★★★★☆ A Fire Born of Exile, by Aliette de Bodard
When a plan utterly fails to come together
A Fire Born of Exile
Aliette de Bodard
When a plan utterly fails to come together
Like most of Aliette de Bodard's Xuya novels, A Fire Born of Exile has more moving parts than a jet engine. In fact, by the time I reached the end of chapter 3, I asked myself, "Am I ever going to manage to remember who all these people are?" So, I'm going to help you out with a brief and very incomplete list of Dramatis Personae:
Prefect Đức: the civil administrator of the Scattered Pearls Belt.
General Tuyết: the military administrator of the Belt
Minh: Prefect Đức's dauighter
Quỳnh: a visiting scholar seeking to influence Đức
Hoà: a technologist hired to fix Flowers at the Gates
Mindships:
Flowers at the Gates: Đức’s own aunt, nominal head of Đức’s lineage but badly damaged
Heart’s Sorrow: Tuyết's son and Minh's best friend
Guts of Sea: Quỳnh's collaborator and friend
In fact, chapter 3 was pretty much the peak of character disorientation -- from that point on they mostly fell into place. The Belt is under military administration because fifteen years ago there was a rebellion against the empire (of which the Belt is a province) called "The Serpent Rebellion". It was brutally put down by Đức and Tuyết, who have held onto military administration and power ever since. Quỳnh has her own history with the Serpent Rebellion and with Đức and Tuyết. She has come to the Belt with an elaborate plan.
This whole novel reminded me, oddly, of a scene in Despicable Me 4. Stay with me, here! This scene is a heist -- Gru tries to steal a Honey Badger from his old school (don't ask). You know what heist movies are like. There's always an absurdly elaborate plot with a million moving pieces, all of which have to come together for the heist to work. That is not what happens. Everything goes off the rails from minute 1. And it's a gas.
Quỳnh's revenge plan is like that. Things go badly wrong. Other things go unexpectedly right.
The consequences, of course, are more serious than in Despicable Me 4. This is a story of revenge and love. But I love the trick of exploding a bomb under the plot, collecting the falling debris in a big bag, and shaking it to see what comes out.