Book Review: A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) by Arkady Martine


A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (4 stars)
Publisher: Tor

After reading the whole book, I needed a day to just savour it and think about what I wanted to say about it. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Everything that captivated me in the excerpt was sustained except for the murder mystery thread. Martine is a world-building mistress and just so put me in this place she created. It's just how I love my science fiction.



I was a bit disappointed that Yskandar's murder wasn't ultimately pivotal here but it there's a much larger game at play that made up a bit for that. I loved Mahit and her deftness in the shifting landscape that is The Palace and The City. She is one who is enamoured of the empire in which she lives but also moves with an awareness that she is an outsider in this place and seen by many of them as inferior. The far-reaching tendrils of colonialism and imperialism are shown to be beautiful, imposing, aspirational, and suffocating.

Mahit felt like a love letter to the diplomatic services and showed very well the challenges on the ground even when one has been exceptionally educated and prepared. I just loved that and that listening and observation were also invaluable skills she possessed. Having worked in Foreign Service I was also struck with how well this showed that once you've spent so much time living and working in a place and culture that isn't yours, you are forever changed. It's not unusual for such people to retire and live abroad. It's not lack of love for home but you are never the same as you would've been if you'd never served so long away. Mahit asking to be sent home before she stopped wanting to go struck a chord with me as did Yskandr's long tenure that changed him so.

Two of my favourite quotes:

"Getting yourself here was well done. The first smart move you've made since you arrived." Mahit bristled, began, "I didn't come here to be insulted-" "Nothing of the kind is meant, Ambassador. And lest you worry, this is only the first time you've been smart; you've been clever quite a bit." The distinction in vocabulary was unkind; that word for "clever" was the one meant for con artists, hucksters, an animal sort of cunning. "Like any barbarian, I assume," Mahit said.


And a flawless description of the vastness and inevitability of sprawling empire and how "discovery" & "conquest" decide what is "the world":

"Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jumpgates and two weeks’ sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capital, about to turn around and come home. The holograph is a cartographer’s version of serenity: all these glitter-Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jumpgates and two weeks’ sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capital, about to turn around and come home. The holograph is a cartographer’s version of serenity: all these glitter-pricked lights are planetary systems, and all of them are ours. This scene—some captain staring out at the holograph re-creation of empire, past the demarcated edge of the world—pick a border, pick a spoke of that great wheel that is Teixcalaan’s vision of itself, and find it repeated: a hundred such captains, a hundred such holographs. And each and every one of those captains has led troops down into a new system, carrying all the poison gifts she can muster: trade agreements and poetry, taxes and the promise of protection, black-muzzled energy weapons and the sweeping architecture of a new governor’s palace built around the open many-rayed heart of a sun temple. Each and every one of those captains will do it again, render one more system into a brilliantine dot on a star-chart holograph.

Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.


When I'd read the exerpt I'd thought a glossary could be helpful to some readers so I was pleased to see that there's a glossary in the back of the book and also a linguistic breakdown. It's a comprehensive work and shows Martine's care for her story that is admirable. I fully intend to read the next book and fully recommend this one.


Summary:  Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident--or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.
Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion--all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret--one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life--or rescue it from annihilation.





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