In this sequel to A Memory Called Empire, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and her imperial liaison/maybe-kinda-girlfriend Three Seagrass travel to the front lines of an interstellar war on a mission to try to decipher the alien enemy's language and establish diplomatic relations. What Three Seagrass doesn't know is that Mahit is also on a covert mission to sabotage diplomacy and keep the Teixcalaan Empire mired in an endless, unwinnable war.
I was so-so on A Memory Called Empire. I would say I had a stronger reaction to the sequel, both positive and negative.
First, the positive: I loved Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada, new characters in this installment. She's the passionate, brilliant captain of the flagship, he's her loyal, cerebral first officer who adheres to a stoic alien philosophy. They deal with high-stakes ethical quandaries as the lives of millions hang in the balance, and they love each other with an intensity that goes largely unspoken. Is this aspect of the book pandering to people who love Kirk and Spock? Perhaps, but I had a great time being pandered to. I wanted the entire book to be about these two.
I mostly liked the stuff about establishing communication with the aliens too, which is also classically Star Trek in tone and approach. (It bugged me a little that the linguistics wasn't more realistic, but you rarely get that in SF and it isn't really the point here.)
Unfortunately, the things I liked were pretty definitively outweighed by all the half-baked themes, garbled political messaging, and many characters' infuriatingly stupid choices and baffling cluelessness. It wasn't quite throw-the-book-across-the-room level, but at certain moments it got close.
Ranting and spoilers- How can it possibly take SO LONG for the characters to figure out that the aliens are a hivemind???? It's not just that it's a basic SF trope and obvious to the reader from literally the first page of the book. It's also that all the prompting the characters need to make the leap is right there in front of them the whole time! Mahit herself has Yskandr's mind in her head, there are the Sunlit guards and the Shard pilots who share their perceptions through technology... To these characters, the existence of a species with a shared consciousness shouldn't even be surprising. But it still takes them 400 fucking pages to figure it out, and they act like it's a galaxy-shattering shock. This makes no sense whatsoever and it makes most of the characters look inexcusably dumb.
- I don't get the way the Mahit/Three Seagrass relationship is written at all. In the first book, they liked each other from the start and then nothing happened with it until suddenly they kissed at the end. In this one, they have a stupid fight at the beginning and feel weird and uncomfortable around each other for hundreds of pages until suddenly they fuck. This didn't work for me. It especially didn't work because I felt like I was supposed to side with Mahit in their argument, but I didn't, because Three Seagrass doesn't know what Mahit is mad about and Mahit refuses to tell her. Mahit's narration is explicit that she wants Three Seagrass to know what's bothering her without being told, so basically she's punishing Three Seagrass for not being fucking psychic. Am I the only one who thinks it would have been more interesting if they'd actually ever talked about any of the issues between them, rather than just winding themselves up about it in their heads?? By the end I wasn't rooting for them to get/stay together at all, so when Mahit ran away from the relationship (again) I didn't even care.
- I felt the lack of gender stuff in the first book was a missed opportunity. In this book, the author seems to be strenuously trying to miss that opportunity as hard as she can. There is one scene where Mahit (in their shared consciousness) accuses Yskandr of not understanding fashion for "female-bodied people." It's brushed off. There's another scene where Three Seagrass says she wasn't sure if Mahit liked people of her "gender and sex," and several where Three Seagrass silently wonders if she had sex with Mahit, or with Mahit and Yskandr, or just Yskandr. No further discussion of these points. I truly don't understand what Martine is going for here. She chose to create a protagonist who is a woman sharing a mind and body with a man. She seems dimly aware that there might be interesting things one could say about this. She apparently doesn't want to say any of them.
- Even leaving aside the gender issues, I think there's a lot more that could have been done to explore the mindsharing scenario. Yskandr often reads like an invisible sidekick who just pipes up now and then to give Mahit some information, advice, or a snarky comment. What is his experience/consciousness/sense of embodiment like? We don't get his own internal monologue, just the things he "says" to Mahit. It doesn't feel as weird and alien as it seems like it should.
- Mahit and Twenty Cicada should have talked! He's assimilated to Teixcalaan in some ways but maintained his cultural distinctiveness in others; doesn't that seem like an extremely relevant perspective for Mahit to hear? The books act like Mahit is the only one in the galaxy who has mixed feelings about Teixcalaan, but surely she can't be.
- On a larger level, these books are about an absolutist expansionist empire and the vulnerable republic it threatens, and nothing about any of that is resolved or even really explored all that much. The child heir Eight Antidote is an interesting character and he's trying to do the right thing, but there's so much more going on here that can't and won't be resolved by a kid with some moral fiber taking the throne. Having a relatively nice emperor does not solve the problems of imperialism. In this book we learn more about how systemically fucked up Lsel is too, and nothing happens with that either. The plot doesn't even make it hard for Mahit to decide whether to stay loyal to Lsel, since there are power-mad authorities on Lsel who want to KILL HER. No wonder people were expecting a trilogy here; this book does not wrap up a single loose end. Okay, that's probably more than enough of a rant. TL;DR: Book dances around a lot of interesting speculative and interpersonal possibilities and solidly lands on very few of them.
mon frère a eu 40 ans samedi ce qui veut dire fiesta on était une quinzaine de personnes, la moitié des profs, plus un gros chien peureux et un second marmot de l'âge du neveu, répartis dans trois gîtes proches ( Read more... )
me voilà chez mes parents à la montagne à la fraîche avec le chat, des cousins à côté et zéro plan !
too french didn't read malu attended a nice birthday party and is now vacationing in the moutains (yay!!)
At one time, the cellar of the current palace was made up of dank, dim chambers where the palace's slave-servants slept and sometimes worked. When the previous Chara made up his mind to free all the palace slaves, there was much discussion over what to do with the former slave-quarters. The somewhat belated consensus by the palace officials was that these rooms were unfit to live in. There was talk of turning the rooms into storage rooms.
To everyone's amazement, the palace's community of eunuchs came forward and asked that the dank, dim chambers be given over to them. They had never before had a place in the palace that belonged solely to them. Many of them, being recently freed slaves, had lived in the slave-quarters; they considered this their home, one that might finally belong to them, rather than to their slave-masters.
The Chara graciously granted them their new quarters and forbade anyone who was not a half-man from entering the quarters, except by invitation of the eunuchs.
I can testify that the eunuch community has done a marvellous job of redecorating the cellar, so that it is bright and cheerful. One room alone has not been touched: the slaves' punishment room, which remains as a stark reminder of this place's bloody past.
If you are invited to visit the eunuchs' quarters, I strongly advise you to visit the punishment room. My advice grows even stronger if you keep slaves yourselves.
[Translator's note:Free-man's Blade includes a visit to the slave quarters, courtesy of a half-man.]
So at the start of last month - last fic_rush probably - I knocked out a little double-drabble Bicker for drabble_zone as a wee test to see if I could write for this fandom. (I am SO down the rabbithole with reading fic for this fandom. But that doesn't always translate to writing stuff myself. I did a lot of movie fanfiction last year for films that I can probably count on one hand the number of other peoples fics I've read, and there are definitely fandoms I read heavily without any desire to write myself. The crossover between what I read and what I wrote in MCU was pretty minimal too...) And then, umm...the idea wouldn't leave me alone, so I figured, I'd expand it out into a fic, 1000 words of outsider POV maybe? Several weeks later and it's four times that length and a completely different fic! I mean, the bones of it are the same, but it's much more about Carter - and his feelings about both his own feelings about his friendship with Scott, hockey friendships in general and Shane & Ilya's weird not-friendship - than the original drabble was. (I spent some time down a wikipedia rabbit hole trying to get the timeline for the realworld Sochi winter Olympics right for this fic. I remember it being a shitshow of contraversy at the time but I was a bit fuzzy on what was known at the time and what came out later.)
Not Friends (Or Anything) (4065 words) by Glinda Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter & Carter Vaughn Characters: Carter Vaughn, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Friendship, Team Dynamics, show canon only, Institutional Discrimination Summary: Honestly, Carter found it weirder that they weren't friends.
Here's a weird question. Is Carter a really common name in the states? Because I feel as though, a lot of shows I've been fannish about over the years have had a character called - normally as a surname but occassionally as here a first name - Carter?
(Also I'd forgotten how good this song was until it showed up on this show.)
Current Mood:cheerful
Current Music:Wolf Parade - I'll Believe in Anything
In this casual co-op birdwatching game, you and up to 10 friends explore a nature preserve with the goal of photographing all the different kinds of birds.
The adventuring party converges on a Rock Pigeon This game really captures the ways in which birding is like Pokémon. (In fact, it's said to be particularly reminiscent of Pokémon Snap, but I haven't played that game so I couldn't tell you.) There are all these little creatures with funny names all over the place, and you've got to, well, catch 'em all. There are even shinies, which are sparkly rainbowy versions of a bird that make delightful UFO sounds when you get close to them.
Flock Around is usually on Steam for $4.99 USD but it's currently on sale for $3.99, and for the price it's absolutely worth it. I have played many games that offered a lot less fun for a lot more money!
This sequel to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi picks up the story with kinda-ex-pirate Amina and her crew on a quest to track down a dangerous magical artifact for the peris (air spirits) with whom Amina struck a bargain in the first book. This time it's a spindle that can alter the threads of fate, said to be in the hands of a witch on an island in the Persian Gulf shrouded by supernatural seas, where ships run aground no matter how skilled the sailors are, and nobody ever comes back.
I loved the first book in this series so I was eagerly awaiting the sequel, and it didn't disappoint. It's another seafaring adventure, this time with a slightly darker tone. It's less episodic than the first book, mostly dealing with this island and the mystery of the witch, her origins, and the suspiciously idyllic society she's created around her with the descendants of shipwrecked sailors who are all so very happy here... but can't actually leave. It's also less of an ensemble piece, with most of Amina's crew sidelined for much of the story. Instead it focuses more tightly on Amina's complicated friendship with the prickly alchemist Dalila, who's only pretending to be seduced into the witch's inner circle so she can steal the spindle... right? There's also more development of Amina's relationship with her semi-estranged husband, who is not only a self-involved jerk and annoyingly hot, but also a literal chaos demon.
With all of these relationships, I really like how the bonds of magic intertwine with bonds of emotion. It's not just, oh, this magical effect is a metaphor for how the character is tempted into something that's not good for them. It's that magic is happening and mundane interpersonal and emotional stuff is also happening, and it feels really cohesive and convincing to me.
I did think there was a bit of a structural hiccup towards the end where the reader learns the truth of what's going on too early, making it feel like it takes too long for Amina to figure it out. But that's a minor issue in a book I otherwise totally enjoyed. I had to tear through it at breakneck speed because I couldn't renew it from the library (someone else was waiting) and that was not a hardship for me at all!
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glyfic - juin 2026
