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The premise of this book is great: the young new ambassador to an aggressive space empire must try to protect her far weaker culture from colonization while also investigating the mysterious death of her predecessor. Her partner in both endeavors is an out-of-date copy of that predecessor’s mind that is installed in her head.

Neat! A space opera that revolves around diplomacy rather than combat and shows a colonial perspective while also using the contrast of cultures to pose some interesting ideas about identity and community.

Unfortunately the book doesn’t play out this premise very far. The young ambassador Mahit Dzmare, though supposedly tested for aptitude and trained for diplomacy, acts naive and clueless. She spends most of her time as a pawn of various imperial factions, and not even a very valuable one.

She is constantly torn between her loyalty to her home and her infatuation with imperial culture, but that culture is just not very appealing. It is cleverly coded as Space Aztec (rather than the more hackneyed Space Roman or Space Briton), and their society revolves around simulated blood sacrifice and poetry.

I just didn’t feel the seduction of all that poetry, and I ended up skimming the long passages where Dzmare laments her inability to compose like a native. There isn’t much description of Dzmare’s native culture though, so perhaps the implication is that she’s from an even duller place.

Still, the book has some strong characterization and enough interesting ideas to see me through to the end. It’s refreshing to read this kind of space opera that innovates in so many ways, even when not all of them end up paying off.

Every word in this book seems to be chosen just perfectly. The writing is simple yet evocative and the characters are unforgettable, especially the leads Gus and Call, aging ex-Texas Rangers who engage in a slightly Quixotic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to semi-mythical Montana.

But the tone not so consistent. A chapter of McMurtry’s irascible cowpokes exchanging wit will be followed by brutal sexual assault, then a passage of high adventure will lead to a shocking description of violence reminiscent of Blood Meridian (or perhaps Bone Tomahawk).

And while the cowpokes of the story are shown with depth and humor, nobody else is. In particular the Indians are either remorseless superhuman savages or pathetic criminals waiting around to be slaughtered.

And slaughtered they are. It’s hard to square the wry iconoclasts that Gus and Call start as with the Terminator-like killing machines they become when they interact with Indians. They also beat people severely for minor insults and hang whoever they feel deserves it according to their own unwritten moral code.

The ultraviolence stands out even more because the rest of the adventure is so captivating. McMurtry transported me to the semi-fantastic time of the frontier, when brave men (or Terminators) carved a path in front of advancing Western society.

He’s clearly fictionalizing the period in the same way that American writers have since the period itself, but I can’t deny that the mythic grandeur of the style really grabs me and McMurtry’s writing is wonderful. I just wish that he had acknowledged that maybe a world where strong men with guns decide what’s right or wrong and who lives or dies might not be so great an ideal.