The fact that Lesl Station – the home of our protagonist Mahit Dzmare and 30,000 other souls – managed to remain independent for decades only shows that the Teixcalaan aren’t the boogeyman. It is supposed to be a remorseless, planet gulping military machine, yet the Emperor is a friendly old man that managed peace for 80 years. Sadly, the Teixcalaanli empire is never menacing, it never shows its teeth. It’s even in the title! What an easy target imperialism has become.

Are all these people far future descendants of Earthlings in a diaspora that forgot their history? Or are these cultures that exist somewhere in another galaxy of the universe, and coincidentally all happened to evolve with a human biology and human cultural habits? Or does this book take place in Fantasy Land? By the way, there are other aliens too, of the kind that can’t be reasoned with, mentioned in passing only, and waiting in the wings for the second act.ĮMPIRE – Indeed, empire. ever has a real influence on what happens in the story, and as such the social commentary is surface level only, and not baked into the story’s blueprint.ĪLIENS – The Teixcalaan are human, as are the people from the station. Martine manages to slip in some stuff about bias, as algorithms reflect their creators, but the bias, nor the the A.I. But it’s totally underdeveloped, and a sideshow only. – There’s a mysterious algorithm controlling the city and some of the police, and it is supposed to signify the dystopian side of the empire: controlling how people walk, what they see, what they read. But at the same time, it was very, very generic.

So let me be upfront: this was an okay book, a nice book, an entertaining book, a Tor book, and I’d even recommend it if you need your contemporary space opera fix. There’s much to like in this book, especially a “cunningly plotted” story of palace intrigue centered around the new ambassador of a mining station in the capital city of the galaxy spanning Teixcalaanli empire – an empire that loves literature and poetry, and an empire in the midst of a succession crisis. Arkady Martine’s debut novel just won the 2020 Hugo and is shortlisted for the Clarke, so indeed, it has all the hallmarks of what people seem to like: a picture of a sprawling throne on the cover, and a “glossary of persons, places and objects” at the end.

A memory called empire series