An alien terror could mean their end
The 2021 sequel to Arkady Martine's Hugo Award winning A Memory Called Empire.
Following her return to Lsel station after igniting a war between Teixcalaan and an unknown adversary, Mahit Dzmare has landed in hot water. The Councilor of Heritage wants her gone for the cultural threat she poses to Lsel station, while the other Councilors are not inclined to help her. When Three Seagrass shows up as official diplomatic envoy to the fleet, on orders to establish communications with the hostile aliens, and requests Mahit's help, she has little choice but to join. But can a disgraced ambassador and an emotionally compromised bureaucrat establish contact with an entirely alien society?
A Desolation Called Peace contains examples of:
- Affectionate Nickname: In Teixcalaan, informal "use-names" that riff on the person's proper name are a sign of closeness, generally only used in private. Swarm (Twenty Cicada), Mallow (Nine Hibiscus), Cure (Eight Antidote), and Reed (Three Seagrass) are just a few. Mahit takes to using "Reed" for Three Seagrass, which is considered unusual since she's not Teixcalaanlitzlim.
- Bittersweet Ending: The combined efforts of Mahit, Three Seagrass, Twenty Cicada and Eight Antidote manage to stop the war and prevent the genocide of an alien civilization. However, Mahit is exiled from Lsel, Twenty Cicada is now permanently absorbed into the alien hive mind and will never serve as adjutant again, and Eight Antidote is likely traumatized by his brief stay in the Shard Trick.
- Brown Note: The alien vocalizations are comparable to static, can induce synesthesia, and repeatedly cause humans to throw up when listening to it. Several characters describe it as "not a language". It's a little easier to listen to when it's just a few aliens speaking rather than many, but still not comfortable.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The Weight of the Wheel is infested by a small, cat-like being that some poor schmuck brought aboard in one of their ports. They resemble cats used as pets on the Jewel of the World, to the point where Three Seagrass assumes it is one, but Twenty Cicada corrects her. It may share a common ancestor with the common cat, but generations of divergent evolution has made it an arboreal predator (the main differences seem to be their feet, which have much longer toes and a rudimentary thumb).
- Chekhov's Gun: One spanning both books. In A Memory called Empire, Mahit notices the unusual coordination between the Sunlit, and ponders if they're linked in a network of some sort. In Desolation, her theory proves to be correct, and the same network was recently implemented in the shard pilots. Eight Antidote ends up using said network to belay an order to destroy a planet.
- The Dead Have Names: Teixcalaanli warships have a special and rarely used frequency to transmit a continuous list of soldiers who have died in service to Teixcalaan. The first name on the list is Two Cholla, a seventeen-year-old soldier who died around a thousand years ago.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: In addition to the normal Teixcalaanli view on things carrying over from the last book, Three Seagrass makes a passing reference to a neighbouring empire that practice democracy. She finds the concept ridiculous.
- Democracy Is Bad: Downplayed. As mentioned under Deliberate Values Dissonance, there is a neighbouring nation to Teixcalaan that practices democracy, but we don't see any of it. The only reference is from Three Seagrass, who was raised in a theocratic empire and finds the concept of popular rule kinda weird.
- Didn't Think This Through: One of Yskandr's communiques to Darj Tarats is yelling at Tarats for this. Back during Yskandr's term as Ambassador, the Councilor for the Miners kept trying to get him to pull Teixcalaan into the very war they are now in. Yskandr refused and sharply pointed out to Tarats that he didn't appear to have considered the consequences of giving Teixcalaan a good excuse to bring loads of warships through Lsel space.
- Disappointing Promotion: After being promoted at the end of the first book, Three Seagrass finds that her new position is incredibly boring, mostly because Mahit isn't there. She ends up assigning herself to a job that will let her reunite with Mahit as soon as possible.
- Dramatic Irony: Nine Hibiscus thinks that the Eight Antidote being the one to send the "don't you dare genocide the aliens" order is some kind of complex political maneuver on Nineteen Adze's part, being warlike herself and having the eleven-year-old heir send the message of mercy. In reality Eight Antidote did an end run on Nineteen Adze by sending that order, who doesn't want to blow up the alien homeworld but doesn't believe there's a better option.
- The Emperor: Nineteen Adze is the new Emperor of all Teixcalaan balancing palace intrigue and politics in one hand and a First Contact situation in the other.
- Fantastic Rank System: The highest field commanding officer in the Teixcalaan military is a Yaotlek, who's in command of one or more legions consisting of six fleets, each with their own fleet captain (except the one directly commanded by the Yaotlek). Each fleet captain, including the Yaotlek, also has an adjutant serving as their Number Two and replacement should they be incapacitated in combat. Lower in the rankings are Ikantlos, who command battlegroups. Even lower down are cuecuelihui, who are non-officer specialist soldiers.
- First Contact: Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass are enlisted in an effort to try and figure out if it's even possible to talk to these new aliens.
- Foil: The aliens are the logical extreme of what Teixcalaan does to foreign nations; A culture that cannot consider anything beyond itself alive or real, and that requires the "other" to be brought into itself to even be considered worthy of consideration. Teixcalaan is your typical imperialists that treat all cultures outside itself as barbaric and primitive and needing of assimilation, while the aliens are a Hive Mind that literally has no concept of how a creature can be sapient if it's not part of the hive, and only opening up for real diplomacy after Twenty Cicada sacrifices himself to join them.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Shard Trick was designed using the same system as the Sunlit, allowing pilots to share thoughts and impressions to work better as a unit. However, the shard pilots have a significantly higher casualty rate than the Sunlit, and when several of them die close to each other, it results in a feedback loop and causes everyone in the network to repeatedly experience each other's deaths. Pilots who live through this are immensely traumatized by the experience.
- He Who Fights Monsters: Mahit's subversive zine about an archivist trying to preserve memory from a hostile Heritage councilor and Amnardbat's own confusion at how she's no longer welcome at events show that in her quest to prevent imperialist domination of Lsel culture, Amnardbat herself has been damaging the very thing she's trying to protect, but from the other side. Instead of defending the Station, she's stifling it.
- Hive Mind: Shard pilots and their Shard sight join the Sunlit as a Teixcalaanli hive. They can share emotions, intense experiences (especially death), and simple thoughts, even though jump gates, which shouldn't be possible with the technology they use to coordinate themselves. The aliens are also a hive mind, connected by a symbiotic fungus, which turns out to be the key to talking to them. They don't understand that anything not in the hive is a person.
- Innocently Insensitive: Once again, Three Seagrass simply cannot understand when she's being rude about other cultures. Yskandr sadly says to Mahit that all Teixcalaanlitzlim are to some extent this; they're raised to so completely believe in their superiority over barbarians that it's incredibly difficult to make them realize when they're being hurtful, and even harder to explain to them why.
- Insurrectionist Inheritor: Nineteen Adze is very pleased that Eight Antidote is an "annoying" independent thinker who investigates and draws his own conclusions, even when they contradict her. In the end, she is grateful to him for intercepting and replacing her own orders to the fleet.
- It Has Been an Honor: Twenty Cicada says this to Nine Hibiscus right before he takes a chance and eats the alien fungus. It works instead of killing him, but he will never again serve with her and might never come home.
- Knight Templar: Dekakel Onchu, the Councilor for Pilots, realizes that Amnardbat is this when she discovers that not only has Amnardbat sabotaged Mahit's imago-line, but is perfectly willing to sabotage others, and is horrified. She thinks of Amnardbat as someone who no longer has any ethics, only "love" for her abstract idea of Lsel Station, and doesn't care who or what she hurts in service of that idea.
- Let's You and Him Fight: The Lsel Station Councilor Darj Tarats shared the knowledge of the aliens with Teixcalaan in the hope that they'd be trapped in an unwinnable war, unable to challenge the Station's sovereignty.
- Noble Bigot: Nine Hibiscus is an excellent commander who truly cares about her troops, but she sees nothing wrong with Teixcalaan conquering everyone and thinks it's weird that Twenty Cicada follows the homeostat-cult rather than assimilating religiously (though she'd never say that to him).
- Number Two: Twenty Cicada has served as Nine Hibiscus' adjutant for decades and retains the position after her promotion to yaotlek. He knows precisely how best to support her, is uncannily omnipresent in the fleet, has a huge network of informants, and is her most trusted friend.
- Orbital Bombardment: Teixcalaanli capital ships each pack enough nuclear weaponry to destroy a planet's biosphere, though even the war-obsessed Empire sees it as the absolute Godzilla Threshold in the present. That the Emperor seriously considers it in the war against the unknown aliens is a sign that they're getting desperate. Ultimately, they negotiate a truce right before the order goes through.
- Number Two: Adjutant Twenty Cicada, aka. Swarm, is Yaotlek (admiral) Nine Hibiscus' second-in-command and closest friend. She nearly has a breakdown when he looks like he might be infected by a lethal alien fungus.
- Planet of Hats: Played with. Teixcalaan has the hat of being sun-worshiping warrior poets, all across their vast empire, but that's because they are an empire, and so they impose their hats on the places they take over. There are still pockets that aren't entirely assimilated; Twenty Cicada notably and visibly follows his culture's pre-empire religion, which people note is unusual for someone so high up in the ranks.
- Proud Warrior Race: While the first book put more focus on the Teixcalaanlitzlim's hat as a culture of poetry and court politics, with shades of this trope, they dive headlong into this in this book. A Teixcalaanli emperor is expected to kick off their reign by winning a war, and dying in battle is considered a matter of routine. Nineteen Adze is troubled by this, as she agrees with the deceased Six Direction's belief that Teixcalaan needs to become less militaristic, but she can't exactly not have this particular war, so she's stuck.
- Psychic Glimpse of Death: Shard pilots suffer the experience of each other dying through the haptic feedback and networking technology they use to coordinate their swarms. Concerningly, that shouldn't be possible with the technology they use, and nobody knows how they're picking up on each other's thoughts and feelings.
- She Is the King: Nineteen Adze is known as Emperor rather than Empress, though given that Gender Is No Object in Teixcalaan, it's likely because the language doesn't use gendered titles at all.
- The Stoic: Twenty Cicada hardly ever expresses his emotions clearly. His potentially last message to Nine Hibiscus, his best friend, is a message asking her to water his plants and feed his kitten, instead of a farewell.
- Stout Strength: The Four-Star Badass Nine Hibiscus has a generous curve of fat over solid muscle. She's described as projecting an image of power and stability that would be the envy of any casting agency trying to find an actor for her role.
- Stress Vomit: Eight Antidote says the first "oh fuck" of his life and throws up in the shower when it sinks in that he's the only one who can stop the order to destroy the alien homeworld and has a very short time to do it.
- Trespassing to Talk: The insubordinate captain Sixteen Moonrise lets herself into Mahit's quarters to have a conversation away from Nine Hibiscus. Having survived a traumatic assassination attempt under similar circumstances, Mahit walks in, sees her, and tackles her on the spot.
- The Un-Reveal: Was the subway derailing really an attempt to assassinate Eight Antidote, or a freak coincidence?
- Uriah Gambit: Some in the War Ministry believe that Nine Hibiscus was appointed yaotlek to send her off to a glorious death because her exceptional military record is a threat to the new Emperor. Subverted when the Emperor says that it's because Nine Hibiscus is dangerous enough to survive the appointment.
- You Are a Credit to Your Race: Three Seagrass muses several times on Mahit's wit, intelligence, and grasp of Teixcalaanli culture, and thinks it's a pity that she was born a barbarian instead. By the end of the book, she's only barely beginning to understand why Mahit doesn't consider this a compliment.
- You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Whenever Swarm calls Nine Hibiscus "Mallow" instead of "yaotlek" where other people can hear, things are bad, and she knows it. When he calls her "my dear", it's because he thinks he's about to die. In the second case, he's incorrect.
- You Can't Go Home Again: The Lsel councilors all, for their own reasons, have either turned against Mahit or don't see her as worth protecting. She ends the book as The Exile.
