A Memory Called Empire
Ratings418
Average rating4.2
DNF 194
The only good thing I can say about this book is the cover is gorgeous.
This book is slower paced than The Talisman by Stephen King and I loatheeee that book. Absolutely nothing happened after almost 200 pages. Nothing about the politics or culture was very interesting either. Idk how the rating is above 4 stars when most of the people I follow gave it 1-3 stars. I've noticed that I'm not a fan of most Hugo award winning books so I might just stay away from those from now on.
Read this at your own risk
DNF - PG 25
Why?
I'll be honest with you, when I have a knee-jerk reaction to a book, it has to be pretty much perfect to keep me around after that. This book isn't perfect, and it would have only been well served to get rid of that needlessly complicatedly written ‘prelude' (which is actually a prologue, but we have to sound cooler than that) and the needless, overly complicated and irrelevant excerpts at the beginning of each chapter.
(The needless, overly complicated and irrelevant excerpt that starts off chapter two (then a second excerpt follows, as important as the first one is):
urgently direct your attention / novelty and importance characterize what comes next / IMMEDIATELY on Channel Eight!
Tonight, Seven Chysoprase and Four Sycamore bring you a report from Odile-1 in the Odile System, where Twenty-sixth Legion under sub-yaotlek Three Sumac are preparing to break orbit now that the insurrection in Odile-1's capital city has been quelled - in a moment we will have Four Sycamore, on site in the capital's central square, with an interview with the newly reinstated planetary governor Nine Shuttle - trade through the Odile Gate is expected to return to normal levels within the next two weeks...
- Channel Eight nightly newscast, as broadcast on the City's internal cloud hook network, 245th day, 3rd year in the 11th indiction of the Emperor of all Teixcalaan Six Direction)
Now, I didn't actually make it to chapter two, because I've had enough of the world that the author has created. My kind of sci-fi does not include statements like :[...]'“radiant blaze” was the epithet for the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare in The Expansion History as Attributed to Pseudo-Thirteen River[...]. (Unless your name is Ninefox Gambit and even then, people at least had people names, not numbers and ‘plants, tools or inanimate objects'. Ninefox Gambit was an uphill slog for me the first time I tried to read it, and I only persevered because 1) it actually moves from the start and 2) even early on, like from the first page, I was at the least interested in the characters. Flipping through this book, I discovered that the most interesting thing in it - the imago memory thing - is very underutilized.)
Also, reading some of the one star reviews indicates that my opinion of the world-building will not improve.
It doesn't matter how clever a hook, or how wonderfully-developed a world or universe is, if the author starts streaming a vulgarity (you know the one) as a “normal” conversational outlet, especially from the protagonist, I'm done. This book is no exception, and a great disappointment as it had a lot going for it....until.
This is a fine debut book. Although I love the genre I am not very well read so the only other author I feel has the same approach would be Iain M Banks or Le Guin - with greater care to highlight the framework than drive the plot forward with action. I will look forward to the next one.
Very positively surprised by this book. I wouldn't call this a hard sci-fi story but more a mystery sci-fi book. It has a really good story, great character arcs and a very interesting universe where this whole thing plays in. And to top this off, the whole book ends with a nice closing, so there is no forced need to read the next book.
Highly recommended
A remote mining station that sits in an asteroid belt sends Mahit, a new ambassador, to the seat of the empire. On arrival she finds that her predecessor is dead, but nobody will tell her the manner of his death. The emperor is old and there is a growing political instability as senior politicians maneuver themselves into positions of power.
Mahit is anything but compliant and as she moves between levels of power in the capital she has two dominating thoughts. First, her predecessor was more than he seemed. And second, the people who targeted him are also after her. If only she could figure out why.
Mahit's home station is virtually invisible to the empire and similarly, Mahit is invisible to most of the people of the capital. As she finds herself becoming friends with two locals, so the mining station rises in significance to the story. The author has cleverly blended Mahit's visibility in the capital with the steady reveal that the mining station held something valuable. And it was that certain valuable thing that put Mahit at the centre of the action.
Arkady Martine has given us a masterful work of political intrigue. She has served up a world of power and suspicion, of privilege and discrimination, of subtle language and, I kid you not, poetry.
There are a few things that took me some time to get used to. First is the names of members of the empire. They are all formed from a number and a noun. For instance, Six Direction, Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea. I found this convention very distracting. Second thing is the Aztec influenced spelling. It's the Teixcalaanli Empire, and there are many instances of similarly Aztec sounding words, cuecuelehui, ahachotiya, ezuazuacat. They were not a problem in themselves but my 'English only' brain would stumble on them. The quality of the story was worth laying aside these distractions and letting Martine's writing beguile me.
This was a surprise favourite for me... mostly because if this book wasn't shoved into my hands I never would've picked it up. When I finally decided to crack it open, I was rewarded with elegant and immersive prose that drew me into a vividly realized universe filled with memorable characters and relevant thought-provoking themes. E.g. The idea of imperialism that's conquering through a culture that's so persuasive that you'll trade your own away to be a part of it... the pull, and guilt, and lie of assimilation. Despite the weighty subject matter, it's a also a pretty thrilling page turner with stakes that start relatively small and work their way up to the fate of humanity. There's a bit of romance here as well, but despite loving both characters involved it felt a little tacked on. Maybe I was just missing the signs? Don't let that stop you from picking this up though!
4.5 Stars!
This is another one of those ‘scifi in name only books'. 95% of the story could have taken place anywhere but since it's a talky book and I like talky books I continued on. Now, with talky books, you need intelligent characters having intelligent dialogue so that when you read a conversation you get goosebumps. Did the author manage to do that here? no, not by a long shot. The Author tries to put layer upon layer of subtext, double and triple meaning in every little gesture in every dialogue that ultimately everything turns out to be almost meaningless. Luckily she recognised this and had the MC's sidekick or the MC's inner monologue explain the actual meaning of every line, making it unnecessarily long and pointless.
This book is a masterclass in ignoring ‘show, don't tell'. We get told about aliens, yet never meet any. We get told about spaceships, yet never see any, we get told about jump gates, yet never use any let alone learn how they work, probably magic, I don't know. There is very little ‘sci' here.
80% of the book is buildup to the last 20% which are somewhat promising for the second book. But having a whole book as setup for a second book, which other authors put on the blurb, is a bit much, for my taste.
All in all it kinda feels like a more highbrow, less interesting, less fun version of ‘The Collapsing Empire' by Scalzi with all the scifi elements taken out.
giving this five stars because it is very much a title i would acquire for my otherwise very minimal hard copy collection, i'm excited to bundle up and walk to my little village library and read its sequel, and because i didn't think i would like a space politics book if it weren't for the personalities and sass in a second language. makes me want to rewatch the expanse (which i watched all of) and altered carbon (which i watched most of one season of). and also, the buffy episode with willow and tara's first onscreen kiss, because there is very much a sort of “mad reaching-out for comfort” (440), tender desperation throughout the book that i quite enjoyed.
I never thought I'd enjoy a book full of politics, but here I am! A Memory Called Empire would've been a five star read if there had been more about the characters, as the book is now I feel like I didn't really get to know them, and the things happening to them didn't touch me much because of it.
I found myself fascinated with the culture and history of Teixcalaan and enjoyed getting to know some it's depths with Mahit.
I really enjoyed this. The setting Martine creates is fascinating, playful and strange, and the booksmart but beleaguered Mahit is a great main character through which to explore its intricacies. I loved the concept of passing memories down from person to person via an implant, and it's a rich vein for intrigue and skulduggery here.
It took me a while to acquire a taste for the writing, which still niggled frequently; Martine is an eloquent writer who undermines her own prose with fuckloads of italics. Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it, until you just want to shake the author by the shoulders and shout, “Your writing's good! You don't need these!”
The pacing is languid in places, but the book builds up to a third act that impressed me. I wasn't always sure if it would, but it left me really looking forward to reading the next one.
I really enjoyed this! It has the Standard Science Fiction thing of really weird character names, but I got over that fast. The world is interesting, the systems are interesting, and the characters are compelling. I enjoyed the writing overall, minus a few instances of dialogue that I felt didn't work (mostly between Mahit and her predecessor).
I really didn't enjoy this, however, the last third of the book did get a lot lot lot better, and by the end I thought it wrapped up nicely
I went in expecting some epic sci-fi to the tune of Dune, but I was pleasantly surprised that this book was probably one of the more digestible epic sci-fis I've read. It doesn't mean that it's simple though. This book is incredibly replete with things to think about, it's just conveyed in a fairly legible manner. Martine almost hand-holds us the readers into this amazing world that she's created, but shows us with every sentence some sharp observation to think about in relation to colonialism and cultural imperialism. Definitely going to continue on to the sequel (upset that this is not a longer series!)
Think Star Wars TV series Andor's subplot with Mon Mothma for linguistics nerds, but with more queer yearning.
I think this was my third attempt at this book and it still took me more than 3 months to finish it. I can appreciate what the author was doing, hence the third try at it, but it just didn't click with me. I felt like the plot was meandering a lot and the characters didn't stand that well on their own to be enough to carry the story for me.
I would still recommend it to people that enjoy reading high-concept and theme-oriented stories. I just wish it worked for me.
This is an absolutely fascinating book. There were times it was a bit dense or too poetic for me because I can't always read between lines, but honestly that's such a personal problem and not one with the book. I'm so glad I read it.
Will I read the next? Ehhhh I don't know. I think it would also be amazing, but at times difficult for me to get through. Not all reading should be easy though, so... we will see.
A Memory Called Empire sets up an amazing world centered around a complex imperial empire and it plays with some great sci-fi and philosophical concepts as well. It's a political thriller with a sci-fi backdrop and some things to say about imperialism. All good stuff!
There's a good chance there are a lot of people out there that will fall in love with this book. I'm not one of them.
I liked it, and I see that it has done what it set out to do very well, but I felt like I was pushing through the book rather than being pulled along by the story.
This might be a case of me being burnt out on space imperialism (I finished Ancillary Sword not long ago too) but I just don't have any motivation to pick up the second book in the series.
3.5/5 for me, but I totally understand the 5/5 reviews. It's an objectively great book, but not for me.
