skygiants | (no subject)

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- Yskandr has not gotten around to returning home in a decade and a half, which means her imago is fifteen years out of date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 .......

PLEASE, DISCUSS:

- WHY is the ambassador such a solo entity? why does the concept of an embassy or a diplomatic staff apparently not exist in either of these highly advanced cultures? maybe I'm misunderstanding how ambassadorial positions from very small political entities work, but "some kind of under-secretary should be on hand to serve as acting member of the position to approve urgent visa requests in case our ambassador suddenly keels over as consequence of Teixcalaani politics" seems ... a reasonable basic precaution ........

- maybe I missed an explanation of this in text, but why does Lsel Station know about the alien threat and Teixcalaan does not? The alien threat on their own borders, sure, but aren't there two other points of alien presence that are not in their sector? Has Teixcalaan just not been paying attention (just as they have, apparently, not been paying attention to the fact that failures in their algorithm have increased eight hundred percent over the past year? For a bunch of very presumed-intelligent people there seem to be a number of important big-picture things that the Emperor and Nineteen Adze have missed)

- did we ever find out who exploded Fifteen Engine, or is that intended to be a mystery for a future book, or is that a who killed the chauffeur moment -- if we were to send a telegraph to Arkady Martine asking who set the bomb, would she respond "damned if I know"?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mific

I've read it and loved it, too.

WHY is the ambassador such a solo entity? why does the concept of an embassy or a diplomatic staff apparently not exist in either of these highly advanced cultures?
Not explained anywhere, but maybe Teixcalaan discourages embassy staff, as they want ambassadors to be assimilated and won over. As Yskandr mostly was. Mahit's Info ministry helper was more a minder than a liaison, really. And maybe Lsel views sending an ambassador with an imago to be like sending one person with several advisors? Also, not like anyone really needed staff for the basics, with it all so civilized and automated.

The alien threat, hmmm. I had the impression it was far away, just on the borders of Lsel's turf rather than in the Empire's part of space, so that hadn't bothered me.

15 Engine. I don't think that was ever explained, but the assumption was that it was anti-Emperor agents, working against Yskandr's scheme. Could have been working for either the competing heir with the flower symbol or the upstart military dude wanting power via acclamation. Not sure it matters?

From:

sovay

From:

genarti

I'm not clicking on the cut tag because I'm in the middle of reading this at the moment and still pretty early on in it -- and only reading it when I have the brain for the amount of (glorious) dense worldbuilding -- but I LOVE THE WORLDBUILDING AND I LOVE MAHIT and I love the thorny, complex issues of empire and culture it's digging mercilessly but compassionately into. And I ALSO love that it's Aztec-influenced with no central Zomg Human Sacrifice thing; I am delighted to hear that continues.

From:

sgac

There is ritual human sacrifice, but it's very rare and is a personal decision rather than mandated. The ethics aren't discussed, it's very matter of fact - this is a thing that occasionally happens and here are the political implications. There's definitely no cutting-out-of-hearts. While I was reading I was never 'oh yes here is the human sacrifice part of the Aztec worldbuilding'.

From:

princessofgeeks

I really enjoyed this book and had the same questions you did!

From:

skygiants

It still doesn't make a ton of sense to me that Teixcalaan would discourage embassy staff, especially with their own complex political system; surely the more people there are in an embassy, the more opportunities to win those people over and play them against each other? I can fanwank reasons that Lsel might want to send only one person -- "there are only 30,000 of us and we literally cannot spare anybody else/let us mitigate cultural exposure to Teixcalaan as much as possible so we don't lose any more young folk to the seductions of empire" -- but, on the other hand, there's a lot of emphasis put on the fact that Lsel Station believes very deeply in therapy and emotional wellness and surely therefore somebody would have realized that sending someone completely solo is somewhat likely to exacerbate feelings of isolation. (Also, automatic as it is, I was still somewhat concerned about the significant visa requests that had been piling up for two months that Mahit never managed to get around to because of everything else that had been happening for the entire book! What if someone needed to, like, get home to visit their parents' deathbed??)

Mahit does say that it's happening "both in our quadrant of local space and two others" (I had to check to see if I misremembered that) but I guess it's not necessarily clear whether 'not in our quadrant' means 'somewhere else on a different Imperial border' or 'farther out on the side of us that doesn't border the Empire,' in which case it would make sense!

I mean, it matters in a meta-narrative sense in that usually if a bomb goes off in the middle of the book, I like to know that the author at least knew why it was happening and that the motivation for it made sense? As much as I respect the ballsiness of the "eh, who cares" attitude to mystery plotting ..... No, but I think it matters to me specifically because it's a question that's raised multiple times of whether it's random chance and Mahit is using overdetermined narrative thinking to assume that it's about the conspiracy, or whether indeed it is about the conspiracy, and there are a number of reasons pointed out about why it does not make sense for several of the major players to have murdered Fifteen Engine, which makes it feel a bit weird to me that none of that's resolved.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, it felt very different to me than the way I've seen it in other Aztec-influenced novels, where there's always this very highly exoticized horror-thrill to it and usually a climactic sequence where someone is unwillingly struggling on an altar.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I started out the book being a little wary, like, 'why is this Aztec though?' and by the end of the book I was one hundred percent sold on the Aztec! (As

sgac said above, there's a sacrifice element in the culture that does come up, but it's never unwilling and is presented in a very, uh .... low-key way?)

As soon as you're finished PLEASE COME BACK AND WEIGH IN ON MY PLOT QUESTIONS.

From:

skygiants

I just kept thinking how much less stressed out Mahit would be if Yskandr had had even a single staff member to orient Mahit when she arrived and provide another Lsel voice ... like I get that imagos are one way of ensuring institutional memory, but alternate perspectives are extremely valuable!

From:

kate_nepveu

* carefully averts eyes from spoilers *

the ONLY Aztec-influenced sff novel I have ever read which does not revolve around The Horror Of Human Sacrifice

oh thank fuck! sheesh.

From:

skygiants

IT'S SUCH AN ENORMOUS RELIEF

From:

sovay

While I was reading I was never 'oh yes here is the human sacrifice part of the Aztec worldbuilding'.

Nice!

From:

cahn

I always sort of got the impression that Teixcalaan felt about those barbarians like they were essentially trained monkeys. So, yeah, if Lsel Station wanted to send one trained monkey to play with, then sure, that sounds cute! We'll even supply a Teixcalaani person as a ~~trainer~~ attache! But really, we only need one, we are strongly discouraging you from sending any more ~~monkeys~~ diplomatic staff. (Of course, Yskander went and made the Emperor fascinated with him! But none of the other ambassadors seem to have that problem.)

I also vaguely got the impression that maybe the Emperor wasn't told about all the failures in the algorithm? Though one would think Nineteen Adze would have figured it out at some point, as her job seems to be rather more data-synthesis oriented than the Emperor's.

That's a good question about Fifteen Engine... I thought I had missed where it was resolved. (for various reasons I was not paying as super close attention as perhaps I should have been)

From:

skygiants

It just feels so precarious to me! Like, there are meetings in my job that I don't want to attend without having someone else from my department to take notes/back me up about what happened at that meeting in future/exchange glances with, and my job is infinitely lower stakes than 'stop our carnivorous neighbor from eating us.' Also, if I was an important person on Lsel Station, and our ambassador had not visited back in -- let's say 5+ years -- I would definitely start wanting to send an auxiliary staff member to at the very least do an in-person person debrief and make sure, you know, that they were still actually alive and doing their job. (I also wanted to know if Lsel Station had any diplomatic relations with the other independent political entities in their quadrant -- "let's collaborate on making sure the Empire looks in different directions" seems like a logical thing to meet regularly with your peers about. Unless all the other ambassadors are so annoyed with Yskandr for all his Imperial flirtations that they've collectively decided they want nothing to do with him? Which I could one hundred percent buy.)

It's sort of implied to be a common knowledge thing that the algorithm does occasionally fail, but nobody seems to take it as significant until Mahit raises the notion. Admittedly Nineteen Adze and her staff are all quite busy, but still!

From:

davidgillon

Not sure about solo embassies, but when I first moved down to Rochester there were still several consulates - Danish and Swedish if memory serves - on the high street. Actually they were shipping firms, or chandlers, but they'd also picked up a consular role at some point, with the consul presumably being the owner/manager. So a diplomatic outpost can not just be one person, it can be one person part time.

From:

skygiants

Oh, that's interesting! These were the consulates to Rochester specifically, right? A diplomatic outpost to a specific city in a country, but not the main diplomatic outpost for that country?

From:

aamcnamara

- Overreliance on the imago? They only have one ambassadorial imago so There Can Only Be One, Ever
- I forget if the book actually explained that but, I mean, borders are big weird vague places, especially if they are made of space, so maybe I just handwaved it in my brain.
- I don't think we ever did. Something something local politics something?

From:

cahn

Heh, I agree it's precarious for Lsel Station! Though wasn't it fairly hard to send anyone to Teixcalaan unless they okayed it, or am I misremembering? I came away with the feeling that it was Teixcalaan that was setting all the parameters for this, but it's true that (even if this is the case) no one on Lsel ever seemed to even get frustrated that they were only allowed to send one person.

Good point (these are all good points) about wanting to know what Lsel Stations' diplomatic relations with everyone else were, I remember wondering about that. Lol about being annoyed with Yskandr, though, I buy that too.

From:

skygiants

There's that mention dropped early in the book of her school friend who also really wanted to get the ambassadorial posting, and I kept expecting that to come back somehow. Surprise resentful staff assistant appears halfway through the story!

I'm kind of glad nobody else knows who exploded Fifteen Engine either ... I was very concerned that I missed a big reveal!

From:

skygiants

iirc, Mahit's status was definitely expedited By Someone For A Reason but I don't remember it being implied that it would be overwhelmingly difficult for someone else to accompany her -- there's an interstitial text about the difficulty of gaining entrance to Teixcalaan, but one of the ways to get in 'must have scored well on Imperial exams' which it does seem like there are several folks on Lsel Station that do/did, including Mahit.

"Ambassador Yskandr, do you want set up a meeting to compare notes and set up a baseline strategy for fending off the Imperial menace?"
"I can't make it, I have a hot date with the Imperial menace"
"sure! okay! goodbye!"

From:

genarti

I WILL DO SO.

And also I am pleased (though not surprised) to hear that the Aztec thing carries through well! I have hit at least a few low-key mentions of sacrifice as a cultural theme (the funeral text that's the epigraph for one chapter, for instance) and enjoyed it so far.

From:

davidgillon

To a degree. They both have embassies in London, and that's only an hour from Rochester by train, and Rochester/Chatham/Gillingham wasn't really a major commercial port, but still consulates, and clearly associated with the North Sea shipping trade. But the point wouldn't be a diplomatic connection to the port, so much as the availability of a point of contact for ships or seamen in need of help from their home government.

From:

landingtree

(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.)

Over the weekend I read the first half of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, so this line tipped me over from 'been seeing a lot of good reviews of this book, I'll get around to reading it at some point' to 'okay, buying this instantly'.

From:

skygiants

Ooh, I'll be really interested in your thoughts on the worldbuilding as someone who did actually quite recently read some Aztec nonfiction! (I've read 1491 but it was MANY years ago.)

From:

genarti

OKAY I HAVE NOW READ IT

AND UNSURPRISINGLY I LOVED IT LOTS AND LOTS OMG I need to rec it to all my grad school friends for sure

Anyway plot questions!

1. ...Yeah idk. I mean, aside from plot convenience. I assumed that it was something about the Teixcalaanlitzlim preferring to have a minimal number of barbarians in the City, ergo making it hard to get visas there especially to work, ergo preferring to have one Ambassador with a small Teixcalaanli staff? But you would think that they would at least have some kind of mechanism in place for approving standard travel visas.

2. It's not made super clear, but I assumed that the other two locations weren't RIGHT IN LSEL SPACE so much but still out on their end of the outer borders of the Empire? Such that it made sense for it to be something that was crossing Lsel's peripheral radar much more and earlier than the Empire's. There are some brief mentions of non-Teixcalaanli non-Stationer pilots encountering the same thing and discussing it with Lsel, IIRC, in the interstitial bits and epigraphs and otherwise scenes that Mahit's not around for.

3. YEAH I DON'T KNOW. The fact that it was never confirmed as either Thirty Larkspur's doing or One Lightning's doing suggests to me that maybe it was just one of those random unrest things and not actually part of a conspiracy?? I'd also totally believe it was Thirty Larkspur's doing, since he was the one who had it in for Mahit specifically rather than for Yskandr. I suspect an important consideration here is what Fifteen Engine actually did or didn't know, and that is very unclear to me since I'm not totally sure when he actually stopped working for Yskander and also he died before he told Mahit anything of substance at all, so. I do wish that dropped plot thread had gotten addressed. (Unless it's a sequel hook thing? I have no idea if a sequel is planned. I have no idea if I even want one -- it's such a good arc of a story, but on the other hand I definitely trust Arkady Martine now, and there are plenty of sequel hook threads even though I'm not totally sure how they'd get pulled together into a coherent whole. But I had no idea how she was going to pull all of this novel's threads together either, so.)

OKAY ALSO CAN I JUST YELL ABOUT THE CULTUREBUILDING SOME MORE

IT WAS SO GOOD

THE CYCLES AND ALLUSIONS AND NARRATIVE, AND THE POETRY, AND BEING IN LOVE WITH A CULTURE THAT'S TRYING TO DEVOUR YOURS AND AWARE OF BOTH, AND THE WAY THE SACRIFICE THING IS USED, AND AND AND.

From:

skygiants

oh man yes you do, the language/translation/literature stuff is so good and so interesting!

1. BUT SHE HAS NO PERMANENT STAFF. How did Yskandr have time to sleep with half of Teixcalaan when he was doing all his own paperwork? Was he on the Emperor's sleep schedule??

2. One of the things I wish we got more of, and would be interested to see in future books (which, although this properly belongs in a different bullet point, there definitely is planned! and which I am stoked for! although apparently it's going to be significantly darker so I'm also a bit nervous!) is the interactions between Lsel and other non-Teixcalaanli cultures in the interstitial spaces; like, I for sure get why there wasn't room for it in this book, because this is the book that sets up Teixcalaanli cultural dominance, but I'm really curious about it AND ALSO if that's how the Lsel found out about the alien menace first then it's also plot-relevant!

3. Yeah, I was confused by the notion that Fifteen Engine would know very much because it was like ... ten years prior that he stopped working for Yskandr, I think? He did know about the imagos, but I think that's the only information he would have had that's relevant, so the only reason to kill him would be to keep that on the DL.

AND YES OBVIOUSLY YOU CAN! I also loved the way the sacrifice thing was used, it was ... so good ...... when human sacrifice stuff in fiction is usually so bad ...........

(It will shock you not at all that I dearly loved poor Twelve Azalea.)

From:

princessofgeeks

Exactly!

It made no sense to me that an embassy like that would have involved just one person.

Of course, much of the plot revolved around Our Heroine being sent there alone and having to feel her way along, but still. I think it's implausible. Better to have had the staff strangely absent or turning up dead, etc.

From:

genarti

1. That's why I'm baffled that Fifteen Engine worked for Yskandr so long ago!! I kept thinking that the ten-year timeline must be something I'd misread, unless we were going to meet a later attaché of his, because SURELY he must have at least had a Three Seagrass-equivalent, right...? Even people with much much lighter responsibilities get administrative staff in most bureaucracies, and this is not the kind of society where AI does that work!

(Also how was the EMPEROR on the Emperor's sleep schedule, also Nineteen Adze?? I would blame future-tech stimulants but all we ever see is tea and coffee, when there are several points when I would expect people to be shoving any available stronger stimulants at themselves and/or Mahit if that were a commonly available thing. PEOPLE PHYSIOLOGICALLY DO NEED SLEEP.)

2. Yesssss. Agreed! As I recall there's one offhand mention by one of the Lsel people about negotiating with the Teixcalaanli and some other political body too and I kept hoping we'd get more of that. I agree that I get why there wasn't room in this book for much more of that, but I do hope we get at least a bit of it in the future.

3. See above for more confusion on this subject. ;_; Anyway yes. To keep that on the DL? To keep Yskandr's relationship with the Emperor on the DL? (Not that several other people didn't also know about it, but then they apparently knew about the imagos too.) Unrelated grudge or accidental political protest casualty that Arkady Martine forgot to spell out to the reader? Part and parcel with this malfunctioning algorithm thing that may get addressed more in future books?? I DUNNO.

4. is now the bullet point about the sacrifice thing, and YES. I loved that, and I loved how well it was woven in. I thought she did a great job of presenting it sympathetically and nuancedly, as something that is a deep part of that culture and shown on their terms (albeit with Mahit's reaction to their terms, now and again) even though it's really not part of us-the-readers' culture and is usually presented as horrifying. GOOD JOB CULTURE-BUILDING, ARKADY MARTINE.

(Hahaha yes, I am not remotely shocked to hear that. I loved him too! Probably a bit less dearly, but I was very fond of him, even though I was sadly unsurprised by his eventual fate. Poor guy. Such a good egg! And I am SO CURIOUS about how many other friends with illegal dissident activities he has, and how involved he was in that, and stuff! Similarly you will be not remotely shocked by how much I loved both Mahit and Three Seagrass, and also Nineteen Adze come to that.)

From:

raven_cromwell

Ok so: I know I'm an utter stranger, commenting on a post that is over two years old at this point. But! I just finished Memory, and your review was marvelous, and this comment thread is brimming with meta on a book I desperately! want to write meta about and can not find much meta of at all.

The joy of finding this made me want to reciprocally provide joy, and I don't think? y'all ever came to satisfactory answers re the lack of staff shortages. I, being an utter sap for morally compromised folk--especially morally compromised folk fucking emperors!!!! and! beautiful, dangerous ladies! fell 1,000,000 percent for Yskandr Aghavin faster than the speed of light. Which made me scour every Yskandr reference as one does with one's new hyper fixation character. Anyway, I found some really! interesting shit re staff.

Yskandr's imago is only labeled "two" we get this in one of the interludes where we find the plottings of heritage councilor. The imago Yskandr was sent with wasn't actually! another ambassador--it was a man who'd negotiated stationer freedom four generations back, when Teixcalaan was feeling especially hungry.

We also learn from that interlude that Yskandr has been negotiating the shit out of trade agreements--and actually facilitating a lot of the visas Mahit was looking to take advantage of. By which I mean: they were his brainchild, not just that he was rubber-stamping an already existing thing. (OH, the shit you can get for shagging the emperor).)

Which made it significantly easier to manage workflow wise, right? he was creating only as much work as he *could* manage, introducing this very new concept of you too can immigrate across the vastness of space to Teixcalaan. And because he wasn't coming home and really hyping it up, most of the people who immigrated were mini-geeks, or just really. really unhappy folk looking for anywhere else to be. Not a vast population subset.

Anyway, it's heavily. heavily implied that Darj invented! essentially the ambassador role for Yskandr and Teixcalaan said sure, you can send your little barbarian because they thought the station might ask! to be brought in to the empire--so much less costly than running a war etc. etc.

Eight Loop probably would've even have bothered asking for a replacement, save that at the time she was still on board with 6D's imago scheme. At some point, she cooled--rather like Nineteen Ads--on the plan, though not on 6D because it's her guards that are his last safe haven.

Teixcalaan had allowed cultural stationer autonomy up to this point for three reasons, imho. A. they are so fucking vast. B. they've been riven over and over with internal strife, to the point they turned it into high art fodder, which then just increased the strife because of the propensity for modeling oneself on narrative ancestors, as it were. And three well, if those barbarians didn't want Teixcalaan that was their loss. They could conquer much larger, richer targets with a lot more risk yes, but also so much more to gain.

Yskandr understood the power of mutual seduction though--and started sending back not just the limited poetry/narrative stationers got on newsfeeds--the way he'd learned Teixcalaanli--but literature and poetry having nothing to do with current events--made the empire love stationers by creating more stationers who loved it.

What I'm getting at is that because he cobbled together an operation wholecloth and was banging the emperor, I suspect he just...borrowed staff. And 6D expected! he would've possessed Mahit--no need to assign more than a minder because well, they'd just keep up the old arrangement in all senses of the word.

I don't know if this answers what you were getting at satisfactorily, because mileage varies so much on plausibility, but the explanation you can get from a close reading held up, at least for this political geek.