Reading Update: Exhalation, The Tea Master And The Detective, Seizing Power, Nona The Ninth

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Collection of short stories. Before this the only thing I’d read of Ted Chiang’s was Story Of Your Life, which was a fun concept but didn’t move me much. That throughline pretty much held up here - for all of these stories I enjoyed their thorough exploration of a concept, with the emotional underpinnings only landing for me about half the time. (Which is a higher than usual hit rate for me reading a short story collection IIRC). Am again reminded I should read more sci-fi short stories.

Notes on my favorites below.

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The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

Via a rec from shadaras, a (very!) loose Sherlock Holmes adaptation where Watson is a sentient spaceship still recuperating from a terrible injury and Sherlock is a scholar-detective, set in a Vietnamese-inspired galactic empire. Their names are The Shadow’s Child and Long Chau respectively.

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Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic Of Military Coups - Naunihal Singh

Non-fiction book about, surprise surprise, military coups. Essentially argues two main points (1) the most important dynamics in military coups are intra-military ones, as opposed to anything to do with civil society or the government (2) military coups are best modeled as coordination games, not battles or elections - coups don’t succeed due to superior military force on the challengers side or popular dissent among the ranks, but due to enough people in the military thinking that a coup is going to succeed.

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Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Shout-out to library holds coming through. Brief thoughts under the cut.

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