fidzu : debian

Review: Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	May 2026
ISBN:	0-316-29068-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	359

Radiant Star is a science fiction novel set in the Imperial Radch universe without being a direct sequel to the other books in that universe. It will badly spoil the end of Ancillary Mercy, and I recommend reading that trilogy first, but it's independent of the other books in the same universe.

In the 3,008th year after the manifestation of the Radiant Star (the 1,024th since the founding of the Consorority itself), Zaved, a newly minted consoror, disappeared a mere two days after the ceremony that elevated her to womanhood. She left a note that read, Bored. Back whenever. This was not normal or even remotely acceptable behavior in a consoror, particularly one who held as much promise as Zaved had, but what could the consorors do?

Zaved, faced with the unpleasant prospect of running out of money during her galactic tour, plied a rich benefactor with tales of how talented, polite, and obedient the boys of the Consorority are. Her plan worked brilliantly. After funding further non-boring adventures, she arrived home in Ooioiaa with a chest full of money and a pregnancy. Great for Zaved and the Consorority; kind of a shame for her son Jonr, who is to be delivered to her benefactor after proper training. Oh well, telling Jonr about that is a problem for future Zaved.

After a strained childhood in which he convinces himself he is a misfit with few redeeming qualities, Jonr ends up in a suspension pod. Before shipping can be arranged, however, external events intervene, leaving Jonr sitting unnoticed in a warehouse.

The planet of Aaa is in a highly inconvenient location, drifting as it does through interstellar space unattached to any star. It would be as irrelevant and overlooked as any other random interstellar object except for two critical properties. The first is that Aaa and its sole city of Ooioiaa are sacred to a religion of obscure origin. Its primary population are members of a religious cult who believe the Radiant Star manifested in the Temporal Location on Ooioiaa and will eventually return to bring light to the galaxy. The second interesting property of Aaa is that it is drifting ever so slowly towards a strategic system of military importance.

The first property brings pilgrims and their accompanying bounty of money, food, and other resources necessary to dig a small city out of rock, make it habitable, and supplement the sparse and strange native edible life. The second property brings the Radchaai, who easily conquer the city of Ooioiaa and are now faced with the unpleasant task of running it.

Some decades after the Radchaai conquest, having never left Aaa, Jonr is woken up. He will not be sent off into the broader galaxy as a slave to pay off a vacation debt. Instead, he will be one of the many protagonists in this novel about the perils of living through supply chain disruptions on a planet full of status-obsessed religious fanatics who would drown in a rain shower.

The other books set in this universe make abundantly clear that the Radch is a voracious colonial power that enslaves native populations and enforces their own cultural preferences at the point of a gun. A reader familiar with this series is predisposed to take whatever side is not the Radch.

Radiant Star adds a complication, however. Charak Svo, the Radchaai governor, is impatient with native inhabitants and strongly dislikes their religion, but she is reasonably competent. The religious factions that ran Ooioiaa before the arrival of the Radchaai, on the other hand, are dogmatic authoritarians with the collective wisdom of a sack of turnips. Charak does not get everything right and is arguably responsible for at least one catastrophe. By the end of the book, though, I was firmly convinced that had the original religious government still been in charge, everyone would have died.

I found the structure of this book a little odd. The omniscient narrator tells the story in the form of a history. The target audience appears to be future inhabitants of Ooioiaa and adherents to the Radiant Star religion, and the narrator is often maddeningly uninterested in topics that a reader of the rest of the Imperial Radch books is intensely curious about. This same property carries through to the plot: I was interested in how all of the tensions in this obviously absurd society could be resolved or, preferably, overturned entirely. The narrator, on the other hand, is far more interested in Serque Tais's intent to become the last saint in the Temporal Location, and in the details of the subsequent political, economic, and religious fallout.

Leckie has written three novels set in the Imperial Radch after the original trilogy: Provenance, Translation State, and now Radiant Star. I am sure that I'm not the only person who wants a direct continuation of the original trilogy, but I'm drawing the conclusion that Leckie doesn't want to write that. Instead, she's writing around the edges of the subsequent events, in effect showing readers the shape of them and their broader implications without showing the details.

Now that I can see what she's doing, I kind of like it. Given what we now know from the books written around the edges, the ensuing events in the center of galactic politics are chaotic in a way that could easily devolve into tedious accounts of messy conflicts. Seeing the effects from afar lets the reader fill in some of the blanks and speculate, and it makes the moments where we get a concrete update (such as at the end of this book) all the more rewarding. I still find it odd, though, to read a book where the narrator's interests so sharply diverge from mine.

I wish I could say that Radiant Star sucked me in as the story developed, but it never did. Part of the problem is that I think this book is intended as a very dry farce, and farce often doesn't work with my reading style. I prefer to attach myself to a protagonist and hope they do competent things, and this book is full of characters who are being themselves far too aggressively and loudly to have time to be competent at anything. My favorite moments were therefore the small pockets of people with sense: The governor, Jonr, his charge, and the delightfully strange Justice of Albis. I enjoyed all of them, but I had trouble caring about the overall plot and kept putting this book down for days between chapters.

I think this is mostly personal taste, though. Like all of Leckie's novels since the original Imperial Radch trilogy, Radiant Star is competently executed and a little strange. When that strangeness aligns with your tastes, it's a great deal of fun and rather unlike other science fiction novels. In this case, it didn't quite work for me, but I suspect it will for others.

I still want another Leckie novel with a ship as a protagonist, though.

Content notes: Rather disturbing (although bloodless) religious practices, mass death.

Rating: 6 out of 10

26 Jul 2026 2:14am GMT

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language-and is widely used by (currently) 1293 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 47.8 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 710 times according to Google Scholar.

This versions updates to the 15.4.2 upstream Armadillo release made this week, as well as to included 15.4.1 version we released only to GitHub and r-universe so do not exceed the (roughly) monthly cadence. For this release, we had run the usual complete reverse-dependency check which came back spotless, and did CRAN so no email exchange needed despite nearly 1300 reverse dependencies. Automation can be helpful when used with a well-maintained software stack. The package has also already been updated for Debian, built for r2u, and will build shortly at CRAN for the different binary releases.

All changes since the last CRAN release follow.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.2-1 (2026-07-25)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.4.2 (Medium Roast Agave)

  • Fix speed regressions in diagvec() and diagmat()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 15.4.1-1 [github-only] (2026-07-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 15.4.1 (Medium Roast Agave)

  • Fix for rare infinite recursion bug in sparse version of diagmat()

  • More efficient checks for aliasing

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

25 Jul 2026 8:56pm GMT

So it will not play cyberpunk 2077, but if you prefer opensource drivers for your hardware, nouveau is certainly an option for some opensource gaming.

Using kernel 7.0 from debian backports, I could run opensource classics requiring 3D acceleration flawlessly with nouveau:

• Supertux (Debian package)
• SuperTux Kart (Debian package)
• LibreQuake (Flatpak with ironquake engine, Full HD and 60 fps)

I would like to highlight here how good is LibreQuake.
It is an horror cosmic 3D shooter, using the Quake engine, but with newly made game assets under the GPL, thus creating a 100% opensource Quake-based first person shooter. Although their documentation mentions it is a work in progress, as of 2026 I find it very much of a finished product.

Dismal shores, my preferred game level.

I missed Quake in the 90s, happy to discover such a classic today.

24 Jul 2026 3:31pm GMT