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I just finished this year's Big Smart Political Space Opera, Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which a number of people I know have already read and loved, and which indeed, unsurprisingly, I also loved!

This is one of those stories that's predicated on extremely deep culture-building, where the plot is indeed driven by the differences between cultures. Our heroine, Mahit, is the brand new young ambassador of Lsel Station -- a small political entity composed of a collective of satellites -- to the interstellar empire Teixcalaan. Mahit has been enamored of Teixcalaani's rich and pervasive culture since she was young, which makes her a perfect match for the previous ambassador Yskandr, who loved Teixcalaan possibly even more than she did and has now gone incommunicado in mysterious circumstances. She also carries a version of his memories in her head, due to a closely-guarded bit of Lsel Station technology called an imago, which is meant to help her in her position and eventually integrate into her personality, along with all the previous memories in Yskandr's imago-line (a bit like a technological version of the Trill symbiotes in DS9).

Unfortunately for Mahit:
- Yskandr has not gotten around to returning home in a decade and a half, which means her imago is fifteen years out of date
- additionally, it is malfunctioning
- also, although no one in Teixcalaan is supposed to know about imago-technology, and in fact that sort of tech verges on taboo in Teixcalaan culture, she keeps encountering extremely high-placed Teixcalaanlitzlim who seem to know Yskandr EXTREMELY well and expect that she's going to be able to pick up right where he left off
- which was deeply enmeshed in highly complicated Teixcalaanli politics
- which are currently potentially teetering on the verge of civil war
- which could lead to another wave of Teixcalaani expansion
- which would be extremely bad for little independent Lsel Station
- and although Mahit loves Teixcalaan -- although there's a part of her that very much wants to be able to step into Teixcalaan and be part of, not other -- that doesn't mean she's ready to see the empire swallow up everything that makes Lsel Station itself

The development of both Lsel Station and Teixcalaan -- specifically of Teixcalaan as seen through the eyes of a Lsel Stationer, who speaks Teixcalaanli fluently but as a second language, who has been immersed in Teixcalaanli literature and media but only the literature and media that Teixcalaan wants the rest of the universe to see -- is incredibly impressive, and also extremely fun. There's a bit early on where Mahit is communicating in anonymous coded poetic messages with a putative ally, a young information ministry official named Twelve Azalea with a highly developed sense of drama, and Arkady Martine is clearly having just as much fun with it as Twelve Azalea.

There's also a really rewarding sense that there's much more world around the edges of what Mahit sees in this particular book, that everything that she encounters is just the top layer of Teixcalaanli culture. Martine does a really effective job of putting you in sort of the same position as Mahit is of wanting to know more and go deeper, even while recognizing the inherent horror and threat of empire; of being charmed by the various extremely charming Teixcalaani characters, who are real and human people and generally are trying their best and may even be genuine allies, while also knowing that those same charming Teixcalaanlitzlim probably don't see anything outside the empire as being quite real, or quite civilized, or possibly even quite human.

(I also have to give five million points for the fact that this is the ONLY Aztec-influenced sff novel I have ever read which does not revolve around The Horror Of Human Sacrifice. THANK YOU, ARKADY MARTINE.)

However, as much as I loved the book ... I do have questions about some of the plot mechanics that are required to get everything to fall into place .......

( QUESTIONS FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE TEXT )