A Memory Called Empire

"This is a pretty straight-up murder mystery, but the world-building in it is so compelling. Mahit Dzmare is an ambassador from Lsel station, which is a 30,000-person space station, and it’s independent. There’s a massive, massive Empire, the Teixcalaanli Empire. Lsel is constantly having defend itself – not with weapons, but with diplomacy – to try not to be annexed. So Mahit has been sent to be the ambassador at the Empire’s city-state planet, the seat of the Empire. Her predecessor has been killed. On of the technologies that Lsel station has is something called an imago, which is basically a recording of a person. Let’s say that you’re a pilot, and you have very specialised skill; your successor gets given your memories. They pick people who have close personalities, and they go through this year-long integration process, so that the memories don’t override the person whose body it is. The idea is that it’s like having a mentor who can go along with you, and has all of the ingrained, internalised knowledge that takes years or decades to acquire. You have someone that you can ask questions; you remain yourself, but with a partner, or this other aspect of self. Mahit doesn’t get to do that. She has three months to integrate. And she’s working within an imago that’s 15 years out of date – the person who was murdered has not been back to Lsel for 15 years – so she’s dealing with out-of-date information. When she arrives, she’s immediately confronted with this corpse, and it’s clear that he didn’t die of natural causes, no matter what people are saying. He was murdered. And she has to figure out who did it. While also being the ambassador. The Empire’s word for people who are not from there is ‘barbarian.’ So she’s this barbarian, to them. But she’s also spent her entire life studying Teixcalaanli literature and society, and she speaks the language fluently. Sometimes she has to pretend to be a full-on barbarian, because that gives her a tool that she can use to get the information that she wants. Other times she has to dial it all the way up, and be as sophisticated and polished as she can be. She’s attempting to defend her home from this empire using diplomacy , and she loves her home. But also, the reason she’s a good fit to go to the Empire is that she loves Teixcalaanli culture. How those two things pull on her as she’s investigating this mystery is really delicious. The world-building is also just lovely. It’s interesting, because it gives the sense of being this really big, sprawling empire – but really you’ve got a pretty small cast, and only a few locations that you actually go to. The culture is so rich that you can feel the rest of the galaxy. She does it very cleverly. Just as an example, when Mahit first arrives and she has the imago with her, her predecessor says that he had the same feelings that she did when he arrived – being overwhelmed by the grandeur, and how beautiful it was – and then she finally gets up off her ship into the spaceport, and what Arkady describes is basically every airport lounge ever. It’s just high-tread carpets and glass and steel. So she grounds you with things that are really familiar to anyone who’s travelled. There’s another point right before she gets off the ship where, even though she speaks the language fluently, she is rehearsing what she’s supposed to say. And if you speak another language, and you travel to another country, this is a thing that you do! You sit there and think: ok – I want to buy a stamp. Stamp, stamp, I want to buy a stamp . You just keep saying it over and over in your head, until you can go up there and say: “I want to buy a stamp.” I think it’s definitely still in fashion in straight-up mystery. I think that in science fiction and fantasy, we have such an assumption that there must be an evil overlord that we tend to go straight into conspiracy theory. So there’s always some larger thing that’s going wrong. I think some of that is because we have inherited a lot of our science fiction from Cold War stuff or from Westerns: there’s the bad guy, then there’s the big bad guy, and there’s got to be a shootout at some point. So I think some of that is in the DNA of how we unconsciously tend to write with science fiction: there has to be something bigger and badder going wrong. The other factor is that doing that gives you more room to explore the world, because it pushes the character out of their comfort zone. Oh actually, when The Martian Contingency comes out – which is the fourth book in my Lady Astronaut universe , and won’t come out until 2025 – it’s got cosy baked into it. My main character’s life is never threatened because of the mystery. It is threatened because she’s on Mars, but not because of the mystery. So maybe it becomes the B-plot in science fiction and fantasy, if it doesn’t have the character’s life in danger. I’m going to have to examine that…"

"Yes! This is one for fans of careful politics, although at the same time it’s a high-concept space adventure. Our hero Mahit is beginning her role as ambassador from tiny Lsel station to the interstellar empire Teixcalaan. Lsel are underdogs, but they have a technological advantage which they guard secretively: the imago-machine, which allows the memories of one person to be integrated in the mind of another. Mahit’s predecessor died in mysterious circumstances and his imago is fifteen years out of date, so she is going without proper backup, and hasn’t had time to integrate him as she should. Both she and this new irascible voice in her head need to understand how and why he died, and deal with the greater political game that was afoot. The stakes are high, but Mahit’s moves must be careful. She is navigating a culture she isn’t entirely fluent in. When we spoke to Martine about the duology, she said, “They’re about assimilation. They’re about imperialism. They’re about languages. And they’re what I did instead of writing the book that was supposed to be the book of my postdoc, about Byzantine and Armenian history of the 11th century.” Yes! So both come highly recommended. A Memory Called Empire does resolve very satisfactorily; we meet the same characters a few months later in A Desolation Called Peace. Expect the same blend of the wildly imaginative and the thoughtful: The Guardian described the second book as “first-class space opera , with added spycraft, diplomatic intrigue and scary aliens, along with interesting explorations of perception, ways of communicating, and what makes a person.”"

"In terms of science fiction tropes, the ‘intergalactic empire’ is what we’re dealing with here. Once you’ve got a canvas as wide as the universe, anything goes—so what’s interesting about this, then, is that zero-ing in on the political detail, the protocol, and so on, rather than the intergalactic war. There’s nothing better in science fiction than that cosmic sweep with the idea that actually one person in the right place at the right time can make a difference. Harking back to what we were saying about world building: the twin conceits of a new arrival in a strange land and the mystery with the predecessor are both plot devices designed to drag you in as a reader, and help you explore the setting, especially its politics in this case, at the same time as the central protagonist. The mystery is the engine that keeps driving it forward; that investigative plot and science fiction go very well hand in hand. It’s a great way for actually being able to explore the universe that you’ve created. Plus, the idea our central protagonist is a new arrival means that, no matter how skilled or special they might in their own right, they’re starting at a disadvantage, which also helps drive plot and avoids that cliché of science fiction, the super-competent indomitable hero. Personally I like my heroes to know what they’re doing—you wouldn’t want Luke always picking up his lightsaber by the wrong end after all—but at the same time not so improbable that suspension of disbelief goes out the airlock. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As a debut, we might draw comparisons with previous winner Ancillary Justice , both because it’s another intergalactic empire type of story and also because this is another book that’s picked up a lot of advance buzz in the industry and across the spectrum of the science fiction readership. In fact one of the reasons I suspected Ancillary Justice might be our winner that year long before the judges even held their first meeting is because of the number of people who recommended the book to me from across all different spectrums of science fictional tastes and interests. I’m hearing something similar now with A Memory Called Empire , and it’s these little trends and signs you learn to look out for when you’ve been an award director for a while. There are two classic schools of writing of all kinds: some just sit down and do it—pantsters, as in ‘seat of your pants’—while at the other end of the spectrum you have immaculate planners; the people who know how every chapter interlinks before they ever start writing, and who are definitely the people with that spreadsheet on alien exchange rates or vocabulary all worked out. Personally, I love it when authors show their reasoning and behind-the-scenes workings like this, it’s like DVD extras, and everyone knows that sci fi movies have the best extra features, right? With other types of movies, you might get a ‘making of’ style feature or two if you’re lucky, whereas with science fiction the extra features can run longer than the film. Yes, it’s definitely not something that’s singular to science fiction. I think for a new writer, the idea that you need to build a world can be quite intimidating. Or, you can get so lost in it that you never get around to getting the book out. But I think it’s a good exercise to look at, because it’s the kind of space where you’re creating material that doesn’t need to be seen by anyone else; it’s a way to chip away at a project, you know? There are natural writers who will sit down and write, just find a way through to the end, and there are world builders. If you’re not too certain which one you are, I would always suggest that you should look to be a world builder first, even if only in private. You don’t need to show your working to anyone and it can be far easier to write 500 words explaining your world to yourself in the first instance than it can be to get 500 words of great plot, dialogue and description all assembled on the page first time out. That’s for anyone reading this feature who might be thinking of starting their own first science fiction novel. I think it’s a really useful exercise."