Promises Stronger Than Darkness

This is the final book in Charlie Jane Anders' Unstoppable trilogy. There's heists, swamp planets, space battles, trauma, processing, and so many feelings. It's got a satisfying payoff, expected-but-still-awful escalated stakes from previous books, and a lot of character growth packed into an action-filled book. I have read a bunch of her previous novels and I think these are my favorite.

To get back at what I mentioned earlier about violence, I think this book ends up with a more nuanced view than I was expecting. (Also, a surprising [quantity, not existence given the subject matter] of trauma for a YA book). This book says "It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re hurting people for the ‘greater good’—and that can mean anything you want it to mean" and also says "Killing is the clumsiest, cruelest solution to any problem". There's definitely trolley problems and Stanislav Petrov-esque issues that the characters have to face. If I had to sum it up, I think this series is trying to say that often there are (usually, but not always) other options that are effective if you're willing to be creative, and that violence is often a lazy option (that will cost others but also you).

One other interesting side set of ideas this book gets into a bunch is how the universal translator gets in the way (and makes incorrect assumptions) as much as it helps. I was wondering when this series would get to it, because the first book dropped some hints that not everything was quite right but also because I had previously read Charlie Jane Ander's blog post about universal translators. It's certainly still a magical device in this universe, conveniently and telepathically(?) detecting which pronouns you want other people to use. However, it's still a question of "who has made this device (and who have they considered when making it)" as well as how do you even translate things properly between species who have very different ways of looking at the world (as if this already isn't an impossible problem between two existing human languages)? It's certainly something I think about a lot in an age of seeing many people's writing mediated through lossy google translate.

Finally some random smaller bits that I enjoyed a lot that I just want to mention: * enemy spaceship named Friendly Advice * polyam jealousy somehow at the root of evil both great and small * friendships as important as relationships, explicitly several times both told and shown * everybody literally holds hands during the final confrontation