A Memory Called Empire
The Teixcalaan series, Book 1
Arkady Martine
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: When Mahit Dzmare was selected as the new Ambassador of Lset Station, she was thrilled beyond words. All her life, she has studied and admired the Teixcalaani Empire, an interstellar behemoth of beauty, poetry, and unmatched power - one that could swallow the Stationers in the blink of an eye, if so inclined. She will even have the memories of her predecessor, Yskander Aghavn, to guide her via imago, a brain implant unique to Lset. But when Mahit arrives at the the city-world capital, she finds that the gilding of Empire covers deeper corruption. The living Yskander has been murdered. Given the unusual level of interest generated by her arrival - out of scale with Lset's relatively minor importance - clearly he was involved in something very deep and very dangerous... but the out-of-date memories in her strangely faulty imago give her no clue what that was. Mahit quickly finds herself overwhelmed by imperial intrigue, beset by half-truths and deceptions, even as it appears that Teixcalaan stands poised on the brink of a bloody civil war. As long and as hard as she wished to immerse herself in Empire, she finds she is not at all prepared for the consequences of that wish being granted - and failure here may mean not only the end of an independent Lsel, but the fall of humanity itself.
REVIEW: This is a very different sort of space opera, at least compared to my usual reads. The battles are mostly diplomatic, the characters sparring with words and secrets rather than rail guns or blasters, and the setting almost exclusively planetbound; nevertheless, it creates a vast sense of power and interstellar scope mostly within the confines of a single (admittedly very large) city. Teixcalaan takes after Central and South American cultures, with glyph-based writing and codex-books, the language relying on poetry and allusion to a degree where those "barbarians" from beyond its borders have almost no hope of ever being truly equal - clearly by design. Even their word for "Empire" makes it clear that, to a Teixcalaanlitzlim (citizen), nothing beyond Teixcalaan is quite human or quite real. The empire is both a promise and a threat, the sweet propaganda of epics and verses and beauty masking the sharpened spears and ever-hungry jaws of a nation that thrives on conquest.
Mahit, like her predecessor Yskander, finds herself struggling with her sense of identity almost from the moment she sets foot in the City. Part of her is still a proud Lsel Stationer, raised in an orbital habitat among miners and pilots, while another yearns to become one of the citizens she finds herself surrounded by, to understand as intuitively as they do the multiple meanings of each glyph and each word, to speak and think in poetic imagery laced with political implications. It's this seduction that is at least as dangerous as the military might of the empire, this pull, this conviction that, no matter how proud Mahit might be of her homeland and how determined to see it remain independent, that she, too, is not quite human unless she is a Teixcalaanlitzlim, that she is inherently flawed by not having been born among them... a feeling that persists even when the proverbial bloom is off the rose, when she recognizes very human blind spots in the citizens, the pull of propaganda and cult of personality that bends her to the will of His Brilliance Emperor Six Direction and others in high circles. Through this dazzling and bewildering maze, Mahit makes her painful, sometimes blundering way toward the truth of what the late Yskander was up to - both a brilliant strategic move and a betrayal of his home, but one that she cannot help understanding as she feels the full weight of Empire pressing down on her with each moment, compounded by an impending struggle over succession that ties into Yskander's life and untimely death.
The characters were decently complex, and if the plot wasn't precisely breakneck, it kept me turning pages. It successfully paints a vivid picture of the City, the culture, and the technology that both enables the empire's vast success and controls its immense and diverse populace. Wending through conflicting agendas and intrigues and revelations, things build to a nice climax and a wrap-up that encapsulates the mixed feelings engendered by Teixcalaan in both the protagonist and the reader. Though there are clear threads leading to another book, Mahit's story mostly concludes here.
All in all, this is a very interesting tale in a unique setting, a story as much about the dangerously seductive influence of imperial powers as the military reach of them. If once in a while the names grew a bit tangled and the allusions to in-world poets and epics sometimes became a blur, they were easy enough to work out from context (usually.) I threw in an extra half-star for the unique culture, conveyed in a depth I've rarely read.
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