Nuanced critiques of imperialism are having a bit of a moment in
science fiction and fantasy. The simplistic, moustache-twirling
villain is in no danger of extinction, but an increasing amount of
speculative fiction is instead taking up more complex visions of
empire: as systemic, as seductive, and as power structures with which
even the most rebellious protagonists are complicit. How to reform—or
destroy—something as large as imperialism itself is the core
question in recent SF work like
Leckie’s Ancillary Justice
and Lee’s Ninefox Gambit,
while novels like Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant
or Addison’s The Goblin Emperor
use it to reconsider the conventions of epic fantasy.
Arkady
Martine’s A Memory Called Empire
takes up these questions at at personal and governmental levels. It’s
a thoroughly diplomatic novel: there’s no separation between her
enchanting characters and the taut political maneuvering that drive
the plot. While
it is a space opera—set against the background of the
Teixcalaanli Empire, an expansionist interstellar power that has been
at relative peace for almost a century—the novel focuses less on
spaceships and aliens (both present) than it does on the bureaucratic
and interpersonal intrigue that steers the empire’s course, and
uses rich worldbuilding and personal detail to meditate on the
effects, large and small, of cultural hegemony.
Our protagonist, Mahit Dzmare, is a diplomat representing a small non-Teixcalaanli state, Lsel Station. Called to the capital planet unexpectedly, she finds her predecessor murdered, an ugly succession crisis shaping up, and her home at risk of being forcefully assimilated. In the most overtly science fictional thread of the book, Mahit is also neurologically enhanced with an “imago”—a recording of memory, skill, and personality—of the previous ambassador, Yskander. Lsel Station’s use of imago technology to preserve skills, the difference between persistence and integration of personalities, and the way that other characters misapprehend the process is a fascinating bit of the novel, reminiscent of Star Trek’s Trill.
The novel circles
around the double-edged nature of powerful cultures. Mahit’s almost
fan-girlish love of Teixcalaanli literature is genuine (and
contributes to a satisfying and literally poetic resolution in the
final narrative arc), but consciously wrestles with her cultural
identity throughout: finding herself deficient for being too much a
“barbarian”, and simultaneously hating herself for the instinct
to turn her back on her own culture. In a particularly enchanting
passage, Mahit wanders from an official party to an indoor garden
full of hummingbirds:
Even as she walked further into the strange dim sanctuary of it, she
peered upward, trying to understand how the birds didn’t fly up the
funnel and escape into the vaulted Teixcalaanli sky...Perhaps succor
was enough to keep a whole population trapped, willingly.
Succor, and the fine mesh of a net. When she tilted her head to
exactly the right angle, she could see it, strung silvery and
near-invisible at the funnel’s mouth.
The threats that
keep the empire’s citizens in line are never too far from the
surface—in one of Mahit’s first excursions in the capital, the
trains running on time is an ominous reference to Mussolini, and it
isn’t long before we encounter the faceless (and possibly
AI-controlled) police force who patrol the city. More than the threat
of violence, though, it’s the seductive and morally ambivalent
sides to the empire that Mahit grapples with, second-guessing things
as simple as her pleasure in a poetry competition and as large as the
way that her own culture has been warped by its powerful neighbor.
Although very different in tone and scope, this struggle with love
for a colonizing culture reminded me of Samatar’s A
Stranger in Olondria
.
Mahit is a
delightfully but not unbearably competent character—cut off from
her expected resources and thrust into an extreme situation,
she uses a very believable level of skill to move among the elite.
Very much in the vein of
C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner
series, the novel follows
Mahit as she wrestles with self-doubt and her own status as the
alien, with a lot of good narrative action arising simply out of her
skill in both following and intentionally
bending Teixcalaanli customs.
She’s joined by a memorable cast, most notably her cultural
liaison and de facto ally Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea
(Teixcalaanli naming conventions are one of the novel’s more
enjoyable elements). Three Seagrass and Mahit’s low-level romantic
tension is a pleasant subplot in itself, and their genuine attraction
foregrounds troubling questions of assimilation, erasure, and
exoticizing. When she’s teased for being attracted to foreigners,
Three Seagrass rushes to say that she’d like Mahit even if she
weren’t a barbarian—a racial and cultural minefield that neither
of them can cleanly back out of.
Martine keeps the
pace snappy, with assassination attempts, surprise revelations, and
charged political encounters abounding. It’s a tight plot, despite
the pace and scope, and nothing feels incidental or unnecessary:
survive, make allies, solve the previous ambassador’s murder, find
a way to shift the course of a vast power. In addition to having to
figure out a political path forward, Mahit is also attempting to
untangle Yskander’s past, while dealing with his sabotaged and
supposedly-secret imago. The novel
really ups the stakes in the final
acts, with the crisis of
imperial succession spilling into the streets, and Mahit and her
associates embedded deeper than they expected in the unfolding drama.
Martine does an unusually good job of both wrapping up the main plot
and leaving enough loose threads to allow for rich sequels—the
questions of alien invaders, AI deep in the City, and insurgents
within the empire all remain open.
If
I have one critique, it’s that the novel is a little weak in
conveying some aspects of the physical world in which it’s playing
out. Snippets of news and
messages give us a glimpse of the wider empire,
as well as Mahit’s home, Lsel Station; but
aside from a few architectural flourishes there’s not much sense of
what it’s like to be
there. The
setting often just feels like a succession of rooms, however grand a
few of them are. Where it does shine is in smaller cultural
details—the connotations of
bits of fashion, the way poetry is both high-brow and pop culture,
the way that echoes of a more ritualistic past still resonate through
the empire. Three Seagrass
and Mahit’s collaboration on a bit of poetry to post online—which
also contains a coded, time-sensitive message—comes across as one
of the more rousing bits of action, which is quite an accomplishment.
“Nothing
touched by empire stays clean,” Mahit reflects; and while nothing
in the novel parallels current events too closely, it also points
towards similar crises in our own world—“no ethical consumption
under capitalism,” for instance. Like other empire-interrogating
works that contemporary genre writers are creating, A
Memory Called Empire has no easy
solutions for us. The system
survives, even if a few villains are taken down.
Still, this is a compelling,
delightful novel—and it places these issues
at its heart, and gets us to take them as seriously as any of its
fictional problems. Mahit has kept an important part of herself clean
of the empire, I think, and it’ll be very interesting to see what
happens next.
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