Tag Archives: intrigue

An Anti-Capitalist Murder Mystery in Space: Stars, Hide Your Fires by Jessica Mary Best

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the cover of Stars, Hide Your Fires

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You ever read something that you really really want to love but can’t? That was Stars, Hide Your Fires for me. I’m a huge sucker for political sci-fi/fantasy, and while I more often read heftier adult novels, I do occasionally browse the young adult section of my local bookstore. From the back-cover blurb to the first few chapters, it really seemed like this one was a shoo-in for me, but ultimately I found it lacking.

Cass is a pickpocket and con artist who grew up on Sarn, a backwater moon in the Helian Empire. Her family is desperately poor, barely surviving by selling salvage and trinkets stolen from the tourists leaving Sarn’s single resort, but she has a plan to get them out: sneak and lie her way into the emperor’s ball, nab as much fancy jewelry as she can while chatting up the aristocrats, then buy tickets to anywhere but Sarn and a lifetime of not having to worry about the next meal for everyone she cares about.

Her plan gets royally messed up, however, when the emperor is murdered just before he was expected to name his heir, and someone slips the evidence into her pockets. Now she’s trapped and has to work with the mysterious Amaris, a member of the rebel Voyria, to find the real killer before it gets pinned on them both.

Best’s worldbuilding is stellar (pun very much intended). “Young Person from Bad Planet goes off to take down the Evil Empire” is hardly the most obscure setup, but there’s lots of detail that gives it a distinctly anti-capitalist vibe that I found very compelling. Sarn is a barren world, reduced to a wasteland by corporations shipping all of their fertile soil off to other planets for private gardens, and its economy is barely kept afloat by a single luxury resort offering exotic vacations to the wealthy. One of the aristocrats Cass steals from is very proud of how she’s saving silkworms by underpaying workers to harvest silk from dangerous spiders that can destroy their hands. The emperor keeps a cadre of exact clones around just so he can have organ transplants on demand. There’s a war going on far away in the background, but this story cares less about the external conflict and more about the internal inequality of the empire, which I really liked.

The plot is promising, but doesn’t quite live up to the potential of the setting. The mystery is particularly obvious in a way that found me groaning in frustration when the characters went after the red herrings. The pacing can also get a bit weird at times—multiple chapters are spent setting up Cass’ situation on Sarn and planning her heist, but when she’s forced to execute her plan early because a dangerous fence found out she conned him, that situation gets pushed past in just a couple pages. This is a pattern that is repeated several times throughout the book, and it makes the potentially lethal threats feel somewhat less lethal by how fast they’re dispatched in favor of moving things along.

Where I felt the book really let me down was the characters. I so desperately wanted to love thief-with-a-heart-of-gold Cass, but while she’s very charming and easily likeable, she comes off kind of flat. I kept expecting what I thought was her fatal flaw—overconfidence despite being in a completely unfamiliar environment—to come back to bite her, but it never really does. She takes risks constantly and most of them just kind of work out. Amaris is similarly lacking a character arc, and by the end of the book I felt like I was looking at the exact same people as I was at the beginning.

The romance is… not really there. In a way, I appreciate that, because the meat of the story where the two are together takes place over what I believe is the span of a few hours, so there’s not really a lot of time to build a meaningful relationship, but the few moments that there are feel just a little forced. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, exactly, but just don’t go in expecting too much.

Overall, I suspect that Stars, Hide Your Fires is, despite what I was hoping, just not for me. I know plenty of people who care significantly less about character arcs and more about cool settings and fun plots, and if that’s what you’re in for I think you’ll probably really enjoy it.

Content Warnings: a brief reference to a side character’s eating disorder early on, police brutality

Evil Gods, Murder, and Angry Women: The City of Dusk by Tara Sim

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Tara Sim’s The City of Dusk has been on my to-read list for a while now, and with the second book in the series—The Midnight Kingdom—having just come out, now seemed a great time to get around to it.

This dark fantasy novel follows the four heirs of the noble houses of Nexus: Taesia, Risha, Angelica, and Nikolas. The members of each house are descendants of one of the four gods, who have left them behind and sealed their own realms behind a barrier. This event, known as the Sealing, has left the world in a dire state—it is slowly dying without access to the other realms, and as such, the heirs are desperate to find a way to break the barrier and reopen the portals. As if that wasn’t enough trouble, Nexus’s king has no heir and is expected to announce the heir of one of the houses as the next ruler.

The heirs themselves are both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While each of them has a distinct personality and unique ambitions and are all a delight to read—despite some of them being morally dubious, at best—the book simply does not have enough time to spend with all of them. Taesia is clearly the favorite: she gets the most screen time, and her character arc is the most complicated and most complete. I frequently found myself wanting for more time with the others, especially Angelica, who was my personal favorite but probably has the least amount of writing. This disparity extends to the protagonists’ supporting characters, as well: Taesia’s sister is an important character who shows up often and even has her own POV section. By contrast, Angelica’s apparent romantic interest is barely around at all—there was an intense emotional section later in the book that was undercut somewhat by the fact that I genuinely forgot who this person was.

Speaking of romantic interests, though, I do love an ensemble cast where every member is some manner of queer, and that does seem to be the case in The City of Dusk. Taesia and Nikolas both express interest in men and women, Angelica has multiple intimate scenes with other women, and I believe Risha is asexual. These identities don’t play a major role in the story, however, so don’t go in expecting any romance.

By far my favorite part of this book was how downright furious the female leads are. I feel like fiction doesn’t allow its female characters to be genuinely angry outside of emotional climaxes, but that is decidedly not the case in The City of Dusk. Taesia and Angelica—and Risha, but to a lesser extent—are upset at their circumstances, at their families, at the political machinations of the people who have power over them, and at the gods themselves, and the story does not shy away from letting them show it. I would not say that any of them handle their anger particularly well, but they are allowed to feel it and show it and own it, and it’s incredibly satisfying to read. I found myself cheering them on even when they were making objectively awful decisions, because it was just impossible to not empathize with that level of righteous fury.

It feels weird to say that a book with a word count of 150k could have been longer, but that was the feeling I was left with by the end of it. The plot progresses at a very rapid pace, which is great for maintaining interest—something that I find a lot of political fantasy really struggles with—but it doesn’t leave enough breathing room for the characters to just exist.

The final act of the story is especially hectic. There are at least five different schemes that all come to a head in the same climax, and the action gets really confusing. This was probably exacerbated by the fact that my ebook did not show any breaks between POV shifts mid-chapter, and I don’t know if this is true of a physical copy, but it still felt like there was a little too much going on. There were several twists involving characters that barely showed up in the story before the end, and it didn’t feel like many of them were foreshadowed particularly well. I’m willing to give it a little more leeway as it’s the first of a trilogy and is setting up the sequel, but it’s still kind of messy.

Complaints aside, however, The City of Dusk still managed to captivate me all the way through. The characters really drive this story forward, even if they left me wanting just a little. I’m still very much excited to get my hands on The Midnight Kingdom as soon as I can.

Content Warnings: a good amount of violence and gore but honestly not too extreme for dark fantasy barring one especially brutal scene involving cannibalism, some suicidal ideation, loss of bodily autonomy

Court Intrigue at the Heart of an Interstellar Empire: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

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A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is an elegant space opera that artfully ties together themes of empire, identity, and cultural dominance. It makes you consider all of these while drawing you into the characters and the complex political intrigues. 

The book follows Mahit Dzmare, a newly appointed ambassador to the powerful, galactic spanning Teixcalaanli Empire after the mysterious death of her predecessor. She represents Lsel Station: a few space stations on the edge of Teixcalaanli space, containing some tens of thousands of humans. With such a small population, they use a device called an Imago that allows them to access the memories of their predecessor, eventually merging to become a single entity. The previous ambassador’s Imago is decades out of date, however, and she has trouble working it besides. As a result she has difficulties navigating the physical, social, and political landscapes of the Teixcalaanli imperial court—all of which present dangers aplenty.

Mahit, like her predecessor before her, is in love with the culture of the Empire. Their culture (in the form of stories, language, and even modes and forms of thinking) is as much a tool of their domination of the known galaxy as their unstoppable fleets. I feel like the dedication at the beginning sums this up beautifully: “This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.” Mahit seems caught in the conflicted state of being a foreigner who wishes she were Teixcalaanli, while also being a lover of Teixcalaan that wishes to protect her station from the Empire. These conflicts are a constant theme throughout this book.

The culture of Teixcalaan itself deserves special mention. Arkady Martine has a PhD in history with a focus on the Byzantine Empire as well a Master’s degree in Urban Planning, and it shows in how believably intricate the Teixcalaali Empire is. The empire seems to draw inspiration from the Byzantine, Aztec, and Chinese empires, but overall it feels wholly unique. The most prevalent feature of their culture is the obsession with literary works, both the words and the content of the stories themselves. The average Teixcalaanli seems to constantly reference stories and poems in their everyday speech, and two separate poems become strongly relevant to the progression of the plot. This probably sounds like it would overwhelm the reader as much as it does Mahit, but the author does an amazing job at grounding you in the context of the Empire. As you read through the little blurbs from in universe written works that begin each chapter, you really start to feel immersed in the culture.

The sapphic content in this book is limited, but on reread there are many more clues than I initially caught. It is a cute love story, even though romance has a relatively minor impact on the plot. The relationship does develop somewhat in the sequel, however, and I’m eagerly looking forward to where things go in the third book.

As an aside, this book has some surprising parallels to both the Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee and the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie. If you enjoyed either, I’d recommend this book wholeheartedly, as well as vice versa (though the Imperial Radch is definitely my least favorite of the three—certainly good, but not as incredible as the other two). All feature characters grappling with existing inside oppressive empires, and all explore fascinating ideas regarding identity. (Oddly enough, all also involve the merging or splitting of consciousnesses).

Lastly, I want to praise how clever this book is overall. The plots are intricate and everything is tied together beautifully, of course, but it’s more than that. The use of language, both within the dialogue and without, is precise and brilliant. By the end you get a sense of the characters and how they think—almost entirely alien to us in a believable way. You come away feeling satisfied and clever for having understood it.