Review: A Desolation Called Peace

"A Desolation Called Peace" is the second book of the Teixcalaan series. It was written by AnnaLinden Weller under the pen name Arkady Martine and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2022. Since this book beat "Project Hail Mary" for the Hugo award, I wanted to read it and see if I think it deserved the win. TL;DR: I think it did, but only just, and I thought it was slightly worse than the first book. Here are my assorted thoughts on the book:

Summary

The story of this book follows the adventures of three characters simultaneously:

• Mahit on Lsel, taking a breather after the end of the last novel.
• Eight Antidote, sneaking around the capital.
• Nine Hibiscus, the fleet captain of the six flagships at the front of a war against strange ringed alien ships.

Mahit is saved from having her imago inspected as Three Seagrass shows up to take her to The Weight of the Wheel, (Nine Hibiscus's ship) in an attempt to communicate with the alien threat.

Once again, they navigate a sticky political web with more of a war-time flavour in an attempt to de-escalate the conflict, and come to understand these new aliens.

Things I Didn't Like

Mahit and Three Seagrass Fight

In "A Memory Called Empire" we read about the blossoming friendship of Mahit and Three Seagrass, which finished with a kiss 💋 as the emperor prepared to ritually ✨sacrifice✨ himself. In "A Desolation Called Peace", after three weeks apart, Three Seagrass appears on Lsel station to conveniently extradite Mahit from the political situation on Lsel with a new high-stakes mission on the edge of space. Readers are treated to the most contrived, reality-TV quality, nonsense schoolgirl argument, as Mahit and Three Seagrass (two professional diplomats by the way) escalate literally nothing into a possibly friendship destroying argument for no good reason. If I wanted to read this dramatic nonsense I'd go read my Facebook messages from 2010.

Very cringe.

After this, readers are treated to excellent fight flashbacks for the next 100+ pages with lines like:

🥀😩 I want her to see how she hurts me 😢🥺

I especially think it's funny that Mahit has a 30 and a 50 year old man in her mind though all of this. I'm surprised the Yskander's don't roll Mahit's eyes so far back into her head they fall out her mouth and scream: "Oh my god, grow up!"

The Ending Was Anti-climactic

The final chapter of the book, featuring the climax of the story when aliens destroy the bridge of the parabolic compression, was almost glossed-over. I loved the actual plotline, but the execution was condensed into about one sentence! Compared to the dramatic buildup of the emperor's speech before sacrificing himself at the end of the previous book, it felt weak and rushed.

I would love to have seen it drawn out. Tell us what Sixteen Moonrise saw seconds before she was obliterated. Tell us what she thought. Did she know she'd been betrayed? What was the atmosphere on the bridge? Did she die instantly, or did she know it was coming? How close was the ship to the planet? Was it about to fire off its nukes?

Expanding this scene would have given it the intensity and satisfaction it deserved.

Things I Loved

Honestly the above gripes are the only real gripes I have with the whole book. Here are some specific things that I loved:

• The "flavour chapters" from the aliens point of view were very well written, and fun to read.
• The chapter where we learn there is some sort of fungus inside the aliens is incredibly cool. It was an especially satisfying way of slowly deploying more plotline, because the reader obviously knows the alien is a hive-mind already from the cool aforementioned alien chapters.
• The writing was just as vivid as the first book. The descriptions, especially about Twenty Cicada and the damp hydroponics bay were excellent.

Things That Just Made No Sense at All

Lack of Radio Communication with Alien First Contact Team

I was absolutely baffled by the first contact delegation. Two aliens and two people were sent down to the surface of Peloa-2, and:

• None of the first contact was recorded.
• None of the first contact was transmitted back to the ship.

That's like sending a man to the moon and just not recording it. Mahit and Three Seagrass had to come back to the ship, and the entire civilisation of Teixcalaan must rely purely on the memory of two individuals to recite what they had learnt about the aliens and the state of their communications.

For starters, this is a massive security breach, because Mahit and Three Seagrass could have just lied. Also wouldn't you want the confrontation transmitted back to Teixcalaan, (or at least the ship), to have hundreds of people attempting to decipher the language?

To drive my point home, here is a snippet from the book:

Down on Peloa-2, four of her people—plus an Information agent and a barbarian diplomat, but four of her people, first and foremost—were either being dismembered by aliens (worst case) or being subject to heatstroke-inducing temperatures while waiting for negotiations to proceed (best case). And she could do nothing but wait...

Want to know what's going on? JUST RADIO THEM?!?!

Then on a later mission to see the aliens, when Twenty Cicada is talking to them, Nine Hibiscus DOES literally just call him on the radio and talk to him. So we know that they have the technology.

This made no sense to me at all.

Other Comments

• Surely on Teixcalaan, the shard trick is immediately co-opted to transmit information faster than the speed of light to make money on Teixcalaanli stock exchanges.

• Mahit gets almost bullied by the councillors on Lsel who don't really like her or see her as useful. Are we forgetting from the previous book that she's good friends with the emperor of Teixcalaan? Amnardbat threatening nonconsensual brain surgery? Can Mahit not threaten to just have the station taken over? I feel like Mahit has a lot more power than she acts like.

• Over the course of this book, I've come to dislike all the councillors on Lsel. Lsel pursues isolationist policy and lets citizens leave and export goods but nobody from Teixcalaan can enter. Historically this has never been a winning move for the isolationists.¹ Why do they resist Teixcalaan culture so much? It feels like the entire Lsel government is very conservative/reactionary, and is incredibly scared of change. Strangely they also seem to be more scared of Teixcalaanlitzlim culture-creep than impending obliteration by alien fleet. I spent a lot of time wondering if Mahit would have an "Are we the baddies?" moment.

• I know this isn't accurate at all, but I visualise Twenty Cicada to look something like this, but with green fractal tattoos.

• Similarly to the first book, we still need to find a synonym for the word "endocrine". There were 14 usages for the word endocrine in this book as opposed to the 17 of the last, so we're making progress.
• Also I know this also is not accurate at all, but I imagined the aliens look like this:

Conclusion

I thought this was a good sequel, and anyone who enjoyed the writing of the first book will most likely enjoy this one just as much.

Also: