A Memory Called Empire

Mahit Dzmare arrives in the capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire as ambassador from Lsel Station, a mining habitat of thirty thousand people that has stayed independent by being useful and unremarkable. Her predecessor is dead, the empire will not say how, and nobody sent for a replacement.

Lsel's secret is the imago machine, a device that carries the recorded memory and personality of the previous holder of a job into the next one, so that expertise passes down an unbroken line from one specialist skull to the next. Mahit's copy of her predecessor is fifteen years out of date, and within days of her arrival it stops working entirely, leaving her alone in a city built to make outsiders feel like barbarians.

She has a liaison, Three Seagrass, who is charming and not remotely neutral. There is a succession crisis, an emperor who is dying, a poetry contest that is actually a political manoeuvre, and a war fleet that will want Lsel's territory the moment anyone in the capital remembers it exists.

The novel is about loving a culture that would erase yours, which Mahit does, having grown up on Teixcalaanli epics she can quote better than most citizens.

The imago machine is also the plot's hard question. If fifteen predecessors are riding in your head, whose judgement is it when you decide something, and what does a station do when the empire learns the technology exists?

It is dense with invented literature, court etiquette and untranslatable jokes, and the first fifty pages ask you to hold a great deal without explanation. Push through, because the payoff is a thriller with a murder, a coup and a fleet, run at speed.

Martine writes the sensation of being condescended to by people you admire better than almost anyone, which is the actual experience of the book.

Best for readers who want political science fiction in which the weapons are allusions, and for anyone who has ever loved a culture that would not love them back.