Machine, by Elizabeth Bear

Well...I liked Machine, better than I liked Ancestral Night.  I'm still not really enthused, even though I basically enjoyed it and was engaged in the plot.  The story is not simple, nor is the resolution.  But I agree with other reviewers that both Haimey (from Ancestral Night) and Jens spend a lot of time introspecting in our general direction, meaning that they infodump big time. 

They are also very similar in their basic belief in the Synarche.  It comes off as an inhumanly prosocial galactic empire, until it doesn't.  The plot situations are slightly different, but both characters react to their situations as though they were representatives of what the Synarche is about on an individual level, instead of real people.  I am reminding myself that Haimey was in many ways not a real person.  Jens seems to be, though we learn less about her background.

The novel stands alone, and you really wouldn't need to read one or the other first.  That is kind of what drives me nuts about this one, because Ancestral Night leaves a very large plot element out there for later development.  <spoiler>Singer, the shipmind from Ancestral Night, is a peripheral character in Machine so we know it takes place later.  I was really hoping this book would take the idea of the pattern written into the universe that only Haimey can see a bit further.  There's a very mild echo of it in the poetry written into the archaic humans of Big Rock Candy Mountain's DNA, but that particular reveal ends up getting dropped entirely</spoiler>  So this book, in my view, *should* have been a straight sequel but it wasn't.  

I liked Helen Alloy as a side character, and the way the action unfurled kept me reading.  But both of these books just leave me thinking they could have been better.  Darn.

My Goodreads Review

The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi

The metaphor for the Interdependency is the Trade Winds. In the age of sail-driven cross-ocean trading (15th-19th centuries) ships would ride the southern Trade Winds to the Atlantic coast, and the northern Trade Winds back to Europe. So let's imagine interstellar Trade Winds that allow relatively easy contact between far-flung parts of an empire, and that the parts become specialized enough that life isn't possible without these trade winds. What would happen if climate change stopped them? That's the basic driver of the series. I kind of missed that in the first book, but the second book with all its exposition makes it more clear. Mind, Scalzi never *says* directly that that's what is going on, but it is.

So the plot has basically written itself, from the title of the first book. A collapsing empire, but instead of the Holy Roman or Ottoman empire it's a space empire. Honestly there are so many of these kinds of stories out there now, particularly among major award nominees, that I'm coming to pick the plot up pretty quickly. So I end up judging the book more by how interesting the characters are. We have a visionary (literally) leader, who doesn't really see herself that way, trying to act on behalf of a large and mostly functional empire, and all the other royalty is in complete denial and mostly out to screw the Emperox and each other.

The book rolls along nicely and there's plenty of humor so it's quite readable, but I can't say I engaged deeply with any of the characters. The Emperox Cardenia and her consort Mace Claremont are basically super nice people, out to help others. Their governing philosophy is expounded at some length throughout the book, which is pretty much straight Bentham utilitarian--the greatest good for the greatest number, in the most practical way possible. The Church of the Interdependency seems like worshipping Benthamite economics. Which would be a decent world--kind of like what's in John Rawls' Theory of Justice, with allowances for imperfect execution. Some think it's worthy on its own, but to me it's really a bridge to the next one, where I hope to engage a bit more.

My Goodreads Review