Arkady Martine, ‘A Memory Called Empire’ (2019), ‘A Desolation Called Peace’ (2021)

 

The first volume in Martine's Teixcalaan dyad, A Memory Called Empire (2019), was one of the hits of its season: winning the Hugo, nominated for the Nebula and the Clarke, widely praised (as you can see from its cover blurbs). It’s a cleverly-written, intricate space opera that is ‘about’, in the broadest sense, empire: in this case the Tleixcalaan empire, which combines (a) a high degree of filigree social formality and hierarchy, ritual, poetry, culture and architecture with (b) a high-powered spacefleet militarism that sweeps through the galaxy crushing all before it. We come at this vast, rather-Roman, just-a-little-Japanese, quasi-Byzantine space empire (Martine is a scholar of Byzantine and medieval Armenian history) from the outside. The story opens on an onion-layered space habitat called Lsel, its 30,000 inhabitants making a living via, I think it is, space mining. Lsel sort-of is and sort-of isn’t in the Tleixcalaanli imperial ambit, and it is a major plot-driver of the novel whether the emperor will allow their semi-independence to continue, or will actually annex them into the empire (Darth Vader replying to Lando Calrissian’s outraged ‘that was never a part of our agreement’ with: ‘it would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.’)

Lsel’s previous ambassador to the Tleixcalaanli homeworld, Yskandr, has died after a twenty year stint of ambassadoring. His replacement is the novel’s protagonist: Mahit Dzmare, who gets the job despite being young and inexperienced, embassy-wise. She at least has the advantage of an implant called an ‘imago’. What's that, you ask? Well Lsellians use implanted devices called imagos to benefit from the life-experience and wisdom of older, wiser individuals, whose consciousness is uploaded thereunto. Over time the simulated personality of the imago merges with the actual personality of the bearer. But there are some problems with Mahit's imago. One is that the last time Yskander visited his home-habitat was fifteen years previously, so the imago-Yskander Mahit carries to Tleixcalaan is fifteen years out of date. Another is that it turns out that actual Yskander, having gotten embroiled in imperial politics, was murdered, and the murder is being covered up. A third is that Mahit’s imago malfunctions soon after she arrives in the imperial centre. Then there’s the briar-patch complexity and danger of imperial court politics to navigate, Mahit nearly gets blown up in a bomb attack, the elderly emperor is dying and doesn’t have an heir, and so on. There’s also, waiting in the wings, a menacing alien civilisation that might be readying to attack. It’s all nicely done; Martine manages to convey a lot of worldbuilding data, or more precisely society-building data, without clogging a very serviceable throughline story and mystery. There’s the hint of romance between Mahit and her imperial liaison Three Seagrass (Tleixcalaanli names are all number + object; such that in this world Ronnie Barker would be called ‘Four Candle’) and Mahit comes perilously close to falling under the spell of Tleixcalaanli charm, as—we discover—Yskandr did before her. But the real emotional heart of the story is Mahit’s growing relationship with first fifteen-years-out-of-date Yskandr and later, in a slightly awkward interior menage-a-trois, with just-before-he-was-murdered Yskandr as well. The novel ends with Mahit and her two internal Yskandrs (Yskandrae? Yskandrim?) repudiating the empire and its alluring but toxic beauties, and returning home.

Nicely done but hardly, I thought at the time, earth-shattering: there are plenty of imperial space-operatic works in the SF backlist after all, and this one doesn’t have the deftness and charm of (say) Banks’s Culture, or the economic thought-through complexity of a Charles Stross composition, or the scope of a Lois McMaster Bujold, or the thrilling oddness of Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. But it’s perfectly fine.

Several critics—and the author herself, as evidenced in the book’s dedication—noted that A Memory Called Empire is a novel about the dangerous appeal of imperial cultures. Martine would not be the first scholar simultaneously to deplore the rapacious violence inherent to an imperial project like the Byzantine and to fall in love with Byzantine art and culture. The novel repeatedly tells us, although it doesn’t deign actually to show us, that Tleixcalaanli art and culture are simply superb—there is a reference to a rather unenticing-sounding ‘seventeen-thousand-line poem which described the city’s architecture’ for instance—but nobody is going to say that the Aeneid justifies the Roman empire, any more than they’d say that Dickens and Jane Austen justify the British. Reading A Memory Called Empire I had a different thought, bothered as I was that the Tleixcalaan empire as portrayed didn’t seem to me to square the circle of archaic social mores and heirarchies and super-advanced space-tech and in-effect beyond-scarcity galactic sweep. I came to the epigraph to chapter 7 (Martine supplies each chapter with a Frank Herbertian set of epigraphs from notional in-imperial texts):

[…] whilst Tleixcalaanli literature and media remain a mainstay of the 15-24 age group’s entertainment preferences, this survey also reports large numbers of Lsel youth whose primary reading material is by Lsel or Stationer authors. Particular emphasis should be placed on short fiction, both prose and graphic, distributed in pamphlets or perfect-bound codexes, both of which are easily constructed by every tier’s plastifilm printer. These pamphlets and codexes are often composed by the same people who consume them as entertainment (i.e. the 15-24 age group) without the approval of intervention of the Heritage Board for Literature. —report on “Trends in Media Consumption,” commissioned by the Aknel Amnardbat for Heritage excerpt.

It only goes to show: you can build starships that traverse the galaxy and implants that contain whole deceased consciousnesses, but you can’t get the plural of codex (‘codices’) right. The point of this is not the strange in-world archaism of its samizdat productions (pamphlets, plastifilm books and so on) but the fact of them at all. Which is to say, this is fanwriting, and Martine is gesturing towards a future that includes AO3. The first sentence of the chapter that follows, which begins ‘the fan-vaulted roof of the Palace-Earth ballroom …’, seems to me a sly reference to the fact. Nothing wrong with fanwriting of course, but it in turn made me wonder if this novel is less a meditation and dramatization of actual empires, like the Byzantine or British, so much as it refracts SF’s fascination with galactic empire, in a metafictional move that acknowledges how appealing so many of us find these star-spanning imperiums. We love them, though we know empire as such to be a violent and oppressive geopolitical idiom.

At any rate, now we have the follow-up volume: A Desolation Called Peace, recently shortlisted for this year’s Arthur C Clarke award.

It’s not a terrible novel, but it’s not nearly as good as A Memory Called Empire. Adding a further 500 pages does not very much amplify the world-building richness to the initial conceit. Instead we get a conventional space-opera/alien threat storyline, revisiting our favourite characters from the first novel and ranging a little further outside Tleixcalaan itself.

A Desolation Called Peace follows straight on from the earlier volume. Ambassador Mahit has persuaded the new empress—who comes over as a thoroughly decent sort, actually—not to invade her homeworld but instead turn the attention of her hideously beweaponed space fleet towards the encroachment of the Scary Space Aliens. These turn out to be a hive mind entity that vermiciously knids its way through its human opponents, scattering corpses left right and centre. And, it being space, up and down as well. Mahit is still ambassador, it seems, but she has retired back to Lsel. Three Seagrass hitch-hikes across space on a series of cargo spaceships to visit Mahit there, which struck me as improbable (try going down to Felixstowe and thumbing a lift from a container ship, see how far it gets you) but also irresponsible, since we discover the fate of the galaxy hinges on her mission, which suggests a more secure and formal approach might be called for.

Then there's Nine Hibiscus, who is the newly appointed supreme commander of the space navy, the so-called yaotlek, charged with winning the war against the alien incursion. And here the novel faltered, I felt. The aliens themselves are effective, if generic, antagonists—they winkle-out and eat pilots from their spacecraft like oysters from a shell, and communicate not with words but a hideous phoneme-less shriek that I imagined sounds something like an old dial-up modem. But where in Memory Martine conveys a convincing sense of office politics—imperial court politics, which the novel renders as a higher-stakes version of the same thing—she really doesn’t capture a convincing sense of the practicalities of military command in Desolation. Early on we get this detail:

She leaned her elbows on the strategy table. There’d be elbowprints later: the soft pillowing of her arms leaving its oils on the matte surface, and she’d have to get out a screen-cleaner cloth to wipe them away. But Nine Hibiscus liked to touch her ship. [13]

Picture General George S Patton leaving an oily mark on a polished table: do you really think he would hurry away, fetch a damp cloth and wipe it away himself? Of course not. He had subalterns to clear up after him, in every single aspect of his day-to-day. He would march off barking an order. Having subalterns to clear up after you is a large part of the point of being a five-star general.

This is not, I think, an incidental observarion. We might, if we were so minded, imagine a non-hierarchical army ... but all armies hitherto have been intensely hierarchical organisations, and the army of an extremely socially-hierarchical top-down authoritarian empire like Tleixcalaan would be so a fortiori. But this isn’t what Martine gives us. We are told (not shown) that Nine Hibiscus commands the fanatical loyalty of her troops, and some space battles are described, swarms of interlinked ‘shard’ fighter-craft sweeping hither and yon like a video game, but the military scenes lack the fictional heft of viability. Sure: this is a space-war and not the Byzantine army marching against the Abassids, but nothing about Nine Hibiscus convinces as not a but the imperial military commander. She’s too nice. She spends her time pondering, agonizing, hosting dinner parties (‘she had planned this meal—a strategy dinner’) and, as we have seen, fetching damp cloths to wipe away the marks she herself had left on the polished surface of her flagship’s polished surfaces. There’s no sense here of what a senior military commander actually spends their time doing: logistics, say. Processing intel and issuing orders. Delegating. Shouting: for as the Duke of Wellington himself so famously said, ‘there’s only one way to win a war—shout, shout and shout again!’ 

But then, everybody is nice in this novel. There’s no coldness and cruelty, nothing of the unnerving sadism that strictly hierarchical societies, especially militaristic ones, inculcate and encourage, nothing of that Lawrentian Prussian Officer grasp of the way having power over another human being gratifies itself via the performance of the humiliation and tormenting of the subaltern. Even the empress is nice. Indeed, the empress in this novel is especially nice, which, I have to say, isn’t how emperor/esses have generally manifested in this Justinian, Caligulan, Stalinesque, Pol-Potian, Trumpian world of ours. There is, it’s true, a certain amount of gross-out and violence, especially in the latter portions of the story, but that’s all focused on the hideous alien threat, which isn’t the point I’m making.

Martine has a habit of italicising words, for no very pressing reason: it’s a species of nerd emphasis (‘Lsel station was little’ [115]; ‘Her hands hurt so badly … “you are fascinating, Mahit … also you’re really pretty naked’ [345]), a mannerism that is all over this book, like a rash. The cliffhanger chapter-endings that were handled well in Memory—unexpected explosions, riots, revelations—are watered-down affairs in this novel, often relying on alarms going off, or I should say alarms going off (‘the proximity alarms on the pilots’ deck of the Station went off at once’ [103]: ‘the entire spaceport seemed to explode with noise … the shrill, incessant scream of an evacuation alarm’ [354]).

The command of language is often off. From a sex scene: ‘Mahit was viciously, delightedly sure that when she got her hand between her legs she’d find her dripping wet’—but vicious means pertaining to vice: wickedness, immorality or depravity, and that’s not what Martine means here (savagely, I suppose). And the plotting just wasn’t as clever as the first novel, a fact I think Martine knows, which is why she occasionally felt the over-compensatory need to prod her readers: ‘that was fucking clever’ [277]—it’s not, on this occasion, actually. (Later: ‘“Oh clever,” said Five Agate’). The aliens turn out to be a fungally-infected hive-mind, not malign (not, we might say, vicious) so much as incapable of comprehending human individuality, and the compromise that is reached to end the war is thin and unconvincing, both on its own terms and as a dramatic pay-off to such a lengthy novel. More interesting aspects of the worldbuilding were left unexplored. In particular, there’s huge potential in exploring the way the ‘imagos’ work. There is a passing reference to ‘people who ended up with incompatible imagos’ [102]—the novel specifically makes the gender dysmorphia connection (‘[people] whose gender identity was stronger than they had thought it was and found a cross-gender memory match unbearable’)—but that’s all we get, and Mahit’s three-ply subjectivity becomes less, not more, pronounced as the novel goes on. And the fan-flattery felt less organic in this novel, and so more egregious: at one point Mahit goes to an actual kiosk and buys a literal pulp SF magazine (printed, we're told, ‘on paper, made from flattened pulp rag’): ‘The Perilous Frontier, starring Captain Cameron’. Right. Or I should say, right.

All this doesn’t altogether sink the novel: the story moves along, driven by this exterior threat narrative, and by the carried-over momentum of ‘I wonder what the characters from that first novel are up to now?’ But it’s a markedly less-well-achieved novel than Memory, and I was a little surprised to see it shortlisted for the Clarke. But second guessing the Clarke judges' rationales is a mug's game in which I shall not partake.