RogerBW's Blog

2023 SF. Enitan is a scribe and tea cultivator on Koriko, conquered a few years ago by the Vaalbaran Empire. But when her sibling disappears, and her highly-placed friend promises to help her in the search and promptly winds up dead, she volunteers to travel to the mother world as a hostage…

There's a lot going on here. On one level there's some Hunger Games, the plucky heroine from the exploited province going off to Make Things Better. But the Vaalbarans aren't cartoonishly villainous conquerors; most of them genuinely believe that their rule is the best thing for Koriko and its people, who are obviously primitives who need a helping hand to get them ready to become part of Civilisation..

Oh yes, there's a lot of colonialism here, including how the top dogs can get away with not examining their assumptions even as they live high on the plunder of conequest. Does a Korikese person show up injured? Must have been a village fight. They're a violent, passionate people, if you know what I mean. No no, why would our security guards have beaten them?

At the same time, Vaalbara and its floating city-palace the Splinter are decaying and static, and Enitan is the only new thing to have come into the inbred in some time—so it's perhaps not surprising (if jolly convenient) that several factions insist on recruiting her to spy for them. What impressed me more, though, is that in many stories of this sort the underdog thrown into the court just stands up and says "no, this is wrong, I won't go along with it" and that makes everything better. But Enitan can't do that: if she puts a foot too far wrong, she will be quietly executed and nothing will have been achieved.

There are things that don't entirely work. The real power behind the throne seems to be a secret from everyone except itself, controlling others based on rumour and subservient media, and even in a repressive state I find that a bit of a stretch. The process of hunting down these conspirators is oddly elided, as most of it's being done by other people. And Enitan seems to lose consciousness a lot, especially at the ends of chapters.

But it's solidly enjoyable even so. Particularly recommended if you liked A Memory Called Empire and particularly Some Desperate Glory; there's that same readiness to take a hard look at SF tropes that too often pass unexamined.