A Memory Called Empire

The Ambassador’s Burden

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador from Lsel Station — a small, politically marginal mining habitat — to the Teixcalaan Empire, which is the largest political entity in the known galaxy and the inheritor of a civilisation of extraordinary richness. She arrives carrying two things: a diplomatic mission complicated by the murder of her predecessor, and a neurological implant carrying that predecessor’s memories, thoughts, and personality. The implant is Lsel’s distinctive technology: a way of transmitting accumulated expertise across generations, of preserving what would otherwise be lost when a person dies.

The implant is also, it turns out, damaged. The version of Yskander Aghavn that Mahit carries is three years out of date — she has his memories until three years before his death, but not his memories of whatever happened in the interval. She carries the past self of a man she is trying to understand in his final form.

Arkady Martine’s debut novel uses this setup — diplomat with a ghost in her head arrives in a glittering empire to investigate her predecessor’s death — to examine a set of questions that are simultaneously political, philosophical, and deeply personal.

The Teixcalaanli Empire

Teixcalaan is one of contemporary science fiction’s great world-building achievements. It is an empire modelled loosely on Aztec and Byzantine precedents, with a civilisation so aesthetically rich, so literary, so politically sophisticated that even knowing its violence — its history of conquest, its current expansionism, its ruthless internal politics — does not diminish Mahit’s attraction to it.

This is the novel’s central insight about imperialism: the danger is not only coercion. Empires seduce. The Teixcalaanli produce poetry of extraordinary beauty; their political discourse operates at a level of literary sophistication that Mahit, who has spent her life studying the civilisation, finds irresistible. She loves what is consuming her home. She is complicit in her own assimilation because the thing she is being assimilated into is genuinely wonderful.

Martine was a Byzantine history PhD student when she wrote this novel, and the empire she constructs has the specific quality of something imagined by someone who understands how civilisations work at the level of their culture, their bureaucracy, and their political logic.

Three Seagrass

Mahit’s connection to the empire is mediated through Three Seagrass, the young cultural liaison assigned to her — a minor official who is also, evidently, considerably more than she appears. Their relationship develops from formal to intimate over the course of the novel, and Martine handles the specific erotic charge of two people discovering each other across a cultural gulf with care.

Three Seagrass is a Teixcalaanli who genuinely loves her civilisation and who has grown up inside its assumptions in ways she cannot fully see from within. Her relationship with Mahit is one of the novel’s primary examinations of what happens when a person from the metropole encounters a person from the periphery: the ways in which the cultural assumptions of power are embedded even in the most sympathetic members of the dominant culture.

The Mystery Plot

Beneath the political and philosophical concerns, A Memory Called Empire is a whodunit: someone killed Yskander Aghavn, and the reason for his death is connected to a political crisis that is developing in the capital. The mystery plot is elegantly managed — clues are distributed fairly, the solution is genuinely surprising, and the revelation illuminates both the specific plot and the broader political situation.

Martine integrates the mystery and the political novel with skill. The investigation of Yskander’s death is simultaneously an investigation into Teixcalaanli power: who has it, how it is exercised, what threats to it are considered intolerable. The answer to the mystery question is also an answer to the political question.

Memory and Identity

The neurological implant that Mahit carries — and the instability of the three-year-old memory it contains — raises questions about personal identity that the novel explores throughout. What does it mean to carry another person’s memories? When Mahit acts on the basis of what Yskander remembers and thought and felt, is she acting as herself? The boundary between self and not-self becomes permeable in ways that the novel treats as philosophically serious rather than merely weird.

This personal identity question runs parallel to the cultural identity question: Mahit’s deep familiarity with Teixcalaanli culture, her genuine love of it, her fluency in its aesthetics and politics — these are also a kind of carrying someone else’s self inside her own. The novel never reduces these parallels to allegory, but the resonance between them is one of the book’s persistent pleasures.

The Hugo

A Memory Called Empire won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020, and the award was entirely appropriate. This is science fiction at the level of the genre’s greatest political writers — it belongs with Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness in the company of SF that uses speculative world-building to examine political reality with a rigour and sophistication that mainstream literary fiction rarely manages.

The comparison to Le Guin is made often enough that it risks becoming a marketing cliché, but it stands: this novel thinks as hard, and as honestly, about political power and cultural identity as anything Le Guin wrote, and it does so in a world as fully realised as Anarres or Gethen.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — Hugo Award winner and contemporary classic. Space opera at its very best.