** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic **

  • Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. *

Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines.

At the street level view, ADCP is a cross-cultural romance between Mahit and Three Segrass, where empire, barbarism, and exoticness are the cornerstones and flashpoints in the relationship. Our heroine’s identities are challenged not only by one another, but by the cultural context switches that characters are willingly or unwillingly subjected to. Mahit suffers reverse culture shock upon returning to Lsel station while Three Segrass’s utter boredom and comfort in traditional cultural confines leads her to snatch at any escape. In this way, ADCP is an examination of how heterodoxy struggles, and usually loses within an orthodox system.

  • That was the difficulty of twenty cicada, determining where the devotion to an entirely minority religious practice stopped, and the person began, if there was a space between the two concepts at all. *

Zoom out one level, and our main characters are merely troublemakers on a larger chessboard of bureaucracies: on Lsel station, the council based leadership system creates conflicting agendas. Within the empire, competing and duplicative bureaucracies pursue theoritecally alligned but dissonant-in-reality aims. Even with organizations, a simple order can be manipulated, overruled, or ignored, forming the core plot of the story.

  • Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted. Especially if someone else powerful was intervenenig in the movement of information. * Since I’ve spent my entire adult life enmeshed in what some might call imperial duplicative bureaucracies, I found this plot particularily satisfying.

Zoom out again, and Martine is examining the entire social construct that we call civilization, as well as the language glue holding it all together. On the one hand is an evaluation of the historical concept of empire * To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles – this they name empire. and where they make a desert, they call it peace. Tacitus (quoting Calgacus) Agricola 30 *. On the other, Martine uses a first-contact scenario with collective-minded aliens to further examine the negation of the individual. * To think—not language. To not think language. To think, we, and not have a tongue-sound or cry for its crystalline depths. To have discarded tongue-sounds where they are unsuitable. * * What singing is their singing, that we cannot hear? *

There are a hundred small joys in the ways that Martine can capture the joy at mastering an alien skill, the confusion when attempting to decipher chains of incentives among groups of people, or the sadness in realizing that by internalizing a new culture you silently but inevitably give up a part of your own. This is why I read scifi.