1987 sf. On the gas giant moons of Orestes and Electra, a harsh honour
code has been mellowed by allowing "social death" to replace
execution. But the system still isn't stable.
To a large extent this is a picaresque: we spend much of the
early part of the book touring the world, and seeing how this society
works—and its tension points. When those tensions break through,
things shift to more of an action story, though it's still primarily
about the individuals and how events affect them than it is about
clever tactics.
The demands of the picaresque form, and of the later political and
military elements, leave the viewpoint characters perhaps short of
motivation: we have two principals, both off-worlders, Leith Moraghan
who's left a military career due to injury and age (at 20!) to captain
a regular mail ship, and Trey Maturin, a trained mediator who's also
acting as a "medium", someone who's allowed to notice the
socially-dead without "dying" himself. But at the start of the book
they're both more or less happy with their lot, or at least not
setiing out to change things; they do eventually find themselves
forced to act, but they aren't go-getting protagonists.
But the world-building is splendid, based on the well-worn SF tropes
of a long isolation between settlement and rediscovery and a harsher
world than expected leading to strict societal rules but taking that
standard premise and doing really interesting things with
it—especially since we learn about the arts and culture of this world,
and how they've been affected by the code.
Not a "usual" sort of SF book, but I rather enjoyed it.