This book picks up almost immediately from the end of the previous book, A Memory Called Empire. Read that first.
Mahit Dzmare is back on Lsel Station, as she requested, though still technically ambassador to the Teixcalaan Empire. She thought she could come home and avoid the seductive draw of everything she loved about Teixcalaan, including her feelings for Three Seagrass. However, she has to avoid getting her imago scanned, which would reveal to Lsel’s government how deeply she was involved in the events of the barely averted coup. This was overall good for Lsel, but her methods would implicate one or more of Lsel’s Council as acting without approval and running their own games of espionage.
Back on Teixcalaan, Three Seagrass is also pining for Mahit and not falling easily into the life of a high-level government functionary, Third Undersecretary for Information. So when the chance to escape arrives in the form of a Fleet request for help with first contact, she assigns herself the job and makes a run for it.
This book adds two new POV characters. Nine Hibiscus is a Fleet commander cut from the mold of Honor Harrington or Horatio Hornblower. She’s an unorthodox tactician, engenders fierce loyalty from her people, and is just a bit dangerous to the new leadership of the War Ministry. Eight Antidote is the eleven-year-old imperial heir. His narrative sections are very well done for capturing how a child might think, a child with 90% of the genetics of the previous Emperor, one conceived to rule.
The new antagonists are pretty stock alien bad guys. As with all monsters, they are scarier when off-screen. The book resolves with a “people are people, we can all get along” moment. If you know how Forever War ended, this is going that direction, but in a week, not centuries.
Yes, once Mahit is on the case, things happen fast. Improbably fast. This book reprises her ability to wrap up galaxy-shattering crises in a week while pursuing a smouldering romance.
This is clearly a “second book” that suffers in comparison with its predecessor. The court intrigue is mostly replaced by Fleet intrigue, but Arkady Martine is not a military SF writer, and it shows. Her conception of fleet maneuver vacillates among the analogies of aircraft carriers in the Pacific, battleships off Jutland, and Napoleon.
If your ships are in orbit around Planet A in System A, you can’t “discover” Planet B in System B and then send part of the Fleet there in a few days/hours’ time. The sheer size of space, the need for jump gates, and the limitation of light-speed communication all get ignored when the plot needs it.
Further nitpicks:
The whole sequence on larynx vs. syrinx between two characters is incredibly contrived, since neither of those two characters is set up to know the things they seem to know. Mahit and Three Seagrass have a big fight for no other reason than the romance subplot requires it. Mahit and Three Seagrass get dropped, almost naked, into a 50 °C desert for hours. They survive with serious dehydration but go back with just a few hours’ rest, where they seem to spend most of the time fucking. (This all feels like an editor told the author to add 10K words and some real sex, this time.) And then some other character goes with them and survives indefinitely with no more than a mild sunburn when the plot requires it. The author doesn’t seem to know how fast a dead body would mummify at that temperature and aridity. The colonists have been dead for months.
Nine Hibiscus isn’t the only one that wants to space Sixteen Moonrise. The reader does, also, but for being a paper-thin villain, not for annoying lapses of Fleet protocol.
Spoilers
This isn’t just bad writing. It is tearing down the world-building of the first novel. This continues in the denouement, with revelations about Shard pilots and the Sunlit, to the extent that telepathy, whether mediated by machine or fungus, becomes a reality.
The novel that Arkady Martine would be much better at writing would have come just after the events of this book. It would have focused on the crisis in Teixcalaan imperial culture as it comes to grips with how collective memory via technical augmentation has already thoroughly infiltrated society. Will the Emperor become a member of a collective? Should they? Will practical telepathy so reshape Teixcalaan society that it ceases to be human in the eyes of Lsel Station? Does Lsel Station go walkabout again to preserve itself? Align itself with Verashk-Talay?
But in truth, I think Arkady Martine has thrown such a monkey wrench into her world-building that it won’t be possible to keep going without just ignoring or retconning a lot of the events of this book. Her largest human empire is on the verge of a transhuman leap into collective consciousness. Alternatively, a retreat like Edo-period Japan, where it becomes a hermit kingdom, refusing contact and cauterizing the wound to ensure it remains pure from all collectivization.
Conclusion
Read this if: you liked the first book and don’t mind being disappointed. Like the characters enough to ignore the problematic world-building.
Don’t read this if: bad military SF tropes infuriate you. Hackneyed mysterious alien tropes infuriate you. New technology acting as a deus ex machina infuriates you.
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