book post: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

[queenlua]

A friend’s pitch is what convinced me to pick up this book:

so I was sold on this book because the author is Byzantine Historian
and this book is about
a Weird Empire
and no one does Weird Empire like the Byzantines
but it's
the prose is good, not earth-shakingly good
but for a first novel, far more than just competent
There are Very Obvious Themes
but in a good way
it's doing the thing where
people very consciously, in setting, have ideological and political dispositions
and a sense of politics that's more than "X good, Y bad"
like there's a very specific feeling they get across of
what it's like to visit the Imperial Metropole
which I think is basically the feeling you get as an immigrant and you get dropped for the first time into the developed world
I can't pin down the quote but
there's a small anecdote from Roman history that feels very appropriate to this story
it's basically this King of a German tribe gets captured
and hauled to Rome as a part of a triumph
and looks around at the majesty of Rome and says
"And you who have so much, covet what little we have?"

If that pitch sounds intriguing, this book is very likely to please you—with the caveat of, I went in thinking this would be some contemplative Novel Of Ideas TM with only a putative plot, but instead it’s actually a page-turning adventure/thriller/mystery that happens to also have things to say about empire and aesthetics and the like.

Which is how I like the balance of my books to fall! Mahit’s an intensely likeable main character, a mixture of bookish/weebish enthusiasm and longing for all things Teixcalaani, and nascent political savvy and guardedness. The worldbuilding is refreshingly unique (poetry competitions! cryptography based on pretentious poetry! strange-yet-charming naming system! etc), and the sci-fi constructs are evocative (the whole concept of literally manifesting institutional memory via the “imago machines” is just lovely). But you never lose the beat of the page-turning political-thriller in the middle of it. Fun times; will read the sequel when it comes out.