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Review: A Memory Called Empire

The cover of "A Memory Called Empire".

The cover of "A Memory Called Empire".

"A Memory Called Empire" is a book by AnnaLinden Weller under the pen name Arkady Martine that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020, and since the sequel pipped Project Hail Mary (which I also thought was fabulous) for the same award in 2022, I wanted to see if the series deserved the wins. TL;DR: I think it did, and it's one of the best books I've read all year. But I don't want to repeat the numerous praises this book has already received, I want to comment on some of the weird things that made me think: "Huh?"

Summary

"A Memory Called Empire" starts with our protagonist Mahit Dzmare arriving on Teixcalaan (the planet-city at the centre of the inter-stellar Teixcalaan empire), as the diplomat from the distant Lsel Station, to both:

She immediately lands in a complex succession crisis, as the kingdom's most dangerous players are circling around an old, dying Emperor, all vying to be next in line for the throne.

Comments on the Story

Sleep and Injuries

The "Im tired boss" meme. A screengrab of John Coffee from Green Mile, but he's captioned as Mahit Dzmare.

An actual image of Mahit talking to Six Direction.

I read a lot when I get sick. Reading is a very low energy activity, so it feels nice to curl up under the sheets with a box of tissues and just read for 8 hours. I don't recommend doing that with this book. I didn't find this to be a relaxing book. Why? Because Mahit never goes to sleep!

80% of the book is Mahit frantically slamming all-nighters as she packs her schedule full of high-stakes political meetings during the day, and even higher stakes covert ops during the night. The most rest she gets in the novel is when she's unconscious, undergoing brain surgery!

On top of never sleeping and being constantly exhausted, Mahit acquires many layers of injury during her week on the jewel of the world. She:

Reading this book while sick exhausted me. Could we not have sent Mahit home for an early night's sleep just once? Let her have a slow morning - maybe eat some eggs on toast and recover? I think the pacing could have been significantly relaxed without sacrificing any of the story.

Science's Perfect Algorithm

The "epic handshake meme" but one arm is labelled: "one lightning", and the other is labelled: "ten pearl". The arm labelled ten pearl is wearing pearl rings.

Ten Pearl being blinged out with pearls is pretty gangta ngl

Of the different factions vying for power there seems to be:

Rather than dive into any of these storylines, the author just "alludes" to them being there, which gives the reader the "feeling" that each faction is fighting for their own agenda, but feels lazy compared to actually telling their stories.

For example, we know Thirty Larkspur tells Mahit cryptically: "The deal is off" and attempts to poison her with a flower. What deal was called off? Why did he think killing Mahit was a good idea? Did he talk to Nineteen Adze about the murder? We never learn the answers to any of these questions, or what Thirty Larkspur's ultimate motivations are. A single chapter from the perspective of Thirty Larkspur could have answered so much, and been fascinating to read.

The most frustrating instance of this is the entire power-grab attempt from One Lightning and Ten Pearl. For starters, we don't even know that science and military are colluding except there is enough circumstantial evidence to assume (again, we're always assuming) that they are. Naturally any curious reader will have questions:

None of these get answered!

It's infuriating because there is so much good material here to explain! And it feels like a waste to not to explain it!

Mahit and Three Seagrass Kiss

Mahit and Three Seagrass kissing at the end didn't feel right to me. Over the first 80% of the book, the relationship between Three Seagrass goes from reluctant cultural liaison, to good friend. There is never any mention about "finding her attractive" or "seeing her in a new light" and then bam they're kissing. I didn't really feel it.

Comments on the Writing

Teixcalaan

In languages, more commonly used words tend to be shorter. This is called the "Brevity Law" or "Zipf's Law of Abbreviation" and it makes communication more efficient.

So naturally it hurts me when "Teixcalaan", one of the most commonly used words in the book, is so long! It's pronounced "teyks-kah-lan" which I had to Google to confirm I was pronouncing it correctly, and it comes in at 3 syllables long.

I'm not too annoyed by this alone, but if something is from Teixcalaan, it's Teixcalaanli, and people from Teixcalaan are Teixalaanlitzlim. That's a five syllable demonym! If you can think up a real world demonym with five syllables, I'll be incredibly impressed, because there are almost none! And for a good reason! People often want to refer to themselves and thus the words used to do are often short. Surely if someone is from Teixcalaan, they're "Teix". I'm surprised the author didn't abbreviate it just to make life easier!

Since the Teixcalaan language is often described as a using "glyphs" I assume it's a logographic system like Chinese or something. I wonder if it would almost increase readability to just replace Teixcalaan with a 京1 or something in the book. Explain how to pronounce it once, and then just use the glyph. Teach the reader Teixcalaanli while reading. Creating a new font for Teixcalaanli glyphs would probably give typographers of the print edition an aneurysm though.

Colour

The author has a wonderful writing style that I enjoy reading. She paints the city of Teixcalaan so colourfully from the moment Mahit descends into the city. In comparison to the previous book I read - Project Hail Mary, which takes place predominantly in a spaceship I imagine to be entirely white - the book just felt 'colourful'.

Pairing excellent descriptions with:

conjured some strong mental imagery while reading, which I really enjoyed.

Internal Monologue

At some points in the novel, I felt like I had to read 1-2 pages of writing just to read a single to-and-fro comment from Mahit to a character. The author loves to interrupt a sentence with some of Mahit's internal thoughts, which is fine most of the time, but sometimes the train of thought flits from talking, to internal thoughts, to comments on those internal thoughts, to a comment from Yskandr, to a response to Yskandr, and back to the initial conversation. I could understand if people got a little lost while reading.

Overall, she did a good job of making the book readable, despite Mahit not only marshalling her own thoughts, but also the thoughts of two Yskandr's and it didn't devolve too far into anime-style monologuing.

Parallels to Dune

The writing style of this book "feels" similar to Dune on some hard-to-explain level. I think it's a strong reliance on language, poetry, and general aesthetics to describe an empire/culture, combined with a story heavy with political maneuvering that triggers these feelings.

Also, like in Dune, the author conjurs up strong mental imagery without necessarily explicitly describing things, which probably results in readers imagining similar scenes quite differently from one another.

I will say I enjoyed this story far more than Dune though.

Other

Footnotes

  1. 京 means capital. Which is why 北京 (Beijing) and 東京 (Tokyo) both have it. It's often mentioned that Teixcalaan is one glyph. Notice that 京 is ONE syllable in both these words, yet Teixcalaan is 3. ↩