![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhA Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. An absolutely fantastic sci-fi novel, the first in an intended trilogy. The Teixcalaanli Empire is vast, powerful, and – like most empires – interested in getting vaster and more powerful. Lsel Station is tiny, poor, and – for now – independant. This is obviously a precarious state of things, and when Teixcalaan sends word that they need a new Lsel ambassador, it's unfortunately up to Mahit – young, only half-trained, and utterly unprepared – to maintain her station's independence. The task that becomes even more difficult once she discovers that the previous Lsel ambassador was murdered, and the questions of by whom and why involves everyone all the way up to the Teixcalaanli emperor himself, his heirs, and Mahit's supposed allies back on Lsel.
Teixcalaan is based on the Aztec Empire, and is a genius extrapolation of that culture out into a future galaxy-wide existence. Though I've seen this mentioned in surprisingly few reviews; are the Aztecs so little known to the average reader that the obvious allusions are flying over people's heads? Connections include the ball game, blood sacrifice, names like "Five Orchid" and "Nine Maize" (though part of Martine's excellent extrapolation into sci-fi means we also have "Six Helicopter" and "Twenty-Nine Infograph"), the mix of poetry and war and flowers, the description of the written language as glyphs and the sounds of words like xauitl and amalitzli (compare real Nahuatl words, chocolātl and tomatl; I don't remotely speak Nahuatl, but that -tl word ending is so distinctive and recognizable), the reckoning of dates, plus, you know, the whole conquering everyone around them thing.
But the emotional center of A Memory Called Empire is obviously not the number of Mesoamerican references that Martine can fit into the book. It's Mahit, who is not herself Teixcalaanli but who has spent her life studying the language, the literature, and the history; who desperately wants to succeed at being Teixcalaanli and not an uncivilized barbarian but who also doesn't want to lose her hold on her own culture; who must find her way between the Teixcalaanli sophistication she dreams of and the Teixcalaanli power that wants to take everything she has. It's about how concepts that are easy to express in one language can be difficult or invisible in a second language. A Memory Called Empire is about hegemony – the way it seduces, the promises it makes to those willing to join, and how even the most dedicated outsiders never quite become an unmarked part. Don't get me wrong, A Memory Called Empire is about a lot of fun, page-turning adventure too: riots and court politics and alien invasions and conspiracies within police forces and a f/f romance and a gloriously fucked-up polyamorous bisexual threesome and weird mind-control technology and spaceships and poisonings and gun battles and more. I loved it so much.
A Memory Called Empire is just SO GOOD. It's by far my favorite book I've read this year, and I absolutely cannot wait until the sequel arrives. It's part of the recent wave of colonial and imperial-critical sci-fi that includes Ann Leckie or Yoon Ha Lee, so if you're a fan of those authors, you should immediately check out Arkady Martine as well.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Rosewater by Tade Thompson. A sci-fi novel set in the near-future, also the first in a forthcoming trilogy. Not too long ago, an alien landed in a rural backwater of Nigeria. The alien - ship? organism? no one knows – immediately enclosed itself inside a dome that proved resistant to all attempts to study it. Nonetheless, consequences were immediate and obvious. Psychics – real, provably psychic people – became common, and about once a year the dome opens and anyone nearby is healed of all wounds or diseases or – sometimes, presumably accidentally – death itself. A town named Rosewater sprang up around the dome, to take advantage of the tourists, scientists, and military operators drawn by these events.
Kaaro, our main character, is a local with the psychic power to find anything or anyone. He works in a bank (the existence of psychics means hackers who can read account numbers from your thoughts, of course, and so banks employ their own team to create a mental firewall) and occasionally unwillingly moonlights for a secret government agency. Rosewater jumps back and forth in time between two plots. The chronologically earlier one reveals Kaaro's original discovery of his powers and much of the backstory behind the dome and the new abilities it seemingly enables. Eleven years later, the second plotline concerns the fact that all known psychics seems to be dying off one by one: murder? a new disease? a government plot? Kaaro investigates, while balancing a new romantic relationship and rumors of a secret town of anarchists.
The worldbuilding in Rosewater is simply outstanding. I loved the mixed blessings of the dome, the explanation behind how the psychic powers work, and the gritty new-money feel of the city of Rosewater itself. On the other hand, the plot is excessively complicated and ties itself into knots by the end of the book, falling apart is a mess of multiple tangles and twists. Another problem I had is that Kaaro is a sexist – which, fair enough, he's also a thief, a coward, an opportunist, and an all-around jerk. But it bothered me that all of the female characters come off as extremely male-gazey cardboard cliches; none of them have enough life to break through Kaaro's shallow perception of them.
Ultimately I'm glad I read Rosewater but I don't think I enjoyed it enough to bother with the sequels.
Teixcalaan is based on the Aztec Empire, and is a genius extrapolation of that culture out into a future galaxy-wide existence. Though I've seen this mentioned in surprisingly few reviews; are the Aztecs so little known to the average reader that the obvious allusions are flying over people's heads? Connections include the ball game, blood sacrifice, names like "Five Orchid" and "Nine Maize" (though part of Martine's excellent extrapolation into sci-fi means we also have "Six Helicopter" and "Twenty-Nine Infograph"), the mix of poetry and war and flowers, the description of the written language as glyphs and the sounds of words like xauitl and amalitzli (compare real Nahuatl words, chocolātl and tomatl; I don't remotely speak Nahuatl, but that -tl word ending is so distinctive and recognizable), the reckoning of dates, plus, you know, the whole conquering everyone around them thing.
But the emotional center of A Memory Called Empire is obviously not the number of Mesoamerican references that Martine can fit into the book. It's Mahit, who is not herself Teixcalaanli but who has spent her life studying the language, the literature, and the history; who desperately wants to succeed at being Teixcalaanli and not an uncivilized barbarian but who also doesn't want to lose her hold on her own culture; who must find her way between the Teixcalaanli sophistication she dreams of and the Teixcalaanli power that wants to take everything she has. It's about how concepts that are easy to express in one language can be difficult or invisible in a second language. A Memory Called Empire is about hegemony – the way it seduces, the promises it makes to those willing to join, and how even the most dedicated outsiders never quite become an unmarked part. Don't get me wrong, A Memory Called Empire is about a lot of fun, page-turning adventure too: riots and court politics and alien invasions and conspiracies within police forces and a f/f romance and a gloriously fucked-up polyamorous bisexual threesome and weird mind-control technology and spaceships and poisonings and gun battles and more. I loved it so much.
A Memory Called Empire is just SO GOOD. It's by far my favorite book I've read this year, and I absolutely cannot wait until the sequel arrives. It's part of the recent wave of colonial and imperial-critical sci-fi that includes Ann Leckie or Yoon Ha Lee, so if you're a fan of those authors, you should immediately check out Arkady Martine as well.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Rosewater by Tade Thompson. A sci-fi novel set in the near-future, also the first in a forthcoming trilogy. Not too long ago, an alien landed in a rural backwater of Nigeria. The alien - ship? organism? no one knows – immediately enclosed itself inside a dome that proved resistant to all attempts to study it. Nonetheless, consequences were immediate and obvious. Psychics – real, provably psychic people – became common, and about once a year the dome opens and anyone nearby is healed of all wounds or diseases or – sometimes, presumably accidentally – death itself. A town named Rosewater sprang up around the dome, to take advantage of the tourists, scientists, and military operators drawn by these events.
Kaaro, our main character, is a local with the psychic power to find anything or anyone. He works in a bank (the existence of psychics means hackers who can read account numbers from your thoughts, of course, and so banks employ their own team to create a mental firewall) and occasionally unwillingly moonlights for a secret government agency. Rosewater jumps back and forth in time between two plots. The chronologically earlier one reveals Kaaro's original discovery of his powers and much of the backstory behind the dome and the new abilities it seemingly enables. Eleven years later, the second plotline concerns the fact that all known psychics seems to be dying off one by one: murder? a new disease? a government plot? Kaaro investigates, while balancing a new romantic relationship and rumors of a secret town of anarchists.
The worldbuilding in Rosewater is simply outstanding. I loved the mixed blessings of the dome, the explanation behind how the psychic powers work, and the gritty new-money feel of the city of Rosewater itself. On the other hand, the plot is excessively complicated and ties itself into knots by the end of the book, falling apart is a mess of multiple tangles and twists. Another problem I had is that Kaaro is a sexist – which, fair enough, he's also a thief, a coward, an opportunist, and an all-around jerk. But it bothered me that all of the female characters come off as extremely male-gazey cardboard cliches; none of them have enough life to break through Kaaro's shallow perception of them.
Ultimately I'm glad I read Rosewater but I don't think I enjoyed it enough to bother with the sequels.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 09:09 pm (UTC)Nice.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-05 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 11:33 pm (UTC)