A Memory Called Empire

This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

I liked this book - it has enough people acting like people that it really hooked me, which is unfortunately something that not a lot of space operas try to include. I do feel kind of annoyed that some of the things about the imago tech were talked up a lot - its secrecy, its danger to the psyche - but we didn't really end up seeing those things realized. Seems like everybody and their dog knew about the imago-machines before Mahit got any chance to tell them, and if they didn't, she told them right away.

But I digress. It was a fun read, and I'm looking forward to reading the next one - just, not yet.

a fun read with beautiful, full worldbuilding and compelling politicking, and plenty of space opera to keep you from putting it down. for me, I didn't find it very striking as a plot or character book, though there's plenty of both, and didn't get much out of it as an ideas book (compared to other SF I've read that plays with self, empire, and language) that said, I do love books that know how to interact with language! linguist-me was left satisfied!

This was not the normal type of sci-fi story I read and I didn't think I would enjoy it at first. But the more I read, the more I fell in love with this story. It's very rich, deep, symbolic, and full of meaning. The characters are deep and very interesting, and the elaborately detailed world/universe of the story is incredibly thorough and stimulating. This story had a great pace and evolved from a story of planetary politics to political inrigue and thriller-type pace. I finish this book feeling like I have experienced something profound and yet sad that it's over - and yet I've already downloaded the sequel! Arkady Martine is masterful and a bit like the Stephen King of the genre. Maybe my top book of the year!

I called this a sci fi thriller (question mark?) because I'm not fully sure whether I think it's really a thriller. Yeah I think it's a thriller. A sort of space opera/thriller maybe. Anyway, I enjoyed this quite a bit. The world building was fun, the characters were interesting and not annoying. The story was well paced, and kept my interest throughout. A fun book. I've already bought the sequel.

I'm so pleased with A Memory Called Empire. It's rare to have a pairing of both a really rich, engrossing world and characters that I cared about so much. It felt like not a decision or phrasing was done without careful consideration. I could feel the pull Mahit felt between her home and the empire, and her exhaustion as the book stretched on. An absolute force and I can't wait to read the next one.

I wrote this long detailed review and it just disappeared into the ether, so here's a shorter version:

Sci-fi full of political intrigue. Very lovely queer romance in it. Interesting concept of memory and what it would mean if we could preserve it in other people.

Would recommend!

Dans ce roman épatant à tous les niveaux, une ambassadrice inexpérimentée tombe dans les intrigues typiques d'une fin de règne. C'est raconté avec humour, détachement, et beaucoup de poésie jouant sur la langue. Il y a par ailleurs des réflexions très prenantes sur la nature de la mémoire, le passage d'expérience, l'identité. Le tout étant toujours exprimé avec une plume pleine de subtilité.
À mon avis, c'est un chef d'œuvre.

I quite enjoyed this book! A fun narrative about a young diplomat from a remote space station who finds herself appointed ambassador to a Big Evil Empire. The book takes place in the imperial capital and thematically does the whole "man, giant empires really do suck a lot" thing, and does it well. The one Big Weird Sci Fi idea (basically multiple people cohabiting in one brain) is pretty cool and also the author manages to portray it without being offensive to people with, say, dissociative identity disorder. I feel like it dragged a bit at the end and sort of fizzled out, and ultimately I found myself reading a book set on the main character's home space station than at the heart of this big scary empire. I live in a big scary empire so it all seemed pretty standard to me. Still, totally recommend the read.