Surit, not for the first time, felt a deep unease about the observational skills of his senior officers. A lit fuse didn’t stop being a lit fuse just because it had decided to burn politely. [loc. 1796]
Tennal has taken great pains to escape his aunt, a powerful legislator, and to escape the noise of other people's (and his own) surface thoughts: as a reader, his mind is 'a little too open to the universe'. He spends his time flitting from dive bar to socialite party, hiring his mind-reading skills to criminals and traitors -- until, calling his little sister to congratulate her on her forthcoming entry to legal academy, he accidentally re-enables the locator function on his wristband. In short order, Tennal is scooped up and delivered to his aunt. She informs him that he's being conscripted into the Orshan military, and furthermore will be synced with an architect (a mind-writer) who will control him. Tennal used to let people write him for fun, and to get away from his own thoughts, but he is terrified by the thought of being forced into a sync. He spends his first weeks on a military spaceship being as awkward as he can, claiming civilian status until his architect arrives, and disrupting every possible interaction.
Then he meets Lieutenant Surit Yeni, the architect his aunt has lined up to sync with Tennal. Surit, the son of an infamous traitor, is much more powerful than he's let the miltary know -- but he is also honorable and compassionate, and unwilling to follow an order which he believes to be illegal. The two fake their sync and work together, in splendid synergy, to attempt to discover why Surit was chosen for Tennal, why the alien remnants (used to create the first readers and architects, a couple of decades ago, against the express wishes of the Resolution) are being hoarded, and what the ongoing war is actually about.
I enjoyed Maxwell's first novel, Winter's Orbit, but reading Ocean's Echo immediately after that really made me appreciate the growth of the author's craft. Perhaps it's simply that Ocean's Echo is less romance-in-SF-setting than SF-with-romance: the world-building, the non-romance plot and the characters' distinct plot arcs (Tennal's difficult family relationships, Surit's understanding of his mother's treason) are given more foreground than the growing attraction between the two men. Which is not to say that the romance is at all lacking ... 'Surit worked in a universe of fixed possibilities. Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well. '
As in Winter's Orbit, the secondary characters -- especially the other members of Surit's unit -- are complex and have agency: the friction between Tennal and Istara, who teaches him piloting, is delicious. Though this is set in a different corner of the galaxy, the cultural milieu (no prejudice based on gender, skin colour or sexual preference) is the same, though Orshan has a more military ambience. There's plenty of humour and snark, but there are also weighty underlying themes: duty and conscience, honour and pragmatism, sacrifice and redemption. I loved it.
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