(Synchronic means “at the same time”, diachronic means “across different times”.)
Arkady Martine’s debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, is a wonderful not-exactly space opera. I think others might call it a space opera merely for the scale of the Empire of Teixcalaan and its capital city/planet. That city/planet capital is a fairly tired trope by now in pop culture, coming up from Asimov’s Foundation series (Trantor) and the Star Wars media (Coruscant).
Not a Space Opera
But this isn’t a tale of spaceships battling in the void. No, it is a tale of an imperial court that is insufferably self-interested, and a backwater, fish-out-of-water narrator that has a love for that insufferable milieu, even as she knows she will never fit in. Mahit Dzmare’s face is right up against the glass, loving it and hating herself for loving the thing that will never accept her.
Oh, it’s also a murder mystery for most of the first half of the novel.
Overall, the delicious high-court dialogue delivers, if you want to know what Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy solving a murder sounds like. The poetry is also quite good, and Twelve Azalea (Petal to his friends) is your best gay friend to live through a revolution with.
The techie side of the SF is only so-so. Mahit, the Ambassador from tiny Lsel Station, has a memory augmentation device embedded in her skull, which technology is a state secret. It gives her a snapshot of the memories of the previous ambassador, but it is badly out of date. This technology, and knowledge of it, is the maguffin of the novel. This is a diachronic, sequential collective memory. About one-third of Lsel Station is fitted with these, making them an essential part of the Lsel culture.
The host culture has its own collective memory, the suffocating layers of poetry and narrative that have accumulated over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years as Teixcalaan grew from a single planet to a galaxy-spanning empire. (There is a glossary in the back of the book if you don’t feel like winging it with the pseudo-Aztec words.)
(Huge mistake not to include any reference to chocolate in this culture. They drink coffee and tea, and chocolate would be a natural fit.
Mahit’s companion, Three Seagrass, is as completely expert and immersed in this court culture as Mahit wishes she could be. She doesn’t need a memory implant to mold her life into the pattern of a poet from four hundred years ago.
Teixcalaan also has at least two forms of synchronic collective memory displayed in the course of the book. One is the City’s AI, which is occasionally a threatening force but is never examined closely. The other is the Sunlit, a police force that practices some form of experience sharing across its members. Again, mentioned but never examined.
In particular, the Sunlit undermines a key plot point, that Teixcalaan society is averse to (thinks immoral) technological augmentation of the mind, or even of the body. Even more obviously, almost all Teixcalaanitli are wearing some form of “cloudhook” for constant information access. Why a memory implant is taboo but a cloudhook isn’t is not explored, the plot just needs it to be so, so it is.
Similarly, Mahit, who has been chosen as the Ambassador to Teixcalaan and has been immersing herself in everything about the culture for her entire adult life, doesn’t know the age of the Emperor. This is silly. His age and infirmity, his appointing multiple co-heirs, the court gossip surrounding succession, it all must have been part of the newsfeeds that went out from the Capital and were read in Lsel.
Other techie nitpicks to get out of the way: the jump gates that allow interstellar travel are awfully close to inhabited planets. Matter can pass through a jump gate but energy can’t? E=mc^2 much? But it is necessary to the plot, so there we are.
There is an awful lot of walking to someplace new so that dialogue can take place in this new setting, and then walking back. Mahit, Reed, and Petal don’t do much except talk to each other and write poetry. And save the world.
Mahit is very whiny about her loneliness while cut off from access to her imago of Yskandr Aghavn, the previous ambassador. Yet, when the story resolves that, she is immediately whiny about her loneliness vis-à-vis Three Seagrass, with whom there is the slowest, most delicious of slow-burn romance arcs.
At a crucial point in the resolution of all the plot threads, agency is taken away from our two primary POV characters, Mahit and Three Seagrass. They literally sit and watch it happen on TV. But until then, the events of the novel happen at breakneck speed. Less than a week between Mahit’s arrival and everything being resolved. Having never lived through a palace coup attempt, this seems fast.
The resolution is acceptable while leaving room for the next novel to be written, which it has.
Conclusion
Read this if: you love witty banter, the words “shimmer” and “thrum”, the habit of every character having the thought that something is worth thinking about and promising themselves they will, but never thinking about that subject again. Infodumps in the form of antique document quotations at the start of every chapter. Repeated reminders of how many things, like attractiveness, are culturally determined.
Don’t read this if: a slow start bothers you, poetry bothers you, lesbian romance bothers you, bisexual romance bothers you, plot-mandated coincidence bothers you, plot threads and interesting characters abandoned bothers you, or silly AI bothers you.
The book is a meditation on culture and memory cleverly disguised as a political thriller. The main characters are endearing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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