A Memory Called Empire

I really had a lovely time getting swept up in this book. It's certainly science fiction but reminded me of the high fantasy genre that has captured my heart for so long, in the political/court drama and intrigue. The central theme exploring Mahit's love and hate of the colonizing force of the Empire, and of course viewing the Empire from the perspective of the colonized, was a unique strength – rarely do we see empire structures in SFF treated as “imperial” in an explicitly critical way. (Like usually the king is evil or whatever but we don't get the same critique of the entire empire, the cultural assumption that the imperial model is fine.) This book drew me in similarly to Gideon the Ninth, where watching a big cast play metaphorical chess but in space and with sapphics hit many satisfying spots I didn't realize I wanted. I also thought it was really fun/interesting that the identity crisis in this book does not come from the literal brain-merge Mahit undergoes (or at least, not only from that; the imago is an accepted part of her heritage and if there are identity issues it's because of the malfunction) but from her wrestling with her position in the empire.

I enjoyed the writing, the world building (although honestly I was sometimes skimming over the detailed explanation of language, syllables, verse). I loved the characterization of cast members like Nineteen Adze and the emperor and even Yskandr, these enigmatic people with deep convictions all around Mahit who contrast her frequent internal dialogue. I enjoyed Mahit as a protagonist though agreeing that her personality and development were often obscured by stewing or plot events – enough of her came through to make me like her, root for her, want to know more about what she does next.

This was a fantastic foray into sci-fi that deals with political intrigue. The two cultures that we experience were different enough thst they truly did feel alien to each despite being human. I loom forward to the next book.

I think it's going to take me a bit to fully process this story. It's exactly what I wanted out of a political space drama. Everything feels like it's barely balanced on a tightrope.

I finished this a few days ago, and was going to give it a 4-star review, but how much I keep thinking about it and how many times I've recommended it tells me it's really 5 stars for me! This is...just an epic space opera! I think part of the reason it also resonated so much with me right now started with the dedication: “This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.” I've been reading/thinking a lot about modernity and its perils recently, and Martine has a lot to say about culture, how it defines us and others, self-perpetuates, but also self-destructs. There's just so much stuff here about selfhood as well - what is memory, what parts of it are shared and what cannot be, and what do our stories mean to us. I haven't ordered her second book yet, but certainly will.

There is a lot if inventiveness in the infrastructure of the story, that makes the read entertaining. In the end, though, there is also some tiredness and the usual empires and noble people doing political things. I think the world literature has enough space empires, so I'm not going to read the sequel.

5/10

i think the success of a political intrigue book hinges on the reader being able to figure out the overarching story and motives of the main players, and maybe it's just not my preferred genre but it felt like the information wasn't there. protagonist unlikable and not very bright. too many words in italics. no real depth of character although the world-building was somewhat interesting. wanted to be a Culture book but didn't really get there.

Audio read by: Amy Landon

I liked this well enough, but I will not continue the series.

Loved the story. Really enjoyed learning about the two cultures; though I wish we'd gotten more ... well, political scenes and less running around in danger. I enjoy witty repartee and seeing characters use their keen observational (and conversational) skills to get ahead of their enemies.

This book starts with a woman who has just become the ambassador for her station after the death of her predecessor. She has had the conscience of her predecessor implanted into her brain, but it is 15 years out of date. When she arrives on this planet, mostly unprepared, she is shocked at what she finds. The story follows her journey in uncovering the mystery of the death of her predecessor, as well as navigating this planets customs while it falls apart around her.

I went into this book knowing nothing about the plot. I was presently surprised. This book was incredibly fast paced. I could hardly keep up. My favorite parts were the interactions between Mahit and the 2 friends she made along the way. They were very fun and relatable. The biggest downfalls to me were how difficult I found following the politics to be, as well as how quickly the plot moved. Normally a fast paced plot is a good thing, but this book only spans like a week or so. I feel like Mahit is able to gain trust from so many people in such a short amount of time. People risk their professions and even their lives for a foreigner who they think is barbaric. It was hard to accept.

However, the plot is a intense and I didn't want to put it down. The characters were all unique and fun to read, while also being incredibly complex. The themes throughout of colonization and imperialism created a story that was frustrating and powerful, in a good way. I am excited for the next one. I'm interested to see where we go from here.

TW: blood, chronic illness, confinement, cursing, death, grief, gun violence, medical content, medical trauma, murder, panic attacks/disorders, police brutality, racism, suicide, violence, vomit, xenophobia

such intrigue many court drama w0w

I love a good sci-fi novel!! The main character Mahit becomes the new ambassador for her small mining station and gets to fulfill her childhood dream of visiting the Empire. Of course there's one small problem in that her predecessor died under mysterious circumstances and a bunch of politics ensue.

Even though the Empire is this overwhelming force that could at any time annex her home, I likex how it wasn't just Empire = bad and Mahit's station = good. Mahit grew up enjoying a lot of the empire's cultural exports e.g. poetry and gets to know some of its people as well through her work as an ambassador.

The other cool part about this book is the maintaining of heritage through copies of people's consciousnesss. Essentially you have a copy of the mind of your predecessor living in you, so that with each successive generation the knowledge can continue to grow and be passed down. I would love to see this concept explored more in future books.

My opinion is probably an unpopular one...this book was just fine. It's solid read that I enjoyed and I have no regrets picking it up, but I really did think based on the hype and you know, the Hugo, I was going to love this. It's mostly plot-driven (which didn't truly wow me by the end by-the-by), it's missing quite a bit of character depth IMO, it had some interesting dialogue (it's kind of one of the components that struck me the most) but again mostly just fine, the writing is fine, the deep themes I look for were there but I thought they were very surface level, the sci-fi elements were compelling at first but again, ended up being just fine...all that to say my socks are still on. It's a book that is clearly touching many people (I mean I'm seeing many reviews where folks think all the elements I think are weak are actually strong) so if it seems interesting definitely check it out. I'm going to read the sequel because what grabbed me the most plot-wise will continue on...well I hope at least.

I so wanted to like this, especially given the high praise it has received. Instead, reading this felt like work that I couldn't wait to end.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is an expertly crafted science fiction fantasy novel that incorporates real-world cultures into the intricate Aztec Empire influenced mythos. It is shining and immersive and should be read and read often.

“This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.”

Right from the first pages of the story, you know that you are reading something different, and doing a little research into author Arkady Martine I instantly knew why. Martine is by profession a historian and city planner. The city planning part thrilled me to no end as I was also a city planner once upon a time. She has many prestigious degrees, one of which is a Ph.D. in medieval Byzantine, global, and comparative history at Rutgers University. When you read this book, you will notice the excellent care and detailing that went into the language and worldbuilding of the Teixcalaani Empire with obvious influences from the pre-colonial/conquest Aztec Empire and influences from the Nahuatl languages. The Nahuatl language group is currently spoken by close to two million people in central Mexico and was spoken by the Aztecs.

“Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.”

Often you read science fiction and fantasy novels that are based on or influenced by a particular culture. They usually only “pay lip service” to that culture. Authors delve deep enough historically and sociologically to have a general understanding of that culture enough to be as respectful and authentic as they can in the depiction with varying degrees of success. I think that what is so exceptional about A Memory Called Empire, and why it won the Hugo award for best novel and a finalist for the Nebula for the same category is that instead of superficially glancing at the culture, it is intensely immersive. The worldbuilding in this story flows like rain flowing to the ocean. Every detail was imagined, and it coalesced into a much greater picture of the history, city planning, and generally the Teixcalaani. There were no moments in which the detailing was off that it threw me out of the story.

“A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness”

The story follows the protagonist Mahit Dzmare. She arrives as an ambassador to the imperial city of Teixclaan as a representative of the space station Lsel. She is to advocate on behalf of her fiercely independent homeland of Lsel Station and investigate the previous ambassador's death. The Teixcalaani is a glorious golden empire that swallows and changes everything it touches. It is beautiful to behold, but so much so that places like Lsel Station will get swallowed by its magnitude. Mahit is new to her ambassadorial duties, although she has studied the Teixclaan culture, language, and history for most of her life. But studying something and living it are two very different things. She must figure out a way to protect her small homeworld's independence in the face of everything.

Martine does an excellent job in representing the feelings of Mahit being a stranger in a strange land. Everything is foreign to Mahit, right down to customs of facial expressions and food. She desperately needs to belong and assimilate into this foreign culture, but she can't because she is missing a critical piece of information. One of the important pieces of hardware that the people of Lsel station use is a device called an imago. The device is the memory and personality of people who have come before her, saved as data to be re-downloaded. It is used so that none of the experiences and aptitude of the Lsel citizens is lost at the death of the person. The experience is then added to the new wearer, and the personalities are blended.
Nothing is lost. But, for Mahit her imago is malfunctioning. The previous ambassador's memory and experiences are gone. She is a fish out of water. Without the experiences and knowledge of her predecessor, how is she supposed to do this?

As befits her station, Mahit is assigned a cultural liaison named Three Seagrass. The naming conventions in this story are spectacular. While not the main protagonist of the story, three Seagrass is hugely important to the narrative and often steals the scenes with her wit and systematic efficiency. She is brutally efficient. As Mahit surfs the political intrigue of the city Teixclaan and its people must not pull her under.

“I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.”

A lot is going on in this book. Right from the get-go, Mahit is thrown into a world of political intrigue. This book is called a space opera, but the genre title is misleading, as it often is. Space operas are usually around space battles, often having a plucky captain or a quest to save the universe. I love the genre, but I don't consider this to be a space opera.

Instead, A Memory Called Empire is a deep science fiction story that asks questions on the nature of memory. What is memory? Can it be taken away? Is memory the collective history of a rich culture like that of the Teixcalaani people or a moment of a single individual? It can be so many things. Simultaneously, while A Memory Called Empire delves into what memory is, it also has a complicated mystery plot of “who done it” laced with wordplay, culture, and political intrigue. There are even cyberpunk elements laced into the story, which is hard to believe, but they work with the narrative perfectly.

The plotting of the story is swift. It moves from scene to scene with no lag and propels the narrative forward. Honestly, the story just got better and better as it continued.

“Nothing touched by Empire stays clean.”

A Memory Called Empire had me stopping and evaluating my thoughts on what memory actually is many times. It is a story that can be taken in sips or devoured for hours at a time. It is glorious and shining like the golden city of Teixcalaani. It has made me remember why I love science fiction as much as I do.

For all those readers who love deep, well-written, and intelligent science fiction and fantasy, A Memory Called Empire should leapfrog all other books on your to-be-read list for your immediate attention.

...reading about Mahit???s conflicting feelings about Teixcalaanli culture and language is, to me, like looking into a mirror of my own thoughts and feelings about my relationship with Empire. It is a relationship that is complex and complicated, and more often than not it can feel as though I belong nowhere: ???Not, in the end, quite home???, to quote the novel. This might seem terribly bleak, these are very important questions, not least because they touch me so deeply. I do not want to shy away from such questions just because they do not make me smile ??? indeed, I think that makes them even more important.

Full review here: https://wp.me/p21txV-Jq

The 2020 Hugo Award winner. The setup is interesting, a new ambassador arrives at the center of the ruling empire. In her head she carries a neurological implant with the previous ambassador's memory. On arrival she learns that her predecessor is dead, a political murder mystery ensues, while she immerses herself in the empire's court built on bureaucracy, poetry and tradition.

In principal I liked this, but it didn't fully live up to my expectations, and the plot could have been tighter.
3.5, rounding down

Very entertaining read, I'll definitely pick up the sequel!

This was a tough book for me to get into. i would get pulled in then, then lose interest. The amount of focus of the language that was spoken was a bit much for me. I enjoyed the names of the characters until i didn't. it was a unique naming but there didn't feel like a lot of substance behind it. any number and a thing. just didn't work for me.

I liked the ending, i thought it was good. I didn't predict it, but it was still plausible.

Good book, but not great

This book recently got the nod in the Hugo awards, and based on that I bumped it to the top of my tbr. I have no regrets for doing this - it is one of the most impressive books I have read this year.

Teixcalaan is a galaxy spanning empire, with a rich political history. We follow the new ambassador for a small independent ‘state' on the edge of the Teixcalaan empire, summoned to the Teixcalaan court and immersed into this complex political structure. Arkady Martine slowly introduces us to elemnts of this court through a combination of murder mystery (what happened to the previous ambassador?) and political maneuverings of the various political factions in court. Somehow politics through poetry seems to work, as that is the way Teixcalaan seems to be ruled. The world building is on a scale I have rarely encountered. This is truly epic.

Away from the politicking that underlies the main story there are some deeply philosophical themes running through the story as well, especially around the concept of ‘self'. One of the key technologies here is an ‘imago' - a device that record the memories and personality of the previous holder of the job, which is embedded in the new person. This person is the integrated with the new job holder, gradually meshing into one, with the old personality being subsumed by the new, but leaving the knowledge and experience of the first. A clever concept and it leads to some interesting subtext around how we view our selves and how our own personality evolves.

If I did not know that this was a debut novel, I would never guess. This is a deep, philosophical and political epic space opera/murder mystery. It is deeply impressive. A Memory Called Empire has to rank as one of the best books I have read this summer. It is definitely the cleverest.

I might suffer from inflated expectation because this book has just won Hugo, but this was underwhelming. I had to plod through and promised myself rewards every 30 pages or so because it really didn't compel me to continue reading.

The book began with a decent mystery, actually: Yskandr, the previous ambassador to the Empire, was dead and so Mahit was sent as a replacement. The whoddunit was quite intriguing.

But the narration could not sustain my interest. Maybe it was one thing being piled on after another in a very quick timeframe, maybe it was the long, pointlessly meandering internal thoughts on Mahit's part, maybe it was my lack of aptitude for poetry. English is not my first language so when they began to celebrate scansion and meters.. I just couldn't picture it in my mind.

As I began to lose my interest, several things stood out:
- This was billed as a space opera, but it's mainly political intrigue and you could transport most of the book to say, 14th century Italy, or a fantasy, or to present-day monarchy and there would be little difference to notice. [I noticed this point as I was listening to Genre Junkies podcast making this same exact complain about Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire–at least there were physics and physicists in Scalzi's Interdependency].
- An ambassador of one? How is it that Mahit was sent as an ambassador and she was the only person from Lesl in the City? It's hardly likely that if there had been trade no one else from Lesl would be in the City. She doesn't even have a native staff and I think it just beggars belief.
- An ambassador without access to resources that she had almost nothing to offer for a medical procedure? No money, nothing? (Compare this to real-life embassies full of diplomatic staff, local and otherwise.)
- Everyone in Teixcalaan seems to be basically human? At least everyone with speaking lines in the story is. And other than the (surmountable) difference in language, Mahit seems to be taller than other people, but that's it.
- Why is the imago technology that Mahit has seems to be an unspeakable taboo but other forms of bodily augmentation seems OK?

I can see this could have been an otherwise enjoyable read–but it doesn't seem to do the trick for me.

I read the prologue of this book and knew I was in for a treat. It was just a council meeting on a far flung space station, but it had all the promise of a giant complex world full of intrigue, action and imagination. And it delivered!
The bulk of the story follows an ambassador from that station navigating her way through the strange culture and politics of a massive empire that controls the space around them. She has two missions: don't let her station get annexed, and find out what happened to the last ambassador we sent. Oh, and protect the secret technology in her brain, obviously. Once I got a handle on the kind of world I was in, the plot moves fast. There's mysteries, lies, a 3-way battle for control of the empire, and in a completely unfamiliar world, no one she feels she can trust.
What really made the story for me though was the uniqueness of the world the author built. The empire is beautiful. Its culture is rich. Some of their traditions seem ancient despite their futuristic technology and dominance over the solar system. Other aspects of the culture simply imagine a world run differently. The main character is constantly torn between idolizing the Empire she's in, and resenting it for the power it wields and its increasing influence on her own world. It's a powerful concept that rings true throughout history and civilization, and because of how well this world is imagined, the reader can intrinsically understand how she feels.
Beyond making powerful statements about history, culture and civilization, the story also comments on technology's role on societies, and on relationships within a world of power imbalances. That sounds like a lot, but somehow the book does all this without feeling too heavy. In fact, when all was said and done, I really wanted more. The world is just so big and amazing, and written so well, I can't wait to see what the sequels will have in store!

Pretty solid Murder Mystery Sci-Fi.

The language and world are too inventive for any story to keep up with.  Despite that, the pieces are well woven and a satisfying conclusion is reached.