A Desolation Called Peace
by Arkady Martine
Summary
An alien fleet is sitting at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, destroying ships and refusing to communicate in anything a human recognises as language. The empire's response is a fleet under a yaotlek who would rather solve this by killing everything, and a request for a diplomat.
Three Seagrass, the cultural attache from the first book, appoints herself to the job and collects Mahit Dzmare on the way, from the station where Mahit is being quietly destroyed by her own government for having been too useful to the empire. The two of them have to work out how to talk to a species with collective memory and no individual self, while the fleet's clock runs down and the imperial court plays its own game around an eleven year old heir who is being groomed to rule.
Martine is a Byzantine historian, and the novel's real subject is the same as the first book's: what an empire does to the people on its edge who love its poetry. The aliens are a mirror of that, since the question of who counts as a person is exactly the question Teixcalaan asks about everyone outside it.
The alien sections are genuinely alien. Martine refuses the shortcut of a species that turns out to think like us in a different shape, and the breakthrough, when it comes, costs something irreversible rather than arriving as a clever line.
Mahit and Three Seagrass spend the book negotiating a relationship in which one of them is a citizen of the machine that is eating the other's home, and neither pretends that is a solvable problem.
It is denser than the first book, shifts between four viewpoints including the heir's, and demands more attention. Start with A Memory Called Empire, since nothing here is explained a second time.
Best for readers who want first contact written as a problem of translation rather than of weapons.
Historical Context & Significance
A Desolation Called Peace won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel, two years after A Memory Called Empire won the 2020 award, making the Teixcalaan books one of the few duologies to take the prize with both volumes.
Arkady Martine is the pen name of AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a working city and energy planner, and the novel's interest in how a small state survives beside an enormous one that considers it barbarian comes directly out of that scholarship. Lsel Station is written from the position of the client state rather than the capital.
Martine has said the imperial poetry culture, in which political argument is conducted through allusion and everyone is judged on their verse, is drawn from real Byzantine and Mexica court practice rather than invented for effect.