Book Review: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Sometimes when you start reading a story, you realize right away why it has received critical acclaim. A Memory Called Empire is just that kind of story. You can see why it won a Hugo award.
This novel has been labelled as “Byzantium Empire in space” by some people, which I think is a criminally bare description. It is so much more. The thing about great genre fiction novels is that they 1) bring something new to the genre and 2) take old forms and produce something fresh out of them. AMCE does both of these things. It follows the political intrigue narrative central to space operas but in the process makes it feel like equal parts terrifying and exciting. On the other hand, it is also a vibrant exercise in the imagination of a fictional world. The world crafted in this novel feels familiar and alien at the same time. The author being a historian and urban planner must have certainly played a part in that.
The themes in this book are countless. But to recount just a few, there is a narrative here about the power of institutional and generational memory, the flow of information, and the pitfalls of your predecessors determining your identity. There is a lot of reflection on the effects of linguistic and cultural differences, the distance between core and peripheries, and the way urban spaces are designed to reflect the populace. There is an underlying theme of how technology fundamentally interacts with and acts in line with human desires, and the way empire-building happens.
This book has been a great sci-fi read. I can’t wait to read the second part of this series in the future.
