"A Memory Called Empire" by Arkady Martine

Nuanced critiques of imperialism are having a bit of a moment in science fiction and fantasy. The simplistic, moustache-twirling villain is in no danger of extinction, but an increasing amount of speculative fiction is instead taking up more complex visions of empire: as systemic, as seductive, and as power structures with which even the most rebellious protagonists are complicit. How to reform—or destroy—something as large as imperialism itself is the core question in recent SF work like Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, while novels like Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant or Addison’s The Goblin Emperor use it to reconsider the conventions of epic fantasy.

Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire takes up these questions at at personal and governmental levels. It’s a thoroughly diplomatic novel: there’s no separation between her enchanting characters and the taut political maneuvering that drive the plot. While it is a space opera—set against the background of the Teixcalaanli Empire, an expansionist interstellar power that has been at relative peace for almost a century—the novel focuses less on spaceships and aliens (both present) than it does on the bureaucratic and interpersonal intrigue that steers the empire’s course, and uses rich worldbuilding and personal detail to meditate on the effects, large and small, of cultural hegemony.

"Behind the Throne" by K.B. Wagers

I came to Behind the Throne thinking it was a space opera, and the first chapter or two seemed to confirm that—interplanetary arms smugglers, spaceships, warp drive, all that good stuff. It quickly changes gears, however, and the vast majority of the novel would be better characterized as "action-packed palace intrigue".

Originally fleeing the constraints of the royal family while hunting for her father's killer, Hail Bristol has spent decades as a gunrunner among violent criminals. All that changes when a series of assassinations and conspiracies threaten the Indranan Empire, and Hail is brought home as the unexpected heiress apparent.

This book was a major struggle for me, but after getting through the first half or so I found myself entertained by it. More than anything else, it feels like it needs another editing pass: cliché use is a little too heavy, chapter breaks feel arbitrary, and the metaphors are a little too frequent, a little too florid—comes across as trying too hard for dramatic effect, without quite finding its tone. Set in first person, these tendencies coupled with Hail's personalities can become a bit much:

"The Tea Master and The Detective" by Aliette de Bodard

(This was the February 2019 Think Galactic selection.)

The Tea Master and The Detective is set in the Xuya universe, a space-opera setting from a history where Chinese, Vietnamese, and Mesoamerican cultures predominate. A Sherlock Holmes homage, the novella (novellete?) follows a traumatized ship AI, The Shadow's Child, who plays a reluctant Watson to Long Chau, a "consulting detective" looking into a murder. Straightforward in its Holmes-structure, I found it most interesting for its focus on trauma, as well as all the snippets of Xuya worldbuilding we get.

The characters here are engaging, the work's main strength. That's unfortunate, since it's so short! Shadow's Child and Long Chau's interactions are great, odd imbalances of personality and power grafted onto the Doyle formula: Shadow's Child is a superhuman AI, but shy and traumatized; Long Chau has those Holmes-like powers of observation and deduction, but is secretive, shaped by the past in ways she doesn't want to acknowledge. I liked the way that Long Chau's abrasiveness feels genuine, largely unintentional, not overplayed, so Shadow's Child's opinion and interactions with her also feel more genuine.

"Surface Detail" by Iain M. Banks

I'm slowly but surely working my way through all the Culture books, using a time-honored "when I stumble across them in a shop" technique.

This was a bit more work to get through, for me, than many of Banks' other works. Sentence-by-sentence, still lots of fun—the more attentively I read Banks, the more wordplay and cleverness jumps out at me—and the big ideas are good. However, the multiplicity of plots and view-points is a little overwhelming; what initially seems like three storylines proliferates and multiplies, with each point-of-view getting only fairly short textual chunks at a time. The result is a kind of attenuated feeling; there's so much not immediately obvious in each storyline (standard for Banks) that I just got a kind of collage of events, with things not really lining up until the last fifth of the book or so, when Veppers' real motivations become clear.

To real it back for a second to synopsis, Surface Detail is a Culture story: broad galactic space opera. The Culture itself is a multi-species civilization run primarily by Minds, highly advanced and typically ship-born AI. As it's basically a post-scarcity, hedonistic, space socialist utopia, tension in the Culture comes from its interactions with other civilizations—lower-tech groups that it sometimes attempts benevolent interference with, equivalent-tech groups that are potential threats, and "Elder" or "Sublimed" species that typically don't participate in galactic life, but may have powers far in excess of the Culture if they decide to do so.

Think Galactic- Borders of Infinity

For the September meeting of Think Galactic, we read Borders of Infinity, a collection/fix-up by Lois McMaster Bujold, set in her expansive Vorkosigan universe, and centered on Miles, its primary character. Extremely brief notes below!

Chicago Nerds- Ninefox Gambit

For the May meeting of the Chicago Nerds' book-club, we discussed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. This was also our first meeting at our new spot—Volumes Bookcafe, just up the road from our old digs.

Ninefox Gambit is a weirdly inventive space opera, and in fact a lot of our discussion revolved around whether to think of it as science fiction or "fantasy in space". A fairly ruthless interstellar civilization, the Hexarchate, maintains its control through the use of "exotic" technologies, which in turn rely on the "calendar", a kind of consensus reality. When a group of heretics make a particularly daring secession, the Hexarchate pairs a low-ranking soldier with genius mathematical abilities—Kel Cheris—with the imprisoned immortal spirit of one of their greatest and most treacherous generals: Shuos Jedao.

This is a weird, surreal book, setting up a very bizarre world and then not explaining it very much. This is one of the things I like most about it, as I said in my review last year. At club, we had good debates about both how and whether different aspects of this novel work. Brief notes below:

Think Galactic- Diamond Dogs Outing

This past Saturday, I joined some other members of Think Galactic for a theatrical outing—The House Theatre of Chicago's performance of Diamond Dogs at the Chopin Theater.

Diamond Dogs is a stage adaptation of the Alastair Reynolds novella of the same name: a kind of horror-survival story set in the far future, transhuman space opera world of Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. Saturday's production also featured a pre-show discussion with Reynolds himself, as well as playwright Althos Low (pen name for Steve Pickering & others) and director Nathan Allen.

I've been meaning to see more of the SFF-allied theater in Chicago, and I am *so glad* I made it out to see this—really quite a spectacle, not shying away even slightly from the science-fictional elements, and with some pretty brilliant tech—props, costumes, puppetry, light & sound—it pulled them off surprisingly well.

More discussion, and possible spoilers, below:

Chicago Nerds- Leviathan Wakes

For the last 2016 meeting of the Chicago Nerd book club, we discussed Leviathan Wakes (2011) by James S.A. Corey, the first book in "The Expanse", an on-going series that is also going into its second season as a SyFy television show.

Leviathan Wakes is set in a fairly-near future where humans have colonized chunks of the solar system using an extremely efficient new impulse engine, but have not yet moved on to interstellar exploration. At the book's start, there's a bit of three-way political tension between Earth, a partially-terraformed (and militarily well-equipped) Mars, and the inhabitants of the outer asteroid belts, moons, and dwarf planets. The novel alternates viewpoints between James Holden, who becomes captain and unwitting political player after his original civilian ship is destroyed, and Joe Miller, a detective on Ceres whose hunt for a missing young woman leads him to a plot that killed Holden's ship and threatens the solar system.

Notes & possible spoilers below!

Review: A Closed and Common Orbit

In reviewing Becky Chambers' new novel, I find myself in the strange position of having to write a negative review of a book I very much wanted to like, that I do like in many ways, and which I don't necessarily want to discourage people from reading.

The good news is, whether or not you should read A Closed and Common Orbit (2016) is easily determined if you've read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014), the novel which precedes this. While structurally a bit different—Common Orbit has barely more than two characters, braids time-lines, and is essentially linear, where The Long Way is a meandering ensemble tale—the tone and intention of the two are very close. I find it very unlikely that one's reception of Common Orbit will vary much from The Long Way, with the possible exception that some might like (or dislike) that more time is spent with fewer characters.

Also, I should note that, although A Closed and Common Orbit follows immediately on the heels of The Long Way, plot-wise, it's by no means a sequel in the conventional sense. It could easily be read first, or as a standalone novel, with the caveat that having some of The Long Way's worldbuilding under your belt will make Common Orbit a little easier, albeit in a very minimal way. In her first novel, Chambers usually drops a lot of factoids about her alien species very quickly on meeting them, but the absence of this up-fronting of exposition in Common Orbit is hardly a weakness.

Plenty to love here; unfortunately, I find that to be outweighed by the novel's shortcomings. Possible spoilers, and many comparisons between the two novels, below:

Chi-SF: The Quiet War

At last week's meeting of the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community, we discussed Paul McAuley's "The Quiet War" (2008), a relatively near-future science fictional tale wherein humans have spread a bit throughout the solar system, and Earth-based interests are rapidly headed towards a military engagement with the fairly anarchic societies of the Jovian satellites.

Before we got talking about the novel, we got some reports from Worldcon--we had three attending members who gave us some highlights from Spokane this year. That in turn led us to talk a bit about the Hugos, the preponderance of "No Award", and the whole Puppy kerfuffle. Also: fire! Spokane was apparently inundated with smoke from (relatively) nearby forest fires for a few days.

But! "The Quiet War". I was so pleased to come back to this book--hadn't read it since it came out, and forgot how enjoyable it was. Possible spoilers below!

Chicago Nerds: Hyperion

After many nominations and near-selections, Dan Simmons' Hugo-winning "Hyperion" (1989) finally made it to the top of the Chicago Nerds' book-club list.

Structurally, "Hyperion" draws on "The Canterbury Tales" (1390ish), being composed of a frame story of a group of pilgrims travelling together, with the bulk of the novel made up of the individual stories that six of the pilgrims relate; each individual's story is told in a different style, and has a different thematic focus.

I found Hyperion a delight to re-read, as did many others at group; I think we were about evenly split between first-time readers and re-readers. It's one of those books that is a real pleasure to share and talk about. Possible spoilers below!

Blackstone F & SF: Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie's “Ancillary Justice”, whatever else it is, is certainly turning into a touchstone for the SF community—I can't think of a book in recent years that so many people are reading and discussing, regardless of their usual tastes in the genre. Last night the Blackstone Fantasy & Science Fiction Book Club took a crack at it. Spoilers and nitpicks below!