A spear in the hands of the sun
Sep. 6th, 2021 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileTwo friends recommended Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire to me in a very short space of time, which was really just as much prompting as I needed to pick it up when, three cocktails deep, I stumbled across it being sold at a steep discount in the middle of Harvard Square. Did I have any idea what it was about? Not at all! But it’s a Tor book and it seemed vaguely in the Disaster Queers in Space genre, and many of not most of my favorite recent discoveries have been Tor books about Disaster Queers in Space, so I was willing to pick it up on the strength of the author’s name being closely networked with the likes of Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells.
This strategy did not fail me and I am reasonably confident in saying that if you liked the Imperial Radch trilogy you may also like this book as well. It is a big sprawling space opera featuring an outsider who gets caught up in the inner machinations of an empire at war with itself, although in this case it is also at war with the small independent mining territory that our protagonist, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, hails from. It’s got culture clashes and palace intrigue and a conspiracy that requires several hundred pages of complicated uncovering, and some Deep Thoughts on cultural assimilation and empire, and an understated sapphic romance. In an unusual twist the big all-devouring evil empire here seems to be based on pre-Conquest Aztec civilization, which makes the hostile alien threat outside of both Stationer and Teixcalaanli space just that bit more intriguing as a plot point. (I assume fighting the alien hostels is the subject of A Desolation Called Peace, and I plan to get around to verifying that assumption reasonably soon, once I… uh… *looks at the TBR pile of doom and sweats*)
The core of the plot here is a murder mystery--Ambassador Mahit’s predecessor has mysteriously died, and the last 15 years or so of records of his memory that Mahit ought to have had access to have died with him, so she and her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass’ mischievous best friend, Twelve Azalea, have to try to solve the murder and figure out what sort of machinations the previous ambassador was involved in and try not to get killed themselves. All the Teixcalaanlitzlim have names that are like [number] [common object] even though all the other empire words are jaw-cracking pseudo-Aztec sci-fi monstrosities like “Teixcalaanlitzlim,” but you get used to it, especially if you read a lot of sci-fi. It gives the book a very specific texture about what’s being translated and what’s not; I’m sure Martine has her own logic about how she handled it but I was mostly just rolling with it because I wanted to find out who was going to get into what sort of trouble next.
Despite it being a reasonably big novel--at 450 pages, it’s not that long for a space opera, but it’s not exactly short either--I read the whole thing in the space of about 36 hours, which did mean I ended up neglecting everything else I was supposed to do yesterday, but oh well. It’s going on the shelf of queer faves with slick black covers, now that it’s been moved off the shelf of queer TBRs with slick black covers.
This strategy did not fail me and I am reasonably confident in saying that if you liked the Imperial Radch trilogy you may also like this book as well. It is a big sprawling space opera featuring an outsider who gets caught up in the inner machinations of an empire at war with itself, although in this case it is also at war with the small independent mining territory that our protagonist, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, hails from. It’s got culture clashes and palace intrigue and a conspiracy that requires several hundred pages of complicated uncovering, and some Deep Thoughts on cultural assimilation and empire, and an understated sapphic romance. In an unusual twist the big all-devouring evil empire here seems to be based on pre-Conquest Aztec civilization, which makes the hostile alien threat outside of both Stationer and Teixcalaanli space just that bit more intriguing as a plot point. (I assume fighting the alien hostels is the subject of A Desolation Called Peace, and I plan to get around to verifying that assumption reasonably soon, once I… uh… *looks at the TBR pile of doom and sweats*)
The core of the plot here is a murder mystery--Ambassador Mahit’s predecessor has mysteriously died, and the last 15 years or so of records of his memory that Mahit ought to have had access to have died with him, so she and her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass’ mischievous best friend, Twelve Azalea, have to try to solve the murder and figure out what sort of machinations the previous ambassador was involved in and try not to get killed themselves. All the Teixcalaanlitzlim have names that are like [number] [common object] even though all the other empire words are jaw-cracking pseudo-Aztec sci-fi monstrosities like “Teixcalaanlitzlim,” but you get used to it, especially if you read a lot of sci-fi. It gives the book a very specific texture about what’s being translated and what’s not; I’m sure Martine has her own logic about how she handled it but I was mostly just rolling with it because I wanted to find out who was going to get into what sort of trouble next.
Despite it being a reasonably big novel--at 450 pages, it’s not that long for a space opera, but it’s not exactly short either--I read the whole thing in the space of about 36 hours, which did mean I ended up neglecting everything else I was supposed to do yesterday, but oh well. It’s going on the shelf of queer faves with slick black covers, now that it’s been moved off the shelf of queer TBRs with slick black covers.