#a desolation called peace

[beartrice-inn-unnir]

10. What is your favorite genre book to recommend to someone who doesn’t usually like that genre?

Usually when people ask me for a rec for a genre they don’t usually like, they are asking for sci-fi, and I start by trying to figure out different access points based on what they already like. I’m not much of a hard sci-fi person, tending more to the space opera and political thrillers, so here’s a few “if you like x, maybe try y”:

If you like romance, give Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit a try. It’s definitely sci-fi in setting and plot, but it also hits nicely in the formulaic patterns of a arranged-marriage, strangers-to-lovers story that will help you through it even if the sci-fi elements are throwing you off. The author has another similar book that increases the sci-fi elements and is enemies-to-lovers as well, so if you like Winter’s Orbit, Ocean’s Echo is a good next step.

If you like non-fiction, The Martian by Andy Weir is a great pick. I have multiple friends who got into reading again as adults via The Martian. It’s well-written, well-grounded, funny, and very sci-fi. If you’ve already read it, then maybe give To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers a try. It can be described with all the same adjectives, plus it’s a short novella, so if you’re hesitant, it’s less intimidating.

If you like mysteries or political thrillers, boy is there a lot of great sci-fi out there for you. The crux of a lot of sci-fi is space or high-tech settings with a plot that asks questions about personhood, and that mixes really well with detectives and spies wandering around trying to solve problems and find truths. Try Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (it’s partway through a series of great books and novellas, but that one’s the most traditional mystery plot) or A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (ambassador solving her predecessor’s mysterious death while trying to do his job)(I’d also recommend this one if you read a lot of classics) EDIT: just realized I mistyped - book 1 by Arkady Martine is A Memory Called Empire.

If YA/ Bildungsromanen/ New Adult figuring the world out through trial and error is often your jam, try Provenance by Ann Leckie (for the kid who really wants to do things right) or The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold (for another kid who wants to do things right, but is also a high-energy chaos gremlin).

If you like fantasy, you probably already have read some sci-fi; it’s all under the speculative fiction umbrella and genres are vague anyway. All the same, I know this is the Locked Tomb Website, but give Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir a shot (it’s got magic and mayhem and an epic locked-room whodunnit mystery). The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord is also good - it has a team of people traveling together and thinking about morals and discovering new abilities, plus some romance.

I’m sure there’s lots of genres I’m forgetting right now, but feel free to send me another ask for any specific one!

[alex-van-gore]

I’ve been doing the draw-everything-June challenge (where you use a pose reference every day, and, no I’m not on time at all). Two of those turned into Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass! Slapped some colour on them for the vibes. Mahit is in her angular white intimidation outfit, and Three Seagrass is encountering a kauraanian Kitten.

[thelastofthebookworms]

Feel free to make suggestions. I may make another poll if there are enough candidates.

More polls.

[deirdresart]

Nineteen Adze redraw! (2022 vs. 2021)

[averagemrfox]

I’ve decided to name it Thirty-six All Terrain Tundra Vehicle

[carcatart]

I finished reading A Desolation Called Peace today and I really wanted to draw my favourite the characters! From left to right: Mahit, Three Seagrass, Eight Antidote, and one of the hive mind aliens.

I decided to base the aliens on bears cause their ears are described as round and fluffy (and they're my favourite animals!)

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Book names + authors under the cut

Mahit Dzmare/Three Seagrass- A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Patroclus/Achilles- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Rhy Maresh/Alucard Emery- A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab

Maurice Hall/Alec Scudder- Maurice by E.M. Forster

[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

[rationalnerd62]

Now that I'm slowly recovering (or at least trying to recover) from A Desolation Called Peace (what do you mean, it's a DUOLOGY?!), can I talk about how much Three Seagrass is such a mood? Our girl spent at most one week with Mahit in the first book, and after that she cannot even stand a few months at her desk job before she randomly decides to take an assignment at the edge of the Empire just so she can make a stop in Lsel and see her girl-who-isn't-her-girl. Professional simp behaviour, I can only respect that.

Not that Mahit is much better, Ma'am "yes you've been flirting with your cultural liaison since day one".

I'm still kinda mad about ADCP's ending, in most part because so much could still be said about those characters, but let's be real. I don't think that LDR / "I'd write back. All the time." will last long before one of them does something ridiculously gay like uhauling or whatever the space lesbians do.

[syeniites]

Three Seagrass 🫱🏽‍🫲🏼 Shallan and Adolin Kholin

^ regularly committing microaggressions against your bestie/crush despite being unequivocally ride-or-die for them

[pretensesoup]

Queer books, day 7/30

Okay, I have a big weakness for Space Opera, even though once you try to think economically about it, you can see that a giant space empire will never work. Like there will never be one planet that is dedicated to growing tea and has no other exports and requires to be hooked into some giant trade network in order to survive. But if there were such an empire, this book.

Ironically, this book is perilously close to my MA work, and also I think Arkady Martine's PhD work, from looking at her biography. It's really about what happens when you are trying to translate, and how impossible that can be. Not just translating words from one language to another, but translating culture. Mahit is sent as ambassador from a small independent station to the heart of the local giant empire, Teixcalaan. To function as an ambassador means you have to make your culture understandable (and palatable) to another group in order to curry favor and push your political agenda. So how does someone who grew up in a place where space is at a premium, births monitored because of population controls, food is vegan because of the problems of raising animals, etc., explain all of that to someone who's always lived not just on a planet but in the wealthiest part of the wealthiest planet? If you live in Londinium, how do you explain your life to someone who lives in Rome? Or if you're living in Manhattan right now, how can you understand the life of someone in rural China? It's difficult. Not saying the words but actually producing the understanding.

This book does a lot of things really well: political intrigue that is actually interesting, poems that are actually pretty good (as a poet, I often have feelings about poems written by novelists in novels), queerness (Mahit's predecessor, Yskandr, who still exists as an implant inside her head, was bi, and Mahit herself is interested in women). The images are gorgeous, the writing is terrific. My one critique is that, when one character mentions that the child she and Mahit are discussing was her own child "of her own body," Mahit is privately horrified--apparently women on her station aren't allowed to actually carry pregnancies, because they could ruin their bodies that way. My feelings about this as a person who has been pregnant aside, I do not for a moment buy that a culture that indulges in recreational brain surgery can't fix someone's pelvic floor. I feel like this is a relatively petty quibble, though.

Key quote:

The coffee was shockingly, blisteringly good: hot but not hot enough to scald, the paper cup warm in Mahit's palms. It had a rich, earthy taste that wasn't anything like the instant coffee on Lsel, and in some better moment Mahit thought she'd really like to drink it slowly enough to think about all the different qualities of the flavor-

‹There are varieties,> Yskandr said, ‹and they all taste different. It's fantastic. But the important part is the caffeine.>

He was right. Even in the few minutes Mahit had been drinking the coffee, she felt more present, more acute, conscious of a faint thrumming in her skin.

I took a class with Maria Headley (I am an acolyte) where she talked about rejecting mid-century minimalism and writing beautiful, maximalist novels. This is an excellent example of that. Write a novel and put everything in. Every fucking thing. Make it beautiful. More. More.

10/10. Go read them.

[st-just]

Opinions on the novel and novella categories excluding Elder Race?

Okay so, uh, 3 months late finally answering this (sorry - but I DID read Elder Race in the meantime!)

So, novels-

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine The central metaphor of how an empire can only understand something by consuming/assimilating it into itself was imo well-done, one of the better uses of a hive mind alien I've seen in a while. Mahit and (especially) Three Seagrass continue to be delightful. The whole palace drama plot in the City leaned a biiiiiit too close to 'the Empress is just and good! Sadly scheming ministers and self-interested officials have attempted to mislead her for their own ends' for my tastes, which absolutely made me start rooting for scheming vizer guy out of spite. Still kind of confused what happened to the Judiciary Minister who vanished 2/3 of the way into the first book without comment. Excellent read, would recommend

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers Absolutely my favorite thing Chambers has written, but that is a very low bar. There were a few pages of actual interpersonal conflict that wasn't just a silly misunderstanding! (Even if they had apologized and agreed to disagree by the end of the next chapter). In principle I approve of any sci fi with no human characters in major roles. Aeleon demography continues to give me a headache (how do you spend so much time on worldbuilding and just mess up the basic math?) - though honestly Pei's whole conflict over the societal expectation to have a kid would have had a bit more tension/drama to it in a setting where her species was legitimately endangered and at risk of extinction (the sheer angst potential!) Anyway, yeah, well-executed but Not For Me.

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki I did, uh, not much like this book. In a 'spent a couple hours cathartically ranting about it on discord after finishing it' sort of way. The central romance didn't work, every character arc was perfectly predictable, the whole incessantly hammered home bit about the magic and wonder of home-cooked food just makes me want to gag, I can kind of see what Aoki was going for with the sci fi half of the worldbuilding but it just didn't work at all, and so on. Still not entirely sure what to make of the fact that if you did the 0.5 degree shift necessary to turn the finale into a Christian morality play the quirky alien family plays an identical structural role to where the angels would be. The cursed/demonic-violin repair lady was fun, though.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark This was fun! Nothing hugely ground-breaking and extremely trope-ey, but in a good way? Like the process was clearly 'buddy cop story in into steampunk urban fantasy Cairo' more than anything that evolved naturally out of the characters or setting. But like, eh? The finale involved a giant robot controlled by enslaved ifrit and a mad sorceress trying to restore the British empire attacking the city, nuance and subtlety clearly weren't the goals here. The central mystery was barely a mystery, though. You could pick out the villain by the end of the first act like three or four different ways. Still, yeah, great time. Very pulpy.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir If you don't know that this is by the The Martian guy going in, it will be extremely clear by the time you're 50 pages in. It's a writing style with a real personality bleeding through - if you don't like it, the book will I'm sure be torture. But anyway, I'm a sucker for first contact stories and properly weird but still sympathetic and agentic aliens, and that's the beating heart of the story so I mean, of course I enjoyed it. The science also all seemed plausible/not-obvious-bullshit to me, and Weir did a really good job of getting tension and drama without ever making anyone a villain, with all the threats being faced being natural/environmental. Fun read, assuming very high tolerance for technobabble and also magic amnesia that you don't apply anywhere near the standards of the rest of the books' science to.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan I mean the whole premise of 'mythic/low-fantasy retelling of the founding of the Ming dynasty but with lesbians' feels like what you'd get if you simmered down my reading consumption of the last year or two and poured out the reduction. So like, yeah, of course I liked it! Probably would have been my vote for winner, though not at all sad that Desolation got it instead. As a character type, I really, really love the whole 'arranges everything to work out perfectly through desperate, furious scheming, then absolutely never breaks character and insists it must be providence and they're but a simple monk/scholar/whatever" so Zhu's whole bit there was just catnip to me. The whole melodrama in the mongol court was great, too. And how can you not love a book that ends with the heroine murdering the messiah in cold blood?

novellas-

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire The only other thing I'd read by McGuire before this was Middlegame, which may have given me unrealistic expectations but, like, this was fine? Or, like, I get the sense that this is very much a YA/Middle-grade book, insofar as it really feels like the literary equivalent of a tv special you'd watch with your kid niece and nephew because hey, it's not painful for you or anything? Really funny that this exists entirely independently of the apparently-a-real-thing cartoon Centaurworld, though.

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky This was fun classic sci fi. Like, really classic - I kind of thought 'fantasy setting that's secretly a post-apocalyptic sci fi setting where all the 'magic' and 'monsters' are just poorly understood hypertech' went of fashion with the millennium. Anyway I adore things that play with POV and have different people see the same events and process/interpret them radically differently, so the whole book was catnip that way, and it managed to authentically feel like just a small slice of a vaster, weirder universe, and both deuteragonists really work for me. Don't have a solid pick for my preferred winner but this is one of the two I'm torn between.

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard First and so far only thing by de Bodard I've read, which I should probably fix given how big a name she is. Anyway, this was fun! Nothing too groundbreaking, but that is 100% down to my reading habits rather than, like, 'lesbian court drama in a fantasy analogue of an asian country under threat of colonization' is an over-filled niche, or anything (really the only surprising thing was that I hadn't read this already).

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente The other one I might have voted for. On the level of stories she's a bit hit and miss but on the sentence-to-sentence and paragraph-to-paragraph levels Valente is seriously one of my favorite writers working, and this was no exception. Just an absolute delight to read. Also, 'post-apocalyptic magical realism on the city-sized garbage heap floating in the ocean populated by a culture of survivors after the world drowned' is just a great premise. And my shriveled husk of a soul appreciates just committing to the character study and the ruin and the elegy without giving into the urge to make a grand redemptive quest of it all.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers I, uh, liked this significantly less than Galaxy and the Ground Within. Utopias are basically necessarily didactic but, like, you really don't have to lean all the way into literally having the heart of the story be conversations between the protagonist and a sacred and innocent alien whose always correct about everything. Also the whole 'we 100% could be immortal but we chose not to because, like, nature or something. Aren't we so amazing?' thing with the robots is bullshit. Which, combined with the entire aesthetic of the world just left be feeling peevish and asking questions which really weren't the point (Where are the mines? The foundries? You can't make solar panels or modern antibiotics in a basement workshop! And you sure as hell can't cobble together and repair fully mobile and sapient robots in a cave with a box of scraps.)

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow So it's not that this was bad, exactly. But, like, I feel like it should have come out sometime in the '90s? (Okay without the explicitly gay bits but that's a matter of a few sentences tbh). Like, the deadline for metafictional feminist retellings of classic fairtails being genuinely novel or subversive was sometime before Disney got in on the game, sorry. Also, like, I'm sure it's just down to me being a weird morbid kid, but the whole shocking revelation about how fucked up the original Sleeping Beauty myth is was, like, something I knew before I hit puberty? Only other thing of Harrow's I've read was the Ten Thousand Door's of January and I'm really, really disappointed comparing them, honestly. (Also, as a general rule I dislike anything where it's very clear whether you're supposed to like or trust a character from the scene they're introduced and this is never wrong)

In other categories L’Esprit de L’Escalier should obviously have one novelette, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" short story, Terra Ignota series, and Monstress comic, based off the foolproof criteria of 'those are the ones I've read'

[serenity-the-firefly]

three seagrass throws caution to the political wind and takes an extremely dangerous mission AND travels across the universe AND makes an unsanctioned stop on her already-sort-of-illegal trip AND basically makes up a reason to take mahit with her just because she misses her so much but STILL has not questioned her xenophobia. girl i love you but you gotta examine your privilege here

[averagemrfox]

Destroying your career in the gayest way possible bc you have writers block after the girl you like kissed you one (1) time and left

[ari-x-cappucino]

I'm an adult. Finally. Nothing has changed. Except I'm now responsible for myself. All of the responsibility yet none of the power. It is truly a cruel world which takes advantage of the young.