Radiant Star
Radiant Star is a sideshow in the Imperial Radch series. The city Ooioiaa is buried under the ice of a rogue planet wandering through interstellar space. Ooioiaa’s main export is religious experiences. The city is the home of the Temporal Location of the many sects of the Radiant Star, who welcome pilgrims and bestow oracular visions. It was occupied by the Radch thirty years ago, and the colonial administration is slowly absorbing the local power structure and beliefs when everything is interrupted by the immense polycrisis of the Radch Civil War documented in the main series.
Shipping stops, orders from above stop coming through, and Ooioiaa is very much on its own. Meanwhile, the head of the powerful and wealthy Serque Removal corporation, which holds a monopoly on carving out new subterranean spaces and dumping the waste rock on the icy surface, decides that he’d like to crown his life by becoming one of the saints of the Radiant Star, a process which involves fasting, drugs, and finally dying and preserving his body within the Temporal Location.
A bunch of overlapping schemes come through. Various sects and Radch authorities see this last saint as a way to secure their political interests. The two Serque heirs, a favored grandchild and disfavored child, duel over control of the company. And the city is on the brink of starvation, as an alien parasite wipes out the meager food supply.
The POV skips around, from various powerful leaders to servants and scholars and middle-class consorts jumped above their station, occasionally directly addressing the reader. Leckie keeps her impeccable sense of names (if only I could remember them) and pronouns. But the plot sort of lurches from scene to scene, without any central narrative or theme. Everything is resolved by events in the main series without these characters doing much.
The best part was when the narrator directly addressed the reader along the lines of “I know water purification systems are boring, but this matters.” like Les Miserables delving into the Paris sewers.