cahn

I didn't forget!
Tangentially, I realized there is no way I can do this during Yuletide season. I'll pick this up again in January. Anyone have any thoughts on what book they'd like me to do?

OK... let's see whether I can make any sense of this. This is where the book gets even more tangled than it was before. Knowing a bit of history, and knowing that the whole point of some (all?) of these subplots is to riff off of our universe's history, really helps. Again here is the link to Draco Concordans (DC), which elucidates a lot of this history.
( Cut for length. )

September JMF reread is The Dragon Waiting. I consider TDW to be the most complex and rich of John M. Ford's books; it's trying to do all kinds of things, historically and otherwise. Because there is so much going on in it, it has become clear to me that I have to split this into several posts. In this post I will talk about what I think several of the general themes are, and in subsequent posts I will address specific questions and thoughts I have about specific parts of the text. Right now I think I will do one post for Ch 1-8 (which are relatively easier to follow) and another post for Ch 9-13.

First note: This is the first time I have read TDW closely following Andrew Plotkin's Draco Concordans at the same time, which I highly highly recommend as it made sense of quite a few things I hadn't quite been able to parse, and pointed out some of Ford's jokes that I hadn't even realized were there. (I also disagree with or have additional commentary about some of his points, which will go in the later posts.) Andrew Plotkin, you are a hero.

Second note: there will be general spoilers in this post, though this book is one of those where the fun is in seeing how things are done rather than what happens, so I don't think most of them will actually really spoil the book for a new reader. The one exception is the "Chapter" one-sentence synopses, which I've put under a separate cut.

On the most surface level, JMF is writing an AU about Richard III in which (spoiler) the AU plots a path for Richard to live at the end; and in addition the text is very concerned with making sense of the whole Problem of Richard III and finding a narrative (sometimes meaning total AU, as in what happens to the Princes) in which Richard can be someone whose motivations are understandable by and sympathetic to a late-twentieth-century audience. This is something that I understand a lot better now, as a result of watching a lot of operas/musicals and trying very hard to make sense of their nonsensical plots :P No, seriously, history is clearly much less well documented and full of odd personalities than one might ideally like for good storytelling, and I feel like in real life / history, often the reasons that something happens are "everyone involved was being STUPID" and that doesn't make for a good narrative, so Ford is basically, well, taking history and making a novel-with-a-properly-hanging-together-plot-and-characters out of it by way of AU.

That AU, though! The AU, as JMF makes clear in the afterword, is one where Julian the Apostate (in our universe) / Julian the Wise (in AU) brought back paganism. Additionally, the Emperor Justinian made Byzantium into a world power by virtue of becoming vampire after the time at which he died in our universe. (Why yes: this AU has magic and vampirism.)

On an overall plot level, JMF is writing about how four (author-created) characters keep this evil Byzantium from taking over England -- by way of, in fact, having Richard III survive and win the Battle of Bosworth Field. It took me a rather embarrassing number of reads to actually understand that very simple plot, although in this reading I noticed that it is carefully set up explicitly in the first several chapters, I'm just a terribly non-detail-oriented reader.

On a more granular plot level -- well, the plot actually does advance in a granular fashion. There are conspiracies and plots like a little self-contained mystery each chapter or two, all of which feed into either character development or the larger Byzantium-antiByzantium plot, or both.

I'll talk about these more when I do the more in-depth posts, but just briefly: ( Spoilers here. )

Another thing which I haven't seen elsewhere (or in Draco Concordans) is that JMF is also clearly riffing off Charles Williams' conception of Byzantium, which forms an epigraph to the book. So: JMF had read Charles Williams' totally wacko and awesome Arthurian poetry. (*) (BTW, this poetry is now in public domain in Canada. I am just saying.) Charles Williams was an Inkling, and one of the wacko and awesome things about his Arthurian poetry is that it is totally chock full of Christian-religious symbolism (one of the things I adore about it). I could go on about this all day, but suffice it to say for these purposes that the Empire of Byzantium, in Williams' poetry, is analogous to the City/Empire of God/Christ, the highest good. So what does JMF do? He borrows the Byzantine Empire and makes it the Big Bad Evil in an AU where Christianity is relegated to a minor subsect of Judaism. Well played, sir.

landingtree referred in a post to a certain tendency to male gaze in Ford's work (not that there's a lot of discussion of breasts or anything, but there is a certain male POV that sometimes can relegate female characters to little more than love interests / plot points), and I do think that can be a thing (and when we get to Web of Angels, let's discuss fridging in a big way, wheeeee) but this book is the one where I feel he is working against that, and male gaze exists at least partially to be pushed back upon by the female characters. There are still a lot of guys in this book, but Cynthia as one of the four main characters is awesome (interestingly, women in Byzantium!AU seem to be at least incrementally more equal -- almost no one gives Cynthia any crap for being a doctor, though part of that is that her family is famous for doctoring), and there are enough female characters that I am happy with all the roles they're filling. This book passes Bechdel easily, which is not something I can say for... most... of his books. (Growing Up Weightless, and I guess that Liavek story where they're putting on a play, because both of those have ensemble scenes. But everything else I'm coming up blank, although we'll see once I reread. Pretty sure Final Reflection doesn't.)

Also, random thing about this reread: I liked Gregory a lot, even more than on previous readings. Poor Gregory :P

There are probably a whole bunch of other things he's doing that I don't yet know, and other things I've noticed but am forgetting to talk about :P

(*) Which I have now also read literally because Williams shows up as an epigraph in this book and I'm pretty sure in one other of Ford's books (though I don't remember which one) (**). So when K and I were in that bookstore during college and she picked up the Arthurian Torso from the used book shelf and said, "Hey, this has notes by C.S. Lewis, are you interested?" I said, "OMG IT'S CHARLES WILLIAMS! YES. YES I AM."

(**) A list of things I have read because of TDW:
-Charles Williams, most of his work
-A Short History of Byzantium (John Julius Norwich)
-The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
-The Princes in the Tower (Alison Weir) (Weir clearly Does Not Approve of Daughter of Time, lol)

I enjoyed talking about all the books I read in June and would have liked to do so in July but July was kind of a disaster in terms of having time to do anything. On the other hand this means I didn't read very many books! I'm probably missing some, but here goes:

The Age of Innocence (Wharton): 4/5. I owned this as a teenager (a remaindered copy, I think) but didn't read it, and I was right not to at that time. In 2019, I was almost the perfect age to read this. It's so good! But probably something like 5-10 years ago would have been better, as I kept being somewhat unsatisfied with how May Welland was handled, in particular. (I would love fic from her POV!) On the other hand, I kept wishing for a take on what Newland's kids would think of all this, and Wharton delivered in the epilogue :)

Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar's Ventures Through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood (Inouye): 5/5. This is a collection of essays and family newsletters Melissa has written. She has worn a lot of hats in her life so far (not all at the same time, but a lot of overlap): Asian studies scholar, stay-at-home mom of four, missionary in China, cancer survivor, runner. (That makes me exhausted just to type!) And she put this book together after being diagnosed with cancer as a memoir for her children, in case she had to leave them early. This is one of those books that I can't really recommend to anyone because I obviously have intensely personal reasons for loving it; I went to school with Melissa and was in the same LDS group (which is why I bought the book), but I didn't really know her until reading this book. It's all the things I have been trying to learn about our religion, and about life, my whole life, only Melissa learned them much earlier because she is much wiser than I am. She's a really really cool person and I wish I had gotten to know her better in school (or in the years since). (Probably my biggest regret about college is that I didn't get to understand how cool my LDS cohort was -- and they are really, super cool -- until much much later.)

Dancing Shoes and Ballet Shoes (reread) Streatfield: I hadn't read Dancing Shoes before. It's definitely a very similar theme to Ballet Shoes, complete with comeuppance for the dancer who gets too arrogant. It was a lot of fun, though!

The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) (reread): This read around I saw why people had problems with the, hmm, racial stereotypes perpetuated by this book. But it's not really about that; it's really about mothers and daughters and cultural divides, and I still really like it.

The True Queen (Cho): 3+/5. It was lovely and nice! But somehow I never felt nearly as invested in... anyone... in this book as I was in the first one. I also rather expected Prunella's familiars to be addressed at some point, but it wasn't in this book.

DNF:

Finder (Palmer): I really wanted to like this one, because I have liked Palmer's short work on robots, but I tried several times and kept foundering. Possibly it needed more robots :P

City of Brass (Chakraborty): Hugo reading. The part I read was good! I think I was just tired out by then. Note to self: next year do Campbell reading before Lodestar.

5/5. I have a lot of feelings about this book, which is a collection of columns Walton did for Tor.com (and still available there free), only I really like having them all together. Perhaps I'll start with saying that it evoked for me the most resonant parts of Among Others -- the entire book is basically a long involved conversation about books (sometimes literally, as she pulls in some comments from the columns) as in AO.

One of the unexpected lovely pleasures of this book were the comments, especially those of Gardner Dozois, whose anthologies, particularly his Year's Best Science Fiction, were a mainstay of my childhood. I was sad to learn of his death last year and this was -- an unexpected gift.

The best thing this book did for me is that it got me excited about SF, about short fiction, and about the Hugos again. One of the interesting conclusions Walton comes to is that the novella length is where a lot of interesting work is done in SF -- which -- I think she may be right. But just in general feeling like I was part of a conversation about SF (even if I suppose I was juts reading about it) was very exciting and very interesting to me, and basically galvanized me to read a bunch of older SF (as you can kind of see from my June reading list).

Because of that -- and, to be fair, also because I still feel Walton was robbed of the Hugo that should have been rightfully hers the year of the Rabid Puppies -- I'm voting her to win and I'd like to convince as many other people as I can to vote for her to win :)

(Although there's a lot of good stuff in Related Works...)

So I've been slowly savoring An Informal History of the Hugos -- which I've now finally finished and am definitively going to vote for to win Best Related Work, because it is basically THE VERY BEST thing about the Hugos this year, period -- one of the things that is so wonderful about it is that practically every year she talks about I came out thinking "gosh, I want to (re)read those stories/books she's talking about." (I have more to say about it but this will have to wait.)

So last time we went to the library I plucked off the shelf the first suitable SF anthology I found, which was this one. It's divided into three sections: The Golden Age; The New Wave, and The Media Generation.

I'd read a lot of these stories (significantly more than half), and the ones I hadn't read were still familiar (e.g., Niven's "Inconstant Moon," which I'd seen in a lot of anthologies and just hadn't actually read). Interestingly, I had read the highest proportion of stories from The Media Generation, mostly because Card had previously put almost all of them in the anthologies Future on Ice and Future on Fire, which I had read as an adolescent when I was reading anything that had Card's name on it. (They are also very good anthologies, though I'm not sure I appreciated that at all then. Most of the stories I was not nearly old enough for.)

The introductions to the stories are weirdly craptastic -- I remember that in the Future anthologies Card had much better introductions talking about what he himself thought of the stories. Here's it's just a resume. I dunno.

Some thoughts I had:
-In general: wow, I was WAY too young for many of these stories, although I'm glad I was exposed to them

-While most Asimov has kind of been subject to the Suck Fairy, I actually really like "Robot Dreams"

-"A Work of Art" is much, MUCH more resonant now that I've actually listened to Strauss. Wow, I really liked this.

-Yesterday was not the greatest day to have (re)read "A Clean Escape." It's probably good I'm not particularly subject to anxiety. I wish this one had aged worse.

-"Snow," on the other hand, has unfortunately aged very badly. It's a good story, all about memory and loss, but the whole conceit is completely nonsensical in 2019, and I may have sniggered a bit at the conversation that goes "That would be over eight thousand hours of video!! Where would you store it all????"

-"Pots" was one of the few stories I didn't actually read this time around, in this case not because I don't like it but because I love it so much I worry about diluting it with too much rereading. (Does anyone else do that?)

3+/5. Recced by Captain Awkward, and it sounded so exactly up my alley that I immediately put it on hold at the library. And indeed it was.

There is a lot of pain in these essays. There are a lot of people... who have really terrible family situations. There are some of these essays where my reaction was something along the lines of, "man, I'm glad I never had to go through anything like that." There are essays where -- regardless or not of whether their specific relationship with their mom was better or worse than mine (generally worse), I empathized with them so hard that it was both painful and cathartic to read. There are a couple of essays by people who had actual good relationships with their mothers, and those were rather a relief to read.

I think the essay I enjoyed most was Leslie Jamison's "I Met Fear on the Hill," talking about her mother's first marriage, before she had children, and how it refracts how she thinks about her mother and her relationship with her mother. (This is one of the good relationships.)

When I told Peter [her mother's first husband] this essay would be about his evolving relationship to my mother, it was the truth. But it wasn't all of the truth. Because the essay is also about my evolving relationship with my mother, how some part of me wanted to humanize her myth, and how I found, in Peter's portrait of her, another gaze saturated by worship -- but also the puncturing of that worship with the admission of her actual, textured self.

The essay where I found myself wincing in empathy the most was Carmen Maria Machado's "Mother Tongue," not that my mother is really so much like that, but somehow there is a consonance in the relationships, more perhaps in the way that I'm like Carmen than in the way her mother is like mine, except that she is rather more self-aware than I was at that age.

A vast and unbridgeable crevasse erupted between us. Whenever I saw her, she found some way to let me know that despite my accomplishments, I was failing. "You need to learn to make better choices," she told me, though what choices they were, she never specified. Besides, all I could hear was, I wish I'd made better choices. And I couldn't help her with that.

I almost didn't quote that bit because, after saying I identified with this essay a lot, it honestly isn't very much like my mom or like our relationship, at least surface-wise -- and I had the same trouble with the other quotations I was thinking about using. My mom was really proud of me, in fact. She never told me to make better choices, nor did she wish she had made better ones.

So now you're saying, well, how are they similar at all? I think there can be a certain amount of... insecurity, for stay-at-home moms. For achievement in your career you can't point to something you made, or customers you made happy, or money you made. You pour yourself into these kids and in the end you only have what they make of themselves, which in the end you have no control over, and if they're screwed up or don't live up to the potential you think they had or come back from therapy telling you that they think you didn't give them what they needed... I think it can lead to insecurity. And that's what I see in this essay, even if Machado didn't explicitly write about it.

The one that kind of annoyed me was Andre Aciman's "Are You Listening," about his deaf mother who learned how to mimic hearing people very well, in which he says,

[My mother] had spent her first eighteen years learning how to do what couldn't have seemed more unnatural: pretending to hear... [My mother's school's headmistress's] method had disastrous consequences for my mother's ability to process and synthesize complex ideas. Past a certain threshold, things simply stopped making sense to her. She could talk politics if you outlined the promises made by a presidential candidate, but she was unable to think through the inconsistencies in his agenda, even when they were explained to her... She might like a painting by Monet, but she couldn't discuss the beauty of a poem by Baudelaire... Did she think in words, I'd ask? She did not know...

I mean. My mom is (a) not deaf and (b) really, really super-competent at a whole bunch of things. Including math! She majored in math in college. She's not dumb at all. And yet all those things (including some I left off just so I could finish this post) are things she doesn't do either. If you asked her if she thought in words she'd look at you like you were crazy. I just... feel like it's sort of reductive and obnoxious to say it's because she was deaf, or because of her education. Maybe it was! But maybe his mom was just like that!

Liane Moriarty writes chick lit (middle-aged mom lit?), only better, because she has a deep compassion for almost all her characters. I don't always like her books, but usually because of the plot, not the characters.

Nine Perfect Strangers - 3+/5 - I picked this up from the library and it spurred me to check out all the other Moriarty they had. Nine people go to this "health resort" to "transform their lives." But it turns out to all be a little more intense than they had imagined! I liked it! The main character, a romance novelist, is rather hilarious, and the other characters are hilarious and heartbreaking by turns. No death, although one family is grappling with a suicide that took place before the book started.

Big Little Lies (reread, skim) - I had read this before but had forgotten literally everything about it except the identity of the, umm, instigator of the, er, fatal accident, which I did remember. I started skimming about halfway through until the inevitable ending. Partially I think this one's a bit dark (content note for physical/emotional abuse, death) and I think I read Moriarty for the combination of breezy humor and the emotional intensity, which sort of don't work for me with discussing abuse, I guess. Also some of those kindergarten parents are terrible and we never get their POV, so they don't get humanized like her other characters do.

The Husband's Secret - 3/5 - I really love Tess and Cecelia and Rachel's arc with her son, but in general probably my least favorite Moriarty, in large part because of the ending, which features (a) a tit-for-tat that once you think about it makes NO SENSE (b) actually another tit-for-tat that also makes no sense and (c) some really important information that becomes clear to us, the readers, but to no one in the story. Content warning for teenager death (though told through flashback, so it doesn't come out of nowhere) and child maiming. ( Spoilers with more details: )

So, rachelmanija is hosting this thing where people are challenged to post everything they read in June and I said I'd do it only I wouldn't have time unless I just wrote a couple of sentences for each one, and then of course I wrote more than a couple of sentences for this one :P

Dread Nation 3+/5 - properly should go in a Lodestar post, but I'll probably forget what I wanted to say by that time. This was actually quite good, and I liked it more than any of the actual Hugo nominees except Spinning Silver (though this is not a high bar this year). In this book, the undead invade the US around the time of the Civil War (in a clever inversion, Sherman's March to the Sea is actually Sherman trying to protect the Southerners by setting fire to the undead), thus giving rise to training schools in which the Negro learns how to defend her white betters from the undead. In case you couldn't tell from that, race relations are strained and the book is interested in examining that. In addition, there's a "Survivalist party" in the book which... is clearly meant to have resonance to a modern reader, what with "all that 'America will be safe again' nonsense." (At least no one wears AWBSA clothing. Then again, I suppose it's a rather more awkward set of letters.)

This was interesting to read after discussing "Beneath a Sugar Sky" and its cavalier approach to compassion, because certainly compassion, and the question of whether and how much compassion we ought to have for those who have treated us poorly, is something that is thought about a lot in this book, although somewhat inconsistently, and I'm not sure whether the inconsistency is because of uneven writing or because of narrator unreliability. But I really liked that different characters thought different things about it, and the same character even does different relevant actions during the course of the book. I'm a little side-eyeing the narrator's ostensible conclusions (again, the narrator is clearly unreliable when it comes to understanding herself, so it's not clear how much we're supposed to buy into it), but it looks like there's going to be a sequel, so... we'll see.

It's generally well written; only rarely did I feel like a word stuck out. (I don't think "OK" was used in the twentieth-century sense at the time? ETA: I have been informed that indeed it was. Ireland: 1, cahn: 0 :D ) At times I felt like the structure wasn't perfectly smooth, but this was very minor.

D and I have caught the plague from our children (well, okay, it's probably just a random virus, but it's a pretty bad one) so instead of doing anything useful, and until D gets up so I can sleep, I am writing up my Hugo ballot.

I, um, got through my Hugo reading by mostly not finishing these, and in two cases didn't start.

Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan) 4/5 I really, really liked this one. I think my stance on it is encapsulated by (a) when I finished it I could already say with 95+% that I was voting for it -- enthusiastically! -- to win the Hugos even though I had not read any other nominees yet, and (b) I'm pretty sure this would not be true in a stronger year (say, 2019, which is already shaping up to be a very strong year for novels). One of the things that I thought was a weakness of Uprooted was that I felt the characters, most prominently Kasia, suffered from the single viewpoint; I never felt like I had a good handle on Kasia or what her viewpoint was. Novik deals with that brilliantly here with the differing viewpoints. It also allows her to include diverse viewpoints and angles without it devolving into Diversity Bingo. seekingferret: Jews dance in this book.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor) - 3/5 - skimmed to end. This was one of those books that someone who isn't me might really like. And I really liked the first several chapters, which postulate a meteorite hitting (and taking out) Washington in the 1950s, and the resulting space program that's launched. My main problem with it was that I never really connected properly with the narrator/protagonist Elna, a Jewish "calculator"/pilot who becomes an astronaut. I mean, this should totally be my jam, right? I was puzzled as to why she never quite worked for me until I read the afterword, where Kowal gives credit to various people for the technical phrases Elna uses, e.g., "Today I 'simmed' terminal docking maneuvers and tried to tune RHC inputs through an overly generous dead-band." Kowal goes on to say, "I understand none of [the calculations Elna describes]." And... well. That's what was bothering me! There was something about Elna where I just couldn't believe in her as a geek, because she would say all these things but never think about them internally in a way that demonstrated technical understanding of or even interest in what she was saying, so it really was a bit like she was spouting off lines someone else gave her.

Also, at times it seemed just a bit check-the-boxes diversity bingo -- the narrator is Jewish! (Alas, I was not reading closely enough to keep track of whether Jews dance in this book.) Staying with a black family! Check off the box for narrator having realizations about intersectionality! Narrator has anxiety problems! Check off the box for modeling good and bad responses to mental health issues! I just felt like... Spinning Silver was doing a lot of similar things too, but somehow I didn't find SS nearly as check-in-the-box about it.

Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga) - DNF. I wanted to read this one, but I think I am just past the point in my life where I care about noir kick-butt girl heroines, unless we have a prior relationship of long standing (hi there, Veronica Mars). It's not you, it's me!

Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga) - DNF. ase sent me (part of) the first paragraph so we could goggle at it:

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb. Somewhere in between discovering various heretofore cripplingly socially anxious particles and transuranic elements and digging through plutonium to find the treat at the bottom of the nuclear box, he found the time to consider what would come to be known as the Fermi Paradox.

There are so many reasons that this set of two sentences alone makes me so irritated that I didn't get much past the first chapter. Besides Italy not being an especially watery country the last time I checked, it struck me as both extraordinarily reductive and kind of inaccurate with respect to Fermi and subatomic particles in general. Maybe I just don't get Valente's humor, or maybe I am just sensitive because it's my field -- I probably wouldn't have felt nearly as annoyed if she had been talking about, oh, Alexander Fleming and made jokes about sentient fungi or something. (See also the flagrant misuse of "quantum," although I've mostly had to get used to that one.)

Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager) - DNS.
Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris) - DNS

I already knew I would bounce off both these authors' writing (again, clearly not them, as lots of people enjoy their stuff), so I didn't even try.

Voting SS >> Calculating Stars > Trail of Lightning > No Award > Space Opera. Not sure what to do about the Chambers and Lee.

5/5. This is an amazing book and I'm still reeling from it, a week later. How do I describe this book? An ambassador is sent to the Teixcalaanli Empire, which is in a lot of ways Space Byzantium. (Arkady Martine is, I guess, the pen name of a historian, and you can tell because it's dense and detailed and complete in a way that many books aren't.) With poetry! And the poetry is political! And the book wants to talk about empire, and belonging, and identity, and culture, and civilization, and colonization, and being seduced by empire, and what does friendship even mean in those contexts. I MEAN. It's like Martine reached into my brain and was like "okay, shall I write you a book that caters to all of your interests?" YES PLEASE. SPACE BYZANTIUM. WITH POETRY. I MEAN. (Sadly, all the poetry in the book is in English translation from Teixcalaanli; there is of course a missing wealth of structure and textual complexity that we would understand if only we understood Teixcalaanli... um... which... did I mention this book is really interested in examining the seduction of empire? The Empire is pretty awful, but even so I was seduced pretty early on, okay.)

(There is a spot where a poet recites a poem, and then the protagonist and her attache spend three pages dissecting its political meaning. I was so delighted. If this makes you want to read it, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. If not, then... maybe not?)

And you know how in Dune everyone's saying stuff and there's double meanings underneath? And several different plots going on at the same time? Yeah. This book too. (No sandworms, though.) I LOVE THIS. All the people in this book have their own agenda, which means there are multiple layers of plots, most of which get resolved brilliantly by the end (but not all; there's one seriously unresolved big hook for a sequel to come, and I can't wait to see what happens). Only it's much more readable and immersive than Dune.

And it's got lovely characters! There's a lot of competence porn in this, let me just say, which is my jam also. But also all the characters are interesting -- mostly trying to do the best they can, sometimes ruthless, often making difficult choices that may or may not align with what the reader might think of as ethical, or moral, or nice. It hits just the right spot for me in between Goblin Emperor and The Monster Baru Cormorant -- enough plotting and double-crossing that it didn't get too cloying, but not so much that it was hit-you-over-the-head depressing.

I've already mentioned the worldbuilding -- the world is very different! Mahit, the main character, is from a different culture/environment than the Empire, and both cultures are very interesting both in relation to each other and in contrast, and in the sorts of reactions Mahit has. The interesting thing is, it's different enough that I would recommend reading this book in large chunks rather than the way I read books, which is often in short spurts of several pages at a time (before I have to go deal with some usually-child-created crisis), and I was noticing that it would always take me about a page or so to re-immerse myself in the universe of the book, and before that happened it would code as much more alien to me!

And romance/sex is not something that gets a lot of screen time in this book (this is a huge plus for me, lol), but of the sexual/romantic relationships in this book, there is one M/F, one M/M (both very much background, same M character), and one F/F (UST, which gets the most screen time).

It's well written. One thing that I've been annoyed about recently, doing my Hugo reading (probably I will rant about this sooner rather than later), is the eat-your-vegetables and/or wish-fulfillment approach to SF/F, where a Problem of Contemporary Society is handled in an SF/F book or story by one of the characters Pointing Out, Pointedly, the problem in the story and then the problem being fixed, all in a sort of "Look how terrible the people who Have This Problem are!" sort of way. This book manages to examine fairly profound problems of colonization and empire in an organic way that arises out of the story, without falling into those kinds of traps, and observes that you can be a fundamentally decent person and still... have This Problem, because you've never thought about it any other way.

Oh! And there's a subplot (extremely minor, but still) that has to do with machine learning / AI and actually treats it in a more-or-less intelligent way, which is something I don't see very often :D

It's also well paced and structured, and does that SF thing where it teaches you about the world until there's this climax that utterly depends on you understanding a very different culture/society/way of looking at things and because it has taught it to you patiently over the course of the book.

( Spoilers! Book-destroying spoilers and also you won't understand them without reading the book. )

This book also was reminiscent for me of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, in that the main character has another character that's supposed to be inside her head, and Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, in the sort of dense nature of the worldbuilding. But I liked Empire much much more than either of those (neither of which I actually finished). I will say that I suspect Ann Leckie's Ancillary books are probably more groundbreaking and juggle more balls in the air at the same time? I'm not sure, though, because this book just hit all the things I want and love so precisely, more so than the Ancillary books, that I can't really be impartial about it, and I love it to little bits and pieces.

My biggest problem -- and it wasn't really a problem, just an observation -- is that Martine uses a lot of italics, to the point where I was channeling Mr. Carpenter from the Emily books: "Beware -- of -- italics!"

But really I don't have a lot coherent to say about this (hence all these short bursts of enthusiasm) except if you happen to share tropes with me YOU WILL PROBABLY LOVE THIS BOOK.