Quiet conflict

I've been re-reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire this week, and it's got me thinking about the nature of quiet conflict in stories.

This book perfectly embodies that idea.  It's the story of an ambassador sent to the heart of a vast empire.  The first thing she discovers when she arrives is that her pedecessor was murdred.  So the story is part murder mystery, part a novel of political intrigue.

On the face of it, you might expect a lot of fast-paced action.  But you'd be wrong.  This book is a  masterclass in how to write quiet conflict.  A lot of that conflict is internal.  The new ambassador is an outsider, and she feels very alone. She often has to fight the urge to share information in order to make friends.  Her desire to discover what happened her to her predecessor is also partly driven by internal conflict.  She suspects he was involved in encouraging sedition among the empire's subjects, and his actions may have put her in danger.

There is external conflict in the novel - a bombing, demonstrations in the streets, and threats of violence, but they're not the primary drivers of the story.  The political system, and the ambassador negotiating her way through it, is.

I was pleased to see this book doing so well, as it echoe the sort of quiet conflict I've got in the novel I'm currently working on.  There, the big threat of being wiped out by alien tech is always in the background, but the quest to find the clues which will allow that tech to be destroyed is low-key.  Deliberately so, as my protagonist needs to avoid alerting the antagonist to the locations of those clues.

In my book too there are attacks, on people and on ships.   There are kidnappings, demonstrations, and the occasional riot.  But they are in the background most of the time, things which add tension and urgency to the main quest.

I am a great fan of quiet conflict, the slow building-up of information that, more often than not, reveals that things are not how we thought they were.  It is my hope that, after this pandemic, publishing will be more open to stories of quiet conflict, and that I'll get more interest in my novels as a result.