“So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,” said Three Seagrass. “Who we model ourselves on, which epic, which poem. Neurological enhancements are cheating.”
On some level space operas resemble one another: a galaxy-spanning empire, an exterior threat, an internal revolution, palace intrigue. A Memory Called Empire checks each box.
The sudden, unexplained death of Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn has created a crisis for Lsel Station, a small satellite of the massive Teixcalaanli Empire. For twenty years, Yskandr used his influence at the court to stave off annexation, and factions at court may see this death as an opportunity for expansion. In a desperate bid to retain independence, the Stationer Council has dispatched a new ambassador, Mahit Dzmare, to court armed only with years of training and an out of date imago of her predecessor—a piece of technology that gives her access to his experience and memories.
The out of date imago might be enough, but for its sabotage that causes the connection to her predecessor to burn out at the first moment of extreme emotion. Thus, Mahit is left to navigate the potential fatal rapids of Teixcalaanli using only her training, her wits, and her instincts as to whom among Teixcalaanli functionaries she can trust, all while trying to learn who killed Yskandr and redirect the military ambitions of an empire.
What Mahit finds is that a brewing civil war at court is the greatest threat to the independence of Lsel Station. The reigning emperor, Six Direction, is nearing the end of his life and scavengers are beginning to gather. Six Direction does have a young ninety-percent clone of himself, Eight Antidote, who he is grooming to succeed him (perhaps with a technological boost) alongside two co-regents Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop. But this likely outcome has not stopped other members of the ezuazuacatlim, the emperor’s closest confidants, from intervening. As far as Mahit can tell, any of these people might decide it expedient to simply kill her — one, Nineteen Adze, she is pretty sure, has both saved her life, tried to have her killed, and held her in a gilded prison. To make matters worse, one of the empire’s most prominent generals, One Lightning, seems posed to stage a coup.
Against these forces Mahit trusts two functionaries: Three Seagrass, who is appointed as her liaison, and a friend of Three Seagrass’, Twelve Azalea. Every advantage Mahit hopes to rely on turns into a double edged sword. That is, except for a crucial piece of information about an unknown alien civilization hovering just outside explored space that could prove the difference not only for the survival of Lsel Station but also for the stability of the entire Teixcalaanli Empire, if only she can figure out who to tell.
I liked A Memory Called Empire quite a lot. Arkady Martine’s academic and civil-servant background were readily apparent, but this didn’t bother me as much as some reviewers whose opinions I respect and the setting of “space” offset a lot of my issues with R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War. Where I found the plot of A Memory Called Empire to be somewhat cookie-cutter space-opera, I thought she did a wonderful job building the setting, both with a planet-city run by an AI and in building out the galactic empire and its satellites. The Teixcalaanli empire is, functionally, a cross-section of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire (her specialty), and the Aztec Empire, all of which were surrounded by small satellite states that were perennially at risk of annexation. Establishing the naming conventions of Lsel closer to those an American audience are familiar with did that much more to allow Mahit to be a reader surrogate lost in the machinations and poetry (literally) of the Teixcalaanli court. I likewise didn’t buy the critique that we are meant to care about the stakes of the Teixcalaanli succession; we’re meant to care about Mahit surviving the crisis however it resolves.
However, what I appreciated most about A Memory Called Empire was one of those words in the title: memory. The imago machines, technology that allowed the wisdom and experience of generations to literally pass down through the generations was a clever wrinkle to the genre that had multiple different iterations throughout the novel. It is introduced to us as a potential crutch at the outset, something that will give Mahit a fighting chance at court, but when hers goes out early on in the story it becomes something else — something she is desperately trying to recover but also something that is sought by others with an almost McGuffin-level of devotion, and an object of debate between Mahit and Three Seagrass. For Mahit, this is the best way to preserve knowledge among a small community, while Three Seagrass sees it as a way of short-circuiting the allusive poetic culture of Teixcalaanli because it allows for replication rather than remembrance.
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I have been meaning to write this post for some time now, so it is pretty far out of order relative to what I’ve been reading recently. Since my last books post I have finished both Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, a gripping memoir about looking for his family members killed in the Holocaust, and Ben Cohen’s The Hot Hand, a journalistic look at the science of streaks that had some interesting stories, but that I found frustrating overall.
Noodlings 