a desolation called peace by arkady martine

There’s much more of a sense that the future is capitalist, which is the same sense you get from movies like Alien and Blade Runner. In Niven, you very much get the idea that alien races compete and collaborate without there being any centralised controlling power. And the key difference between something like Known Space and Foundation/Empire is this idea of empire. I couldn’t get past the first few pages of Foundation, but I avidly consumed everything Clarke wrote, and then moved on to Larry Niven’s Known Space series. As I said recently, when I was getting into science fiction as a teenager, I very much preferred Arthur C Clarke to Isaac Asimov. In her day job, Martine is an historian of the Byzantine Empire, and like a lot of these science fiction far-future galactic empire stories, you really get a sense that this empire is very much based on that. He makes a solitude, and calls it - peace.

Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease!

Or, in the translation by William Peterson clearly favoured by Martine: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.” And onwards from Tacitus to Byron: The title comes from Tacitus, from Agricola, and it’s a quote attributed to the Caledonian (Scottish) chieftan Calgacus: “ To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace“. There are so many scenes of people in rooms talking that this is almost a Menippean satire, but there is a plot, and the story does slowly progress and eventually reach a kind of conclusion. I used scare quotes around the word ‘action’ above, because one thing this isn’t is action-packed. It’s also a first contact story, or wants to be, as the alien threat identified at the end of the previous novel comes front and centre here. The sequel is, ironically, more of a space opera, since much of the ‘action’ takes place on the flagship of the empire’s fleet.

I enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, though disputed its classification as space opera, since it was set on a planet. I paused three different times, and read three PD James mystery novels as a kind of palate cleansing sorbet course between the heavy stodge of this tale of galactic empire. I kept having to pause in my reading of this sequel to A Memory Called Empire because I found it a bit of a drag.

A desolation called peace by arkady martine