A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine

The sequel to A Memory Called Empire. Having achieved her mission of setting the all-engulfing Empire of Teixcalaan at war with the unknown power nibbling on her space station home's borders, Mahit Dzamare has fled home before she's herself engulfed, but finds all of Lsel Station's leadership want to know what's going on inside her head, and if that means brain surgery, then so be it. Meanwhile, back on Teixcalaan's capital planet, Three Seagrass (aka Reed), Mahit's former liaison and now an undersecretary in the Information Ministry (aka a senior spy) takes receipt of a plea for an expert on talking to aliens from the Teixcalaani fleet, and decides she and Mahit are the best candidates for the job. Being Reed with an idea, this means her talking very fast at everyone she encounters, and leaving them steamrollered in her wake.

I didn't like this quite as much as A Memory Called Empire, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it a lot. Not only are Mahit and Reed back, but there are a couple of new and interesting characters with the Tleixcalaani fleet, and we also get a substantial chunk of Teixcalaani politics via Eight Antidote, the 11yo clone of the former Emperor and likely future Emperor. The problem for me was structural, in that the resolution bypasses Reed and Mahit.

OTOH we're pretty much promised a third book from something Mahit says to Reed, and I'll be queuing up for that.

To End in Fire - David Weber and Eric Flint

I thought Weber was done with Honor Harrington, but I'd forgotten the spin-off series with Eric Flint. The Grand Alliance may have hammered the Solarian League in record time, but the Mesan Alignment, the slave-trading eugenicist bad-guys responsible for the last 20 (30?) years of war are still out there, and all the intelligence types are still looking for them, And their hidden base. Utterly bizzarely the story has a single major new character, the Solarian Leaugue's new spy-chief, who is basically a Marty Stu (he's repeatedly called a genius) of Flint's frequent collaborator Charles E Gannon. He's even called Charles E Gannon?!?

The plot is completely predictable, the spies and analysts narrow down the physical  patch of space where the bad guys can be and then hand the problem over to Honor to blow up their not so little evil base, But there's something off for me, the whole thing feels rushed, even to the point of having Honor go into premature labour to get her back in the saddle a couple of months earlier, which pretty much times the whole plot to that point at under seven months, even though it can take months to get from place to place. One character even completely regrows a leg they lose in the course of the plot within those seven months, including post-regrowth physio. Yet there's absolutely no reason that I can see for the compressed timetable.

And there's at least one more book to come, because that was only the bad-guy's secret base, the good-guys don't know about the secret secret base yet.

Fighting the Great War At Sea - Norman Friedman

Wow, this one was heavy going, I think it took me a full month to get through, reading most days. The length isn't excessive, either 320 or 416 pages in the print edition depending on whose website you believe (though that's A4 pages), but it's a very dense book. As is normal for Friedman, about a third of the length is footnotes, often just a citation, but just as frequently 3 and occasionally 4 kindle pages of text. But it was heavy going because of its depth and I've come out of it finally understanding what was going on with Fisher's Baltic Project and the truth about Winston's competing desire to invade Gallipoli - yes, Winston was all for the Gallipoli landings, but so was the entire War Cabinet and Winston took the historical fall for all of them as the junior member.

And oh, dear God, Asquith*. I was vaguely aware he was discussing Cabinet affairs with his lover Venetia Stanley, I wasn't aware it went to the level of "We've been seriously discussing the invasion of Borkum, we've agreed always to refer to it as Sylt, but we really mean Borkum"

* aka the Prime Minister,

Definitely only one for the serious naval history fan, and it might more accurately be titled Fighting the Great War in the North Sea as coverage of the other theatres is minimal.
 

It started off with about half an hour's sleep on the Friday night, half an hour on the Saturday night, and at most 4 hours on the Sunday. I'm used to my sleep patterns being a mess, but that's the first time they've ever actually scared me - particularly as I couldn't identify any particular reason behind the shift. Thankfully they settled down a bit after that (though not helped by being woken three times by the same spam call on the Monday, the earliest of which may have been before 8AM, the second was definitely before 9AM), but I basically spent the entire week half-asleep while I tried to catch up. But I slept 12 hours on Saturday night, and 7 hours last night, so hopefully things are back to merely abnormal. This recent Guardian article I stumbled across mid-week seems to fit me almost to a tee:

Extreme night owls: ‘I can’t tell anyone what time I go to bed’ 

And just to make the week complete, I then developed an upset stomach. I can't tell if it was a bug, or the normal end of opioid patch, opioid levels are fluctuating, delayed gastric transit has some catching-up to do thing I get once a week, as the symptoms were identical, but that normally lasts no more than half a day, whereas this was more like five. Ick!

Latest example of unthinking ableist idiocy to come my way: John Lewis (non-food UK shops re-opened from lockdown today, John Lewis are a high-end department store chain) have installed hand-sanitizer dispensers in the entrance to all their stores, they're foot-operated. Apparently wheelchair users are magically immune from spreading coronavirus. A friend posted a pic from their local food store last week of a hand-sanitizer unit that looked like a big steel bin, preventing wheelchair users getting close, and I thought that was going to be difficult to beat, but a bit of googling showed up that Global Protection Supplies are marketing a whole range of them, all foot-operated. *Headdesk*

Recent Reading

Mutineer's Moon,
The Armageddon Inheritance,
Heirs of Empire, David Weber

Reread. This is really a duology and a linked singleton, rather than a true trilogy. It's Weber, so you pretty much know it's going to be MilSF. Dealing with the duology first, NASA astronaut Lt Cmdr Colin MacIntyre is flying a mission over the Moon to try out a new penetrating densitometer, when he finds himself shanghai'd by the ancient spaceship Dahak, whose camouflage he was about to penetrate. It isn't that his course was unfortunate enough to take him over Dahak, so much as inevitable, because Dahak is the Moon. Aboard Dahak, Colin rapidly learns that everything he thought he knew about history is wrong. Humanity isn't native to Terra, the whole Terran ecosphere was seeded by a long vanished alien empire, as were many other planets, and there have been multiple previous 'Human' empires, which keep getting swatted by galaxy roving xenophobes the Achultaani (who are dead-ringers for the Traveller RPG's K'kree, though without the claustrophobia, and with the xenophobia turned up to 11). Dahak was meant to be a forward picket against the Achultaani for the Fourth Imperium, but its crew mutinied and Dahak has been sitting overhead for 50,000 years, caught in the Catch-22 of its captain's last orders. It can't move until the mutiny is resolved by loyal crew, but it prevented the mutiny's success by rendering its internal spaces uninhabitable, forcing both the mutineers and the loyal crew to evacuate down to the surface, and crippling itself in the process. By the time Dahak had repaired itself, there was no-one left in the loyal crew it could contact - because the mutineers had hunted down any surviving officers, or evidence of technology - so it has had to sit passively overhead* while the crew and their descendants spread over the planet, becoming homo sapiens, and while the mutineers manipulated them from their hidden base in Antarctica. But now Dahak has Colin aboard, and fleet regs, designed for a species with a four century lifespan and two century deployments, say that any descendant of a crewman becomes a crewman, so what are your orders, Senior Fleet Captain MacIntyre?

* Well, passively bar evolving to self-awareness through being left on for 500 centuries.

So there's a mutiny to be put down, and only one man to do it, but on landing back on Earth Colin rapidly discovers there are actually two factions of mutineers. There's the dominant faction, who are keeping themselves spry at 50,000 by brain transplants into unwilling hosts, and the slightly decrepit resistance, who are horrified at what they got talked into, and have spent millenia fighting to limit the predation of the bad guys. And there is much derring-do and the good guys emerge triumphant. But then there's the Achultaani search and destroy mission that's due, and why isn't the Fourth Imperium answering its email?

Heirs of Empire picks up a couple of decades later. Emperor Colin I is busy rebuilding the Imperium, and he's got a couple of good-looking* kids to carry on the line, but he never found all of the mutineer's Quislings in Terran government, and Mr Big has now reached a position of power where he can put his plan to become emperor into operation. And the kids are going to have to be the first thing to go. And if he can pick off the kids of half of Colin's inner circle at the same time, then that's just a bonus. But Dahak's protective meddling means the plan doesn't go quite to plan, and the kids - actually late teenagers on their Midshipmen's cruise - end up marooned on a regressed Fourth Imperium planet, where a fanatical priesthood maintains an armed orbital quarantine that hasn't been necessary for millennia, while keeping the rest of the planet in an enforced stasis that's ended up at roughly 16th/17thC levels of technology, with the pike block as the supreme battlefield weapon. When their probing around trying to figure out how society works accidentally starts a jihad by the church against one region of the planet, the only thing for a pair of MacIntyres to do is to take charge and bring down the Ancien Regime.

* Well, bar the MacIntyre nose.

This last book is very clearly the prototype for Weber's ten-book Safehold series, with a corrupt, and deliberately designed, church that must be brought down in order to allow technology to flourish, and where it's down to a limited number of survivors from a technological past to lead the good guys to victory. It's also very clearly the prototype for his 4 book Empire of Man series with John Ringo, where the ship-wrecked Imperial Heir must fight his way across an alien planet to reach his one hope of getting home. And he's recycled the Imperial bodyguard unit making a doomed defence of their charge into the Honor Harrington series at least once, if not twice. Now that's efficient writing! Not necessarily innovative writing, but definitely efficient.

Currently reading: The Goblin Mirror, C J Cherryh, and I may reread the rest of her Slavic fantasy as well, but I'll be taking a break between them in order to read Yoon's Phoenix Ascendant, which I now have a gorgeous looking copy of.

Currently Reading

Penric's Mission, Lois McMaster Bujold

The certainties of Penric's life in the World of the Five Gods have changed since last we saw him in Penric and the Shaman. He's now around 30, though still taken as younger, the Princess-Archdivine has died, medicine has lost its attraction, and he has moved on to a new Duke's court. His new lord has decided he might make a useful spy, which is quite a change for a Sorceror-Divine (and almost a doctor) of the Bastard. The change in role clearly excites Penric, but things don't go so well, and soon he's quite literally in a hole, with Desdemona, his inner demon, she of the 11 prior lives, all female, called on to perform a little life-saving self-surgery. Still, it's difficult to keep a good man, and his demon, down in a hole and Penric and Des manage to figure a way out. Which still leaves him overseas, in a city where he is visibly a foreigner, and there's the small matter of the man he was sent to meet, who will have been thoroughly incriminated by the documents he was carrying.

Penric is rather too late to prevent his contact's thoroughly Byzantine punishment, but his stubborn side, and maybe also the Bastard, mean he's not about to abandon him, or his interestingly widowed sister, even if that means taking up doctoring again. It's perhaps surprising just how dangerous a spy Penric could be, but he's constrained by his ethics as both doctor and divine, though of course that's a divine of the Bastard's order, and the Bastard's ethics are interestingly flexible (I loved the way Penric finance's himself). And only Penric could interrupt a duel to the death to tell his opponent 'look, you're doing it wrong' and deliver theological advice.

Grand Central Arena, Ryk Spoor

Ariane Austin is your typical space-racer pilot, bar the blue hair and the all-powerful AI in the box on her belt, in a post-scarcity society that has expanded to dominate the entire solar system, but can't make the jump to an interstellar society for some reason. Then up pops Dr Simon Sandrisson, who just happens to have figured out a jump drive, but can't get it to work as all the automation fails the instant his test probes jump. So he needs a pilot, and the rest of a crew. Cue crew assembly montage, mostly focused on power engineer Dr Marc C DuQuesne, who is More Than He Seems.

The jump drive is based on the everything's closer in warp space principle, what they hadn't bargained on is warp space being full. There is a mini Dyson sphere for every star system, and at the centre of everything is the Arena. It's sort of the Babylon 5 scenario, but rather than a beacon of hope, all alone in the night, the Arena is a beacon of full-contact sports, where everything is up for challenge. The Arena is old, and ruled by what is presumably an AI, but no other AI works in Arena Space. Nor do nuclear reactors, which is a bit of a bugger when you need your fusion plant to recharge your jump drive. The Arena is also the meeting place for the various factions of Arena Space, and the medium of commerce is betting on formal Challenges. But that's okay, Humanity is a society of insane risk-takers by Arena standards. (Of course we are, got to have that human exceptionalism) So it's up to Ariane, as newly designated leader of the Faction of Humanity, to figure out a way to refuel their ship.

Obviously this means Humanity variously bonding, having scientific meet-cute, or thoroughly annoying all five main factions in no time whatsoever. The Molothos are your typical aggressive xenophobes, the Vengeance think it's all an alien plot, the Faith are the Arena's version of B5's Vorlons (the cuddly Kosh version, not the fascist planet destroyers of Season 4), the Analytic are scientists and the Blessed to Serve are the biological slaves of an AI dominated society. And then there's Orphan, clearly the same species as the Blessed, and leader of the Liberated, a faction of one, who serves as their guide to the Arena. And lurking in the backgroud are the Shadeweavers, the polar opposite of the Faith, with more than a touch of B5 techno-mage about them.

And it's up to Ariane to win the prize of a trip home.

If you imagine Babylon 5 crossed with Golden Age SF you'll get the right feel for this, it's space opera on a grand scale, with all humanity's fate in the hands of Ivanova Ariane, backed by a certain power engineer whose name is a flaming banner he's more than he seems.
 

Spheres of Influence, Ryk Spoor

The sequel to Grand Central Arena. Ariane and the others have been back to the Solar System, to explain why Humanity is now at war, and the politicians and diplomats are Not Happy. But it's time to head back to the Arena ahead of the official mission, but with a new recruit to the crew. Marc thinks Ariane needs a bodyguard, and he has just the 'man' for the job, Sun Wu Kung, the Monkey King.

Meanwhile, back at the Arena, everyone is plotting, especially those factions Ariane managed to humiliate the first time around. And the plotting gets worse with the arrival of two human diplomats, and a wildcard. But Ariane was difficult to beat the first time around, and this time she's got the Monkey King backing her.

I liked this just as much as the first, but there are two major flaws. The first is it loses a little focus on what makes the Arena so attractive a storytelling venue, the second is the real problem, the story seems to be missing about it's first sixth. There's a back-story summary that includes about a page of 'and what happened in between' that's actually fairly important to the plot. I'm not certain whether that means it was written as a separate novella, was a late editorial deletion, or what, but it should definitely be there at the start, and it isn't. It's still a thoroughly entertaining story, but it's a flawed entertaining.

Shadow of Victory, David Weber

I'm a fan of the Honorverse, and Weber in general, but I found this seriously irritating. That's not to say I didn't also thoroughly enjoy it, I read all 800 pages in under 24 hours, but it has some serious issues. This is the latest in the Shadows sub-series, which concentrates on the exploits of Admiral Michelle Henke and Captain Aivars Terekhov and his crew in the newly annexed Talbot Cluster (because Honor is now far too senior for the ship-to-ship stuff), and the main problem is it's a thematic repeat of Shadows of Freedom, the previous book, with walk-on parts for A Rising Thunder, the last mainstream Honor Harrington novel and Cauldron of Ghosts, the last novel in the Crown of Slaves Zilwicki/Cachat sub-series. Essentially we're getting three years of history we've already seen three times over, from a fourth perspective.

Shadows of Freedom was the Mesans (slave-creating, ubermensch, behind-the-scenes manipulators) using agents of the Solarian League (the 800lb gorilla of oppressively corrupt bureacratic states) as puppets to set up local liberation movements/terrorist cells to oppose the Manticoran annexation of the Talbot Cluster (never mind the overwhelming majority of Talbot cluster residents being firmly of the thank god you got here before the Sollies, where do we sign up to be imperial subjects opinion). Victory has them repeating the same stunt, but in Solly territory, telling the liberation movements on various Solly client states that they're the Manticorans, here to help them break free of Solarian oppression, and that the Navy will be there when they do rise up to keep the Solarian headbreakers off their backs - the operational concept is for all these efforts to fail and tarnish the Manties' rep.

So you have the Polish planet with its football-based liberation movement, the Czech planet with its party-based liberation movement, the Celtic planet with its forestry-based liberation movement, the US planet with its redneck liberation movement, and the other planet with its non-denominational liberation movement. All expecting Mantie help and the Manties none the wiser. Results are varied, for values of varied ranging into circa 10 million dead. (I'm not convinced having both Polish and Czech liberation movements was wise, I got thoroughly confused as to which character belonged in which movement).

There aren't actually that many new characters. A couple of Solly intel types who are beginning to figure out the Mesans are manipulating them (of course we already had a couple of Solly intel types who are... etc),  a new Mesan junior spymaster and his sociopathic deputy, and Aivars Terekov's wife Sinead, who is A Force of Nature - a significant chunk of the book is Sinead flattening anyone who stands between her and her husband after he's redeployed after precisely two nights at home. For fan-service Ginger Lewis finally gets her own ship, but having built her and it up, she and it aren't even present for the culmination of her own arc. And at the end of it all the overall series narrative has moved on a whole 12 hours from Cauldron of Ghosts.

Irritating.

Other observations. Not having read any Honorverse in a while, the relative lack of familiarity rather beat me about the head with just how keen Weber is on tall, thin female officers with 'exotic' looks. Here including a literal catwoman. And his mainstream characters do seem to be rather predominantly Western. Oh, Manticore's Queen Elizabeth (and her cousin Michelle Henke) are black, so it's not the white man's burden, but anyone of Asian background is overwhelmingly likely to get exotic hung on them (this includes Honor and her mother). I don't think we've seen an Asian-derived society in the entire series, while even the Czechs now have a star-system to call their own. The non-denominational liberation movement does have a Thai family involved. They run a Thai restaurant where the coup leaders meet, and the family patriarch goes by Thai Granpa. Seriously?!

ETA I remembered last night that the Honorverse's Andermani Empire is ethnically Asian, but culturally it's explicitly modelled on Prussia. *Headdesk*

Anno Dracula, Kim Newman

I've now read the last two books (to date) in the series, Dracula Cha Cha, Cha, and Johnny Alucard, but this is big enough already, so I'll save those for a separate update,

Up Next

Not certain, I'm tempted to re-read the entire Eric Flint/Ryk Spoor Boundary series, I'm probably 30 pages into Boundary, but might settle for just Castaway Planet, which is the next in the series after the two I've read. It's a shared setting, rather than a related plot, so the re-read is optional.