote on Twitter, just this morning, that: “The cultural domination of fantasy over science fiction that we are currently living through just seems to be symptomatic of the broader turn towards fascism.” He is especially thinking, I suppose of current television blockbusters like the prequels to Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. I am inclined to agree with Jason for the most part: it just seems reactionary to me that so many speculative fiction works focus on Kings and Emperors, rather than on bureaucracies and spy systems, as both forces of oppression and ideals. I will always prefer science fictional approaches. But at the same time, this domination of fantasy over science fiction in recent years does not just apply to hegemonic media, but also to written speculative fiction by so many queer, trans, and nonbinary authors, and to many nonwhite authors as well. I am not sure what to make of this. I do not accept the explanation that this simply means the rejection of dominant Eurocentric instrumental reason in favor of older and non-Western ‘ways of knowing.’ But I do not have a good counter-theory, either. The Genesis of Misery deals to a certain extent very thoughtfully and self-reflexively, but my questions remain.

I have followed Grant Morrison’s work, on and off, for something like three decades now – ever since Kathy Acker told me I had to read him. Morrison’s run on the comic DOOM PATROL became the template and inspiration for my own first attempt to think about “postmodernism” in the 1990s – I titled my own book DOOM PATROLS. Since then, I have read a lot of Morrison’s creator-owned comics titles, and some of his revised versions of canonical (and corporation-owned) superheroes. I also liked the tv series HAPPY!, based on Morrison’s comic of that name, and made by the director Brian Taylor in collaboration with Morrison. (I think I may be the only academic who has published book chapters about both Morrison and Taylor; though I didn’t write anything about their collaboration).

LUDA is Grant Morrison’s first novel — their first narrative consisting of words only, without illustrations — i.e. formatted as prose fiction rather than as a comic or a “graphic novel.” I got an advance copy from NetGalley, with the obligation to write an honest review. This is it, though it is hard to be objective and judgmental about a book like this. I found it utterly delightful, but it is not easy to explain why.

LUDA is a novel about drag queens. The first-person narrator, Luci LaBang, is an aging drag performer, trying to come to terms with the brute fact that you aren’t as glamorous and beautiful at 50 as you were at 25. (As somebody who is close to 70, all I can say about this conceit is, 50 still seems relatively youthful to me). We get all her reflections about her life and career, her past and her present, with scenes ranging from her childhood infatuation with women’s garments, her stint as a glam rock star, her brief attempt to go straight in a heterosexual relationship, her later career as a washed-up ex-star on a reality/game show hybrid television series, and her present as a drag performer in a “pantomime” (which seems to mean, in the UK, a live musical theater entertainment mostly for kids). Luci is a lifelong resident of “Gasglow” (which I presume is a deliberate misspelling or re-spelling of the Scottish city of Glasgow; I have never been there, and I do not know how the novel’s cityscape relates to the actual cityscape, but the city is certainly a major character, as it were, in the novel).

The eponymous character of the novel, Luda, is a much younger drag queen who sort of becomes Luci’s protégée, though actually it is much more complicated than that. Luci does give Luda advice about drag performance, about magic, and about life. They meet because they are supposed to be costarring together in a pantomime called “Phantom of the Pantomime” (which sort of combines “Phantom of the Paradise” with “Aladdin”). But their relationship is also one of a continual, and usually underhanded, power struggle. The novel suggests multiple frames of reference (the “All About Eve” plot of a younger diva supplanting an older one is one of them), but it always manages to subvert, or to turn inside out, the conventional genre twists that you cannot help expecting.

The novel is dense with nested narratives: we get Luci’s life story, Luci’s attempt to uncover Luda’s life story, the story of the pantomime being rehearsed, the story of the continual problems that come up in the course of rehearsing it, and so on. These all resonate with and echo one another. Drag is not presented as exotic or weird, but just as something that the narrator and her object of fascination do.

Evidently we are in the realm of fantasy and pretense, but part of the novel’s point is that pretty much everything than any of us do is really driven by fantasy and pretense. Desire is never simple and straightforward, it is rather why human beings in general most emphatically are never simple and straighforward. It is a case of universalizing, not by generalization, but precisely by emphasizing the particular in all its minute particularity. We get the ins and outs of Luci’s life and career, in both its glamorousness and its abject failures, in its everydayness but also in its extremities. We also get Luci’s cares and worries, her misunderstandings and illusions, her pain and depression as well as her episodes of happiness and enjoyment. It is this insistent particularity, or singularity, that makes it possible to “identify” with Luci (though I am not sure that “identify” is the right word here, or indeed ever).

LUDA is often quite funny. Its extravagances and outrageous twists of reality (such as one would always expect from Morrison) are themselves often quite funny. But there is also a lot in the novel that is quite disturbing, and even horrific. I don’t ever like describing a narrative as a “romp”, as some reviewers tend to do. But if you go into this expecting a romp, then after being flattered into enjoyment in this way for a while, you will eventually find yourself in for a bumpy ride. This is a novel about frustrated desires, about alienation, about unrealistic fantasies, and ultimately about horrific abuse. None of this is freakshow-like, in the sense of something that puts unconventional lifestyles on display for straight delectation. No, the straight people in the book are really the ultimately most horrifying ones. Drag is a desire as straightforward AND as twisted as any other, but not more so.

The book left me with both a keen sense of enjoyment, and with a depressive sense of desolation, both at the same time. Morrison is masterful in the way they reel out twists and surprises, and in the way they sneakily insinuate things you weren’t expecting, yet that seem inevitable once they are revealed. The narrator is both narcissitic and deeply self-deprecating; both charismatic and exposing herself to our contempt and disgust. She is always talking directly to her audience, aware of the reader’s presence, teasing and alluring us, only to end with a sucker punch (or several) of desolation — only to follow that by tying everything together with a dazzling series of ironic (?) postmodern flourishes that pull the ground from under us (even after we thought we had had the ground pulled from under us and reached the lowest level of bedrock possible already).

I said that this is a novel about drag queens. I found myself delighted by its total rejection of gender norms — without even having to mention it or make an argument about it. But– AND THIS IS CRUCIAL — I do not know how it will read to readers who are trans, or genderqueer, or already far less normative than I am. I am unable to step away from my own predilections enough to even guess.

I have previously known Ruthanna Emrys for her revisionist Lovecraft fiction series, which sees the ‘fish people’ of The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a persecuted minority, and tries to imagine life from their point of view. (I also saw an interview with Emrys, in which she pointed out that her own grandparents, Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe who came to Brooklyn in the 1920s, were precisely the people about whom Lovecraft expressed his racist revulsion. I immediately identified with her comment, since my maternal grandparents were Jews who emigrated to Brooklyn in the 1920s as well).

A Half-Built Garden is quite different from Emrys’ previous work. It is a semi-utopian first contact novel. (She also describes it in the concluding acknowledgements, somewhat humorously, as ‘diaperpunk’.)

We are in the late 21st century. The Earth has undergone a big reorganization, for the better. Though nation-states and large corporations both still exist, they have been displaced from much of the Earth’s land surface by “watershed networks,” ecological communities that are more or less anarchist and communal in organization, each of which is responsible for the watershed in which they live, and which have succeeded — over the past half century, since the mostly nonviolent revolution that allowed them to be set up — in slowing down, and even to a certain extent reversing, the ecological damage that had been done to the planet by the two previous centuries of unbridled capitalism.

The watersheds are characterized by a mesh of extended families, tied together by nonhierarchical computer networks using automated (computerized) comment moderation, designed to maximize democratic discussion, and weighted according to the core values of the communities: shared resources, volunteer work sharing, and concern for the broader environment (so that the rivers, trees, etc. have their interests represented as well). Ubiquitous computing allows people to access and participate in the network through unobtrusive technological prostheses (mesh nets over their heads, projection into their glasses, etc.). Decisions are made by consensus, but without the annoyance of having to attend hours of meetings all the time. All this is beautifully presented, both in terms of the way that the writing conveys it (through community/environmental description without excessive infodumps) and in terms of being down to earth and deidealized (people are not any more perfect in such a setting than they are in capitalist America today, it is just that authority is decentralized and decisions are made better).

We get the point of view of Judy Wallach-Stevens, a woman who lives in the Chesapeake watershed. She has an extended family: she and her partner have a baby, and they live with another couple who also have a toddler. This enlarged household is also tied to other, surrounding ones (both through family relatedness, and simply through geographic proximity). Gender is refreshingly fluid and changeable; though some people identify themselves as “male” and “female,” many do not. Multiple sets of pronouns are used, and in terms of both physical presentation and community expectations, nobody is tied in to a single identity — they can stay as they are, if they are happy with that, but they can also shift if and when they want. There is no assignment of gendered responsibility for childraising; at a minimum, both adults identified as the parents share equally in childcare, and the other adults in an expanded household pitch in as well. (It is considered rude to enquire as to which parent actually physically bore the child in their womb).

Nation-states (like the US government) still exist, but they seem to have greatly reduced authority. Corporations exist too, but they have been exiled from the mainland of all continents, and exist only on artificial islands that they have constructed. The corporations still manufacture certain high tech goods that they can sell to the watersheds. The way financing works is not entirely clear, but in the watersheds most things are commonly available without money; and whatever monetary basis the corporations work with does not have the universal reach that finance does today. The corporations are evidently still very hierarchical, and they are always seeking to extend their power and regain the control they had in the 20th and early 21st centuries — so the watersheds still need to exercise vigilance with regard to them. However, the corporations as much as the watersheds have rejected traditional gender roles, and have replaced gender binaries with continually shifting forms of self-representation. These forms are central to the jockeying for dominance that is a major feature of corporate cultures, but again it is completely free of and apart from what we take for granted as male/female binaries.

All the world building in the novel is convincingly and vividly done. And it is solid enough that I was not bothered by questions of how the unaddressed portions of social organization and technological infrastructures might work.

At the same time that the background of Emrys’ world is conveyed, the narrative is mostly about how this organization and way of life is disrupted by First Contact. An alien spaceship lands in the Chesapeake region. The crew consists of two separate sentient species, originally from two separate planets, who have lived in symbiotic communities with each other for more than a thousand Earth years. There are ‘plains people’ who are sort of like human-sized arthropods on twelve or more legs; and ‘tree people’ who have mammal-like fur but look more like giant spiders (though again, they have a lot more limbs than actual spiders do). The aliens have learned to speak English from watching all the movies and television series that we have inadvertently beamed into space for decades. The aliens are organized into cross-species extended families, with gender systems that are a bit different from ours (I mean from the more liberated one that humans have in the novel’s future setting), but not unintelligibly so. They aliens place a very high value on their children, whom they take with them everywhere; part of the initial bond that the novel’s narrator makes with them is that she is nursing her own child when she first meets them.

The aliens are friendly, but they have an agenda. In the course of their technological development, both species destroyed the environments of their home planets. They now live in huge constructed orbital habitats around a single sun, all of which are kept in ecological balance around a planned, controlled, and limited ecosphere. They live in company with numerous trees and other plants, and with some nonsentient animal species; but this is (by their own admission) a rather limited environment compared to those of their original native planets. They are flourishing, but only because they have constructed an ecosphere that is basic enough for them to manage.

The aliens now seek to rescue other sentient species from ecological catastrophe. They are unhappy about having reached three planets in other solar systems too late, when the species in question had already exterminated themselves through self-generated environmental catastrophe. They are happy to have reached the Earth in time. What they want to do is rescue Homo sapiens by having us all abandon Earth en masse, and taking us instead to share their artificial space habitats. They hope to convince us by reason and persuasion to join them. But they are not averse to using force if they cannot get us peacefully to agree. They believe that if we refuse to abandon Earth we are endangering the lives of our children, so they have to force us for the children’s sake. (What would Lee Edelman say about this scenario?).

This creates confusion and disunity on Earth. The corporations love the idea of forcible removal. They see it as a way to increase their markets and their power, and maybe even to return to the practice of continual expansion that is no longer allowed on Earth, but that could be renewed on other planets throughout the galaxy. The nation-states are also attracted to the idea, for less extreme but somewhat similar reasons. But the narrator, and most of the people in the watersheds, unsurprisingly resist the idea of leaving Earth forever. They feel that they have made considerable progress in healing the Earth, and that as they continue to do so they will be able to live in reasonable harmony with a large and vibrant ecosystem, rather than with the severely reduced one that they aliens have created for themselves. Judy initially gets along well with the aliens — having been the first Earth person to meet them, and sharing their insistence on the importance of children — but tensions arise because of the aliens’ ultimate aims. But there are also a number of additional contributing factors that complicate and enrichen the narrative, including both interspecies sex between humans and aliens, and tensions that arise because the corporations deploy computer viruses to disrupt the watersheds’ networks.

So the novel has substantial dramatic tensions as well as great worldbuilding and great aliens. Things are semi-resolved (there is a reason why the “garden” of the title is only “half-built”) over the course of the book, mostly through complex negotiations among all the various parties. Discussions, arguments, shifting of locations and of background assumptions. One of the great things about the book is that it makes these negotiations as exciting and as emotionally compelling as violent conflicts are in other speculative novels. (I also appreciated all the specifically Jewish stuff in this book. Unusually for American literature, this is a book that is essentially non-Christian — by which I mean there are no traces of either a Christian or an anti-Christian sensibility).

Here is my review of Rivers Solomon’s new novel, Sorrowland. The book will be published on May 4th. I received an advance copy, courtesy of NetGalley, in return for providing an honest review.

Rivers Solomon is the author of two previous books: An Unkindness of Ghosts, a space opera crossed with a neo-slave narrative, and The Deep, a narrative elaboration of the hip hop group clipping.’s reboot of the Detroit techno band Drexciya’s mythology of an underwater civilization composed of the descendents of kidnapped Africans who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. Both of those books were powerful and thought-provoking, but Solomon’s new novel, Sorrowland, is even better. The book feels like science fiction to me, even though it might more likely be categorized as gothic horror, or even magic realism. Solomon’s writing is one more instance of the genre hybridity and emotional and conceptual reach of speculative fiction writing in the twenty-first century, especially by writers of color.

It is difficult to discuss Sorrowland without giving away lots of spoilers, but I will do my best to keep these to a minimum. The reason it is hard to avoid spoilers is that the narrative works by continual expansion. It starts out with a very narrow focus, but continually opens up, or spirals outward, to new dimensions and new contexts. What starts out as a grim survivalist tale about isolation, loneliness, and deprivation ends up as a much broader account of the United States as a repressive hierarchical state founded upon racist terror. The writing is tightly focused on naturalistic detail, even as it offers up the most unsparing judgments, and even when it opens up to the most fantastical happenings.

At a number of points throughout the book, the narrative reaches a crux, a confrontation. Each time this happens, you think about what might take place next; you imagine the most extravagant possibilites, and wonder if the author will dare to go there. And each time, Solomon does not so much go there as go even further, to an outcome (or a new stage) that exceeds even my most delirious expectations. (Of course, my inability to imagine such happenings in advance is part of why I am not a creative writer, but a critic-scholar who seizes on books like Sorrowland as opportunities for reflection and expansion). At each of these cruxes, it feels like I have had the rug pulled out from under me, and I am forced to realize that, ‘no, this is vaster and more horrifying than I had previously imagined.’ I should note too, though, that every time these developments are given fictively scientific explanations, rather than supernatural ones; this is part of the reason that the book feels science fictional to me, despite the fact that its tropes have more in common with gothic fiction. Even as we discover and feel forces that are cosmic in scope, and disproportionate with our commonsensical understandings, they still ultimately have empirical roots and explanations. There is no rupture or bifurcation here between the natural and the social, or between the material and the spiritual.

Sorrowland gives us the story of Vern, a young albino (and apparently intersex) Black woman. When we first meet her, she is 15 years old and pregnant. She is extemely nearsighted, and does not know how to read. She is hiding, alone, in the woods, having run away from the only home she has known, a Black nationalist commune called Cainland, somewhere in the US Deep South. Cainland is all about Black pride, education, and self-sustaining independence for its community; but it is also extremely patriarchal and puritanically religious. Life in Cainland involves a seemingly endless series of chores, prayers, punishments, and medical exams and injections. Vern, still a girl, was forcibly married to, and impregnated by, its stern leader, Reverend Sherman.

But all this backstory is only filled in gradually, over the course of the book (and with revelations placed strategically at unexpected points in the course of the narrative). At the start of the book, Vern gives birth to twins, unassisted, in the heart of the forest. The novel has a great and compelling opening sentence: “The child gushed out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt.” Vern immediately thinks of drowning this child, to preserve him from a worse fate. But instead, she cares for him “with what gentleness she could muster, and it wasn’t enough to fill a thimble.” Though the child is referred to as “he” (together with his sibling, born an hour later), Vern raises them without any ascription of gender. Their names are Howling and Feral. Vern and her babies remain in the forest, apart from any human contact. They subsist as hunter-gatherers. Conditions are harsh, rather than idyllic; Sorrowland is no robinsonade. But Vern’s survivalist skills are sharp enough that they make do.

Things happen around Vern and her children, however; she is not truly isolated, but submerged in the world, or in nature. The novel has an ecological vision, according to which all things are entangled. Vern has a living connection to the trees, and more generally to the animals and plants and fungi. But there are more disquieting things, as well. Vern is stalked by a “fiend,” who continually taunts her, sometimes by setting fires, and otherwise by leaving murdered animals hanging from the trees, often adorned with baby clothes or toys. In addition, Vern is frequently tormented by hauntings, visions of the dead who sometimes speak to her, and other times just appear mutely before her. They include people she remembers from her time in Cainland, but also people from deeper (ancestral, community) levels of memory, like lynching victims she sees hanging from trees. And on top of all this, Vern starts to notice strange changes in her body…

Saying more, with any detail, would involve those spoilers I said that I would try to avoid. So I will just note that Vern lives with her babies in the forest for four years; and then — at not quite a third of the way through the novel — she has to return to, and deal with, what most of us know as the outside world (and what she mostly encountered in the past during short supervised trips outside Cainland itself). Surviving in contemprary America without any form of ID, or any money or credit cards, is in some ways more difficult that surviving in the forest. But Vern finds allies and helpers, as well as persecutors and enemies. She and her children are gifted with greater resources, as well as assaulted with wider and more articulated dangers. And Vern herself continues a metamorphosis (both physical and mental) that at once debilitates her, gives her strength, and puts her in danger from forces that want to control her. She is no longer entirely human, though in some ways this also ties her more concertedly to human histories and communities. (Again, I must be vague in order to avoid giving away too much).

Like Solomon’s other novels — only even more so — Sorrowland is at times overwhelmingly distressing, though it manages to eke out a bit of hope by the end. A lot of what happens in the course of the novel really hurts. The pain is both inflicted by others, and also self-inflicted, as Vern has to some extent internalized her own oppression — this is part of how she was educated, as well as how she experiences the world. Though Vern ultimately becomes something like a superhero, she also continually has to face her own limitations, an existential finitude that would exist in any context whatsoever, but that is massively amplified by social injustice. This is still another way in which the novel feels science-fictional to me; it combines a daring cognitive scope with a careful parsing of how it feels to be caught up in, and very nearly swamped by, powerful social and technological currents.

The prose of Sorrowland is deeply affective and intellectually cutting at the same time, a combination few writers can manage. Concrete physical and sensory details, and a deep sense of corporeal being, coexist with tremendous leaps of abstraction, not to mention citations of such authors as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Derrida. There’s even a joke about a book supposedly called A Poststructuralist Critique of Embodiment (which is entirely silly, and yet at the same time deeply apropos to what is going on over the course of the novel). The novel starts out with a harshly delimited horizon, but it ends in a sort of cosmopolitics.

Sorrowland is an extraordinary novel. it is continually and astonishingly inventive, while at the same time (I don’t know how to better express this) it has the force of necessity, of something that just has to be. It begins with the harshness of childbirth; and it ends with “the night calls of one thousand living things, screaming their existence, assuring the world of their survival.” The book is itself a deep and ferocious expression of survival; and — perhaps, even, we may at least hope, beyond its final pages — of flourishing.

Here is my review of Charlie Jane Anders’ new science fiction novel, Victories Greater Than Death. The book will be published in two and a half weeks. I received an advance copy, courtesy of NetGalley, in return for providing an honest review.

Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, Victories Greater Than Death, the first volume of a projected trilogy, is great fun. It is Anders’ first book for a YA (Young Adult) audience, which means that it has teenage protagonists, who are shy and moody and nervous about their infatuations. It is perhaps less conceptually audacious than some of Anders’ other work; but this is only a relative observation. There’s still a lot going on in Victories Greater Than Death, even if its main purpose is to entertain.

Victories Greater Than Death is about a bunch of human teenagers, of various gender identities and ethnicities, who find themselves transported onto a starship, and e in a galactic war. A multi-species and relatively non-hierarchical federation, the Firmament (ultimately guided by benevolent computers like those of Iain Banks’ Culture novels) is engaged in struggle against a fascist counterforce, which we can think of as an analog to the contemporary Earthly movements behind Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, Duterte, Netanyahu, and so on, only expanded to a galactic scale. In the course of the novel, we get everything that we expect from space opera: exciting interstellar battles, majestic discoveries, last-minute escapes, daring rescue missions against great odds, and the sociology of navigating interspecies differences. We also get everything we expect from YA fiction: the emotional ups and downs and intensified agonies and ecstasies of teenagers who are geniuses but misfits, struggling to define themselves, to do something meaningful in the world, and to make sense of their own emotions. What we do not get, thankfully, is the overdone template of YA dystopian fiction today, in which a plucky teen girl, all on her own, overthrows a totalitarian world order. Anders has something much more imaginative in mind.

Victories Greater Than Death deftly combines teen interiority with galactic socio-politics. The narrative focuses upon six teens who leave the Earth behind and venture into space. They are gay and straight, female, male, and trans, and from different continents and ethnic and racial groups. Their multiplicity is echoed by the crew of the warship the HMSS Indomitable, who are drawn from different humanoid species originating across different planets. Anders’ worldbuilding feels solid and well-thought out, although she definitely puts wacky imaginative detail ahead of plodding sociological plausibility.

In its worldbuilding, Victories Greater Than Death entertainingly subverts many of the expected genre clichés. For instance, the HMSS Indomitable belongs to the Royal Navy. We all know how space opera is obsessed with galactic empires. But it turns out that the Queen, ostensibly at the head of this interplanetay society, “isn’t a monarch,” but rather “more like a librarian”; she interfaces with gigantic AIs, “gathers the knowledge of a million worlds,” and “shares it with everyone in the Firmament.” She is more Barbara Gordon or Rupert Giles than she is Elizabeth Windsor. Learning this is a great relief to one of the teens, an Afro-British gay man who hates his memories of “being forced to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ as a small child.” I give this detail as only one small example of how the novel continually plays with the tropes of both the space opera and the teen romance, and twists them into delightful new forms.

Tina, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, is a white American teen girl who is actually, under disguise, the genetic clone of a legendary Firmament starship captain from a planet of purple-skinned humanoids. She is supposed to have the captain’s memories implanted into her own brain as well, but the operation backfires. She gains her predecessor’s procedural and semantic memories, but not her personal ones. Tina now knows how to fire a “positron cloudstrike gun,” and she knows cultural details about the various galactic species, but she does not know what her predecessor actually did, or what sort of person she was. This turns out to be a good thing rather than a bad thing, because Tina reaps the rewards as well as the confusions of hybridity, without having her own personality swamped by that of her supposed ‘original’. In any case, this extra-human or post-human layer of doubt works to intensify the romance aspect of the novel, which has Tina pining for one of the other teens, a dark-skinned trans woman from Brazil.

In giving Tina this divided and incomplete heritage, Anders also undermines the tiresome narrative stereotype of the Chosen One. As a result of her incomplete transformation, Tina cannot be the one who saves the world; more broadly, she cannot be “The One” (like Neo in The Matrix) at all. This is, first, because such a savior figure does not exist; and second, because any such figure would be a nasty, megalomaniacal dictator if he or she did in fact exist (that would be the novel’s antagonist, Marrant, who leads the fascist rebel forces: fascists have leaders, but egalitarian democrats don’t).

Instead, Tina learns a number of things. In the first place, although Tina picks up the powers and abilities of her predecessor, and therefore is a superb warrior, she finds that she cannot live with herself after killing people. This is the case even though she only kills people in self-defense, in order to stop them from killing her and her friends. She becomes a pacifist, and hopes to defend the Firmament and oppose the fascists while maintaining “non-offensive status.” It remains to be seen, in the other volumes of the trilogy, just what this will entail.

In the second place, Tina learns that she can only help to save the world by joining up with her friends. The group of Earth teens integrates successfully into the larger galactic community aboard the Indomitable, but they also stick together and have one another’s back. Defeating the bad guys is a group effort, in which everyone has their individual roles. Nobody can go it alone, but also nobody can substitute for the uniqueness of anybody else.

Multiculturalism is replicated on multiple levels throughout the novel. There’s the multiplicity among the group of Earth teens, and there is the larger multiplicity of the humanoid races existing in harmony on the starship, and throughout the Firmament. But beyond this, there is a looming, still broader level. We gradually learn the backstory behind the Firmament. An older, now vanished species, known only as the Shapers, went through the galaxy ages ago, aiding the growth of humanoid sentient species on many planets, while at best stymieing the development, and at worst exterminating, all the sentient non-humanoid (and especially non-vertebrate) species they found. These crimes stand behind the current splendor of the Firmament, as much as slavery and genocide stand behind the United States of America. The fascist antagonists in Victories Greater Than Death embrace this ugly heritage, as much as right-wing forces in contemporary America (with analogs across the world) do. But even the good guys, the Firmament, are not free of this history. In principle, the Royal Navy is supposed to cross the galaxy, aiding the helpless and oppressed. But in practice, this doesn’t always happen — the Firmament has a long history of broken promises and calculations based on realpolitik. And this, too, is part of the legacy our teens have to deal with.

The end of Victories Greater Than Death gives us something of a cliffhanger, preparing us for the later installments of the trilogy. Most of the plot strands are resolved, and the immediate bad guys are defeated. But there is a cost — Tina’s best human friend, and one of the alien good guys as well, are left in a coma — and there are intimations of greater dangers to come, as well as the lingering, unresolved issues that I have already mentioned. I look forward to the sequels; but for now, Victories Greater Than Death is a fun, satisfying, and also thought-provoking read, which I can happily recommend to an adult, as well as a YA, audience.

I just finished reading Nicky Drayden’s just-published Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis (2021), the sequel to the first Escaping Exodus (2019). These books are absolutely bonkers, and I mean that in the best possible way. I haven’t absorbed enough from just one reading of these novels to be able to draw out their rich implications as fully as I would like. In what follows, I will mostly avoid spoilers as I write about what these novels offer in a fairly abstract way.

The Escaping Exodus books are space opera of a sort. The Earth is nothing more than a distant memory. Human beings live, not precisely in spaceships, but rather inside the bodies of the Zenzee, enormous (moon-sized) living animals that travel in herds through outer space. Inside each Zenzee is a complex array of parasitic or symbiotic microfauna, and an equally complex human society. These societies differ radically from one another, after thousands of years apart. The people in the novels have to negotiate their own social worlds, together with the biophysical challenges of their host environments.

That’s the basic premise of the novels. What really brings the books alive are their rich, world-building details, including a lot of gross and squishy macro-anatomy, odd foods that range from delicious to repulsive, complicated sex/gender/family/class systems that are as inescapable as they are arbitrary, and Machiavellian political infighting. These societies aren’t easily described along a utopian/dystopian axis. In the main world of the novel, for instance, same-sex relationships are just as common, and just as accepted, as heterosexual ones. Women are pretty much in control of everything; men are mostly expected to remain in the domestic sphere, and when they appear in public their appearance is beautified through makeup and revealing garments. There is a rigid class system, with a powerful aristocracy who can get away with pretty much anything, and workers who have almost no rights or privileges. Families are rigid institutions, but they are nothing like the nuclear families of our own society. Instead, these families are composed of multiple spouses, all of whom are consigned to pre-determined roles, and with child-bearing heavily policed as well. Of course, the way these structures are taken for granted within the society, to such an extent that the characters are nearly unable to think their way outside them, can be seen as a cognitively estranging ways of reminding us that our own gender and family arrangements are equally arbitrary and constraining. But the florid proliferation of these arrangements makes an impressive point in its own right; and it is further relativized by the brief glimpses we get of social arrangments inside the other Zenzee worlds (my favorite, perhaps, is the insane world in which there is no gender inequality, but children from a very young age are trained to be warriors; the result is a heavily hierarchical society filled with paranoia, as everyone is full-time engaged in trying to betray and undermine their superiors, while at the same time policing their inferiors to prevent the same thing from happening to them; assassination is common).

The overall effect of all this world-building is quite amazingly delirious, even though in logical terms it all hangs together, and makes at least as much sense as the more humdrum world-building arrangements projected by other sf writers (let alone the world-building arrangements that we ourselves inhabit, and take for granted more than we should). The social relations that I have just described are overlaid by ecological ones, based on the relation between the human beings in general, and the organisms that they inhabit. The human beings initially exploit their Zenzee as resources to be plundered; when the weight of human activities saps the energy of the Zenzee and kills it, the human inhabitants simply transfer themselves to another one. But gradually it becomes clear, not only that this environmental pillaging is unsustainable (making the books into ecological parables), but also that the Zenzee themselves are sentient and feeling organisms, whose own needs and desires need to be taken into account and respected.

Indeed, the novels are concerned above all with various forms of intertwinings and co-dependencies that exist on multiple scales and levels, moving from particular sexual relationships among human individuals, to social arrangments and exploitative class structures, all the way to large-scale ecological dependencies such those between the human beings and the Zenzee. On all these levels, people and communities need to negotiate between their own needs and those (often quite different ones) of the others they encounter. These negotiations can be understood anthropologically and sociologically, of course, but also physically in terms of energy flow and biophysical resources.

The novels thereby suggest — without spelling things out too explicity — an ontology that is very different from anything we are accustomed to. Our most basic categories break down, and it becomes evident that we need different ones. This is both intriguing and difficult, because the characters in the world(s) of the novels never articulate their primary assumptions systematically. They are unaware of their presuppositions in the same way we are all too often unaware of our own (ultimately in the same way that, as McLuhan said, fish are unaware of water). The result is a kind of exciting indeterminacy. For instance, the traditional binary between biological and social simply makes no sense in these novels. Neither of these terms is reducible to the other, or can be explained in terms of the other; but the social and the biological are nonetheless so inextricably intertwined that we cannot find a stable boundary between them. Recent feminist and ecological thinkers have addressed this sort of situation by means of linguistice coinages like Donna Haraway’s naturecultures or Karen Barad’s intra-activity; but in Drayden’s world(s), somehow these hybrid words/concepts don’t seem quite right either. This is yet another one of those cases where even our most advanced theoretical articulations have yet to keep pace with the constructions of speculative fiction.

In any case. we need to infer the consequences of Drayden’s world-building — together with those arising from the wild twists of her plots — indirectly. This is of course one of the main characteristics of science fiction narratives in general; but Drayden carries this “cognitive estrangement” to an extent, and with a meta-referential skill, that is quite unusual. I am tempted to say that, where we expect science fiction to introduce a novum that induces cognitive estrangement, the Escaping Exodus novels present the experience of cognitive estrangement itself as the novum. The books continually force us to reconsider whatever we have already accepted and agreed to. The novels present us with a series of ethico-ecological imperatives, and work to convince us that these imperatives are both urgent and entirely rational. But whenever we get to some degree of acceptance and resolution, the narratives then up the ante in startling and outrageously hyperbolic ways. The Escaping Exodus volumes are immediately gripping and entertaining; but they also push us inexorably into a series of increasingly crazy WTF moments, whose imperative logic we nonetheless have to accept.

Here is my review of Arkady Martine’s new science fiction novel, A Desolation Called Peace, her sequel to the Hugo-winning A Memory Called Empire. The book will be published in three weeks. I received an advance copy, courtesy of NetGalley, in return for providing an honest review.

Arkady Martine’s new science fiction novel A Desolation Called Peace is a sequel to her Hugo-award-winning debut, A Memory Called Empire. Like its predecessor, Desolation is a far-future space opera. Martine carries over her exquisite world-building, and some of the same characters, from the previous volume, and gives both world and people a series of new challenges. The galaxy-spanning Teixcalaan Empire — reminiscent of both the Byzantine Empire (the subject of Martine’s scholarly work as a historian) and the empire of the Aztecs — regards itself as the epitome of civilization. All outsiders are disparaged as “barbarians.” The Empire is at once aesthetically dazzling, enormously wealthy, bureaucratically vast, and politically ruthless. Its accomplishments in art, literature, and architecture are unparalleled. It dominates galactic trade and commerce, and controls access to the “gates” (presumably wormholes) that allow for travel between distant planetary systems. With its fearsome military might, the Empire slaps down anyone and anything that dares to challenge its worlds-spanning dominance. Teixcalaan is something like a science-fictional analogue of the United States (at least in the period after we “won” the Cold War but before our recent decline), though its overtly totalitarian political structure bespeaks a franker acknowledgment of aspects of the American Empire that we tend to dissimulate, even to ourselves.

A Desolation Called Peace switches fluidly among multiple points of view; but like its predecessor, its main character is an outsider (a so-called “barbarian”): Mahit Dzmare, from the small independent space colony Lsel Station. The Station is fully in the Teixcalaanli sphere of economic influence, but it has so far managed to preserve its political independence. Mahit has grown up studying, and loving, all things Teixcalaanli, while maintaining her Lsel cultural identity. In A Memory Called Empire, Mahit is sent as Lsel’s ambassador to the Empire. Coming to the Teixcalaan capitol planet and city, she fully indulges her love for its culture; but her ambassadorial charge is to preserve Lsel Station from the Empire’s imperialist designs.

Immediately upon arrival, Mahit is thrown into a world of complex and treacherous political scheming (that fully merits the adjective ‘Byzantine’ in its looser metaphorical sense); at the same time, she is forced to recognize that, no matter how well she integrates herself into Teixcalaanli cultural life, she will never fully be accepted by it. She will never escape being regarded as an inferior barbarian. Mahit acutely feels the same post-colonial dilemma that so many people of color and people from elsewhere than Western Europe or North America have had to face in our actual world today: how to negotiate between their having been shaped by, and having come to love, certain aspects of Euro-American culture, and their inescapable awareness that this culture has systematically devalued and exploited them.

A Desolation Called Peace inverts the situation of the previous novel. Now, several Teixcalaanli legions find themselves at the edges of the Empire, engaged in low-level space combat with a nonhuman but sentient alien species. If the Teixcalaanli regard human beings from other cultures as barbarians scarcely worthy of recognition, how can they deal with this far more deeply alien presence? The aliens’ technology is at least equal, and in some ways superior, to that of the humans; but their communications, both among themselves and when they address themselves towards humans, don’t seem to be categorizable as anything we can recognize as language. Given the inscrutability of the aliens, together with their mastery of stealth guerrilla warfare, it seems that the Empire is faced with an alternative between humiliating withdrawal, or genocide of the alien species on a planetary scale (with the latter still not guaranteed to end the war for good).

In this situation, the linguist and spy Three Seagrass — Mahit’s Teixcalaanli contact and semi-love-interest from the first novel — is called to the space frontier to try to find a way of negotiating with the aliens. Three Seagrass asks Mahit to come along and help her. Mahit agrees, because she is in political hot water back home at Lsel Station; although she preserved the Station from direct annexation by the Empire, she is still regarded by her own people as overly pro-Teixcalaanli and therefore untrustworthy.

What follows is another story of (sorry) Byzantine political intrigue, combined with the ontological uncertainties of a First Contact novel. A Desolation Called Peace is rich on a personal-is-political level, as Mahit must negotiate her way among many stresses: the distrust and disdain of the Teixcalaanli in general, the condescension of Three Seagrass despite the mutual sexual attraction between them, and the ill-will of her Lsel compatriots — not to mention the difficulties of grasping the desires and beliefs of civilized beings who nonetheless look grotesque and menacing to human eyes, and whose vocalizations (which they think of as singing) literally cause nausea due to infrasonic vibrations when heard by human ears in human bodies.

I should probably be a bit more circumspect in the rest of this review, so that I do not give away too many spoilers. I will just say that the novel’s resolution comes about through Martine’s other great theme, besides questions of borders and negotiations and cosmopolitanism. This other theme has to do with the nature of individuality, and of possible connections among minds and bodies. The major science fictional novum of A Memory Called Empire, alongside its broad political and cultural vision, is a key technology that Lsel Station has, but the Empire does not. This is what the novel calls the imago — a prosthetic computational device that contains the memory and personality of ancestors or predecessors. Upon reaching adult maturity, every Lsel citizen is implanted with an imago that is suitable for their personality, and for their chosen career. Mahit is given the imago of Yskandr Aghavn, her predecessor as Lsel ambassador to Teixcalaan, and who shared many of her cosmopolitan interests and even (to some extent) sexual proclivities. An imago often contains a multi-generational line of predecessors, and its personality is supposed to integrate with that of the host. For various reasons, Mahit finds such integration difficult, over the course of both novels. The technology is supposed to be a Lsel secret; but when the Teixcalaanli find out about it they tend to be both fascinated and horrified.

Questions about the integrity of the self, and of personality connection and integration, are central to both novels. Mahit is genuinely helped by Yskandr’s imago, and mostly values their integration, but she also sometimes has difficulties with having what is ultimately another person “inside her endocrine system.” Similarly, after Mahit finally has sex with Three Seagrass (maybe this is a spoiler, but after we’ve been teased about this prospect over the length of two long volumes, it just had to happen eventually), she worries about what it means to say that “this person has had their hands inside you.” So it is not too much of a stretch to see the technological forms of personality integration imagined by Martine as extensions of sexual connection — just as First Contact tropes in science fiction generally are extensions of actual worldly problems of connection among people of different cultures and belief systems. In all these cases, questions of intimacy — of welcoming someone who in one sense combines with you but also at the same time remains other than you — are combined with questions of freedom and coercion, and of unequal power relations between the partners.

A Desolation Called Peace imagines an expanded range of technologies of connection among separate bodies and minds — alike among the Lsel Stationers, the Teixcalaanli, and the aliens. I will just mention that these exist, on several levels, without going into description and analysis of all of them. It is quite beautiful the way in which these prospects of connection nicely resolve the narrative, and lead to at least a certain possibility of peace, beyond the alternatives of either continual skirmishing or violent annihilation — while at the same time, things remain open, complicated, and unresolved on a broader, philosophical level, and in terms of future prospects for the characters and their societies. A Desolation Called Peace gives us so much of what I look for in science fiction: deep and cogent worldbuilding, characters who definitely intrigue us and grab our attention, whether or not we actually like them, and deep conceptual speculation, which opens up new prospects for thought.