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

This was an ARC from NetGalley. 

This was a thrilling end to the story of Tina, Rachael, Eliza and their friends.

As with the other books in this trilogy, a major focus was on these characters working through their doubts, grief and trauma with the help of their friends. 

One theme very much came to the forefront in this book: how to deal with having killed someone, even in self defence. I remember reading a review of the first book in the trilogy that mentioned this, which pointed out how rare it is that fiction deals realistically with the trauma of having killed someone. In Promises Stronger Than Darkness, this is not only a theme, but an active topic of discussion among the characters. At one point, one of the characters says, “It’s difficult to grieve when a friend dies. But it’s even harder to grieve for an enemy you killed. We don’t even like to think of it as grief, because that implies you wish they hadn’t died. Still, if you must take a life, then it’s best to make space to hold a funeral, even if it’s only in your own imagination.”

This is not just an action-packed book, but a thoughtful and humane (is there a better word fir this when there are multiple alien species involved?) meditation on how to make the world (the galaxy? the universe?) a more inclusive and better place.  And how to retain your humanity when fighting against those who would destroy people unlike them without a second thought.