Carnival

Carnival is the Elizabeth Bear novel that takes the diplomatic-SF tradition (Cherryh, Le Guin, occasionally Banks) and runs it through her particular interest in the way bodies and politics get tangled. Vincent Katherinessen and Michelangelo Kusanagi-Jones are two gay diplomats from the patriarchal-Christian Old Earth Diaspora government, sent to Amazonia, a matriarchal society that broke away centuries earlier and has been ignoring Earth's requests for diplomatic contact.

What Bear does with this setup is significantly stranger than the politics-as-allegory model the form often produces. The two protagonists were lovers years before. The Amazonian government has reasons for receiving them. The local intelligent biology has its own interests. The ending genuinely surprised me.

The prose is dense and the politics are layered in ways that reward attention. Four stars. Recommended to readers who like their SF with serious political and erotic stakes.