A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

[pamela]

I feel I’m in the minority of how I felt about Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. It wasn’t a bad book, but I just didn’t enjoy reading it. I found that the pacing, worldbuilding, and character development just didn’t mesh with me – a lot of it felt like it was trying to be clever, rather than trying to be interesting. Rather than immersing me in its world, it felt like reading non-fiction. I was learning, being forced to retain information, rather than experiencing and internalising that information in an organic way. I love non-fiction, but I have to approach it differently.

Please read the rest of this review at your own discretion, as it will contain spoilers:

The biggest issue I have with A Memory Called Empire is that it’s about Empire and Colonialism at its heart, but has very little to say on the subject. Ambassador Mahit, our protagonist, is in Teixcalaan trying to stop the Empire from engulfing her people into their expansion, but she never voices an opinion on the subject. Instead, she waxes lyrical about Teixcalaani culture, food, and values, lending weight to the age-old apologist argument of Empires as a “civilising force.” It rankled me. The cultural and social damage caused by colonialist expansion is well documented historically. As an historian herself, I wished that Arkady Martine had put some more thought into how that subject matter was presented.

If I consider the plot, the whole book felt like an introduction to a more interesting story. I know A Memory Called Empire is going to be part of a series. I felt like the contents of this novel should have just been the opening quarter to a much more interesting one. The two elements that were the most interesting (the imago-relationship between Mahit and Yskandr) and the alien threat (the three-ringed ship mentioned in an early dispatch), were the most minor parts of A Memory Called Empire, and the rest of the plot just wasn’t interesting enough to carry it. The most fascinating mystery for the novel could have been the imago-machines, but they were revealed very early on, and it turned out everyone important knew about them anyway. The murder aspect could have been removed from this novel entirely, and it wouldn’t have made a difference at all. Yskandr’s murder literally didn’t have any impact on the story, and the same political events would have happened with, or without it.

When it comes to worldbuilding, for a book about politics, I got very little sense of what they actually were. From the second Mahit arrives she is removed from her embassy, so she does very little in the way of ambassadorial duties. As such, I never got a sense for the politics or intrigues of Teixcalaan. The closest we got was the event at Palace-Earth, but everything that was too convenient. She wanders off for 20 minutes and just happens to meet the three heirs to the Empire on that walk, even though she has demonstrably no political power? We are also meant to believe that an international ambassador doesn’t know about the fight for who will lead the country before she arrives?

Teixcalaani culture was also under-developed. I didn’t get a real sense for it. There was a lot of time spent on developing their literature, and social stratification, but almost no time given over to who they were as a people. Apart from a brief mention of the sun temple at the very beginning, no time was given over to developing their religious lives or their deities. Therefore the end of the novel felt largely meaningless. I didn’t feel as shocked as I should have, because I had never really engaged with the meaning behind it until that point. It was all telling, and almost no showing.

I found that language use was also inconsistent, meaning I was broken continuously out of immersion. At first, I thought some of the jarring language choices of A Memory Called Empire would have some kind of reveal later, but when they didn’t, it felt like a huge letdown. I understand that an alien empire would probably have similar technology like Magnetic Levitation Trains, but the likelihood of them using the same naming conventions as us (Maglev) would be slim to none, especially since they have such “alien” sounding names for everything else. And calling meat between two purple bits of a plant a “sandwich” literally made me groan given that it’s named after a human Earl from Earth which there is no indication in this novel the Empire would ever have heard of. There was just too much incongruity with when a familiar name was used for something and when it wasn’t. It removed me from the immersion of the story. Which also leads to the odd language choices for the romance (which, incidentally, was shoehorned into the last 10 pages of the book and should either have been developed more – or at all – or left out entirely as it didn’t expand the plot in any way). There are diverse romances in A Memory Called Empire (f/f and polyamorous m/m/f), which creates the impression that the Empire is one in which homophobia etc. does not exist. Because of that, one of the things that seems the oddest is the Teixcalaani use of binary language. With so much time spent on developing the concept of their speech and literacy, binary terminology seemed a massive oversight.

This brings me to the pacing issues. The entire first third of the novel was an in-depth analysis of language, reiterating things that had happened, reading emails, attending meetings, and providing excerpts of things the reader isn’t given enough context to understand. The second third is some hints at political intrigue that gave away the next third of the plot. And the last third was some misplaced action that felt like it came from nowhere leaving some huge holes in the story which ultimately led me to believe the entire plot could have been avoided had someone on Lsel station just sent an email to someone who wasn’t their ambassador. There was also a fascinating plot thread that fizzled into nothing about AI and machine learning bias. The thing that makes science fiction so great is the deep emphasis on exploring the science and technology of a fictional world – A Memory Called Empire kind of brought those elements up, glossed over them, and then proceeded to give us pages and pages of cryptic riddles about Teixcalaani literature instead.

My overall opinion is that this book had amazing potential, but it should have been cut to two chapters and used as the introduction to a much larger epic. There wasn’t enough happening to keep my interest for 400-odd pages, and Martine couldn’t consistently keep her worldbuilding strong enough to be truly immersive. There was also nothing in the book the shocked me. Every potential twist and turn was evident from the beginning. A lot of the time, it felt like Martine was just rehashing descriptions of literature to try and show off how smart she was, rather than focusing on writing a good story. With so much potential, I was left rather disappointed. I wanted to love A Memory Called Empire, but I just couldn’t. It’s a shame, because I adore high-concept sci-fi, but felt that, despite its potential, A Memory Called Empire just fell short.