To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles – this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Arkady Martine’s sequel to her Hugo-winning novel A Memory Called Empire picks up two months after the end of Book 1.
The hardliners at Lsel Station have gotten exactly what they wanted. The Teixcalaan Empire – notified of a strange new alien race at the edges of the Empire’s reach – has sent their ships to investigate. What they found was an Enemy that can appear out of nowhere and has literally ripped the citizens of one colony planet into pieces. Teixcalaan will have to spend all their resources on the conflict, and if there’s one thing that can distract an empire to the point where it stops expanding and will leave Lsel Station alone, it’s war.
The problem is that war isn’t a weapon, it’s a plague. It spreads out of control faster than anyone can plan for, and before long it’s a problem for everyone, including fanatical Station counselors, a Station ambassador with a secret, a grieving Teixcalaani Information agent, a brilliant fleet commander, a newly crowned emperor (Nineteen Adze, She Who Gleams Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, Her Brilliance), and an eleven-year-old clone of the former Emperor and heir to the sun-spear throne.
When we last saw Ambassador Mahit Dzmare she’d been offered everything she’d ever wanted. She could have any job she could ask for, a home in a place she’d been dreaming of since she was a teenager writing bad Teixcalaani poetry, and what could be a very steamy relationship with her beautiful Teixcalaani cultural liaison, Three Seagrass.
Mahit responded by running all the way back to Lsel Station, for very important reasons that she couldn’t quite put into words. She comes back to a home that frustratingly isn’t home anymore, with a ruling body that’s delighted with the new war that the Empire is about to be waging, and not happy that an obvious Teixcalaani sympathizer is on the Station again.
There’s also the matter of Mahit’s imago. On Lsel Station everyone who can be is implanted with an imago, containing the memories of their predecessor, who was once implanted with an imago of their predecessor, and so on and so on back to the barely-remembered founding of the Station itself. Mahit is now the only person to have two imagos: the 30-years out-of-date damaged (sabotaged?) imago of Yskandr Aghavn, and the more recent imago, taken from Yskandr’s body after his murder and illegally implanted by a Teixcalaani surgeon.
If Lsel’s ruling body finds this out at Mahit’s (absolutely not optional) next medical exam, there’s a 100% chance she won’t live long enough to get off the table.
Cutting the imago-line of Empire-besotted ambassadors out of the heart of Lsel was right; no one should have been heir to Yskandr Aghavn’s memories at all. Dzmare was acceptable collateral.
Over time a person’s personality merges with their imago’s memory; Mahit is still at the stage where she’s having conversations with Yskandr in her head, much more so than when she was first getting to know him back in Book 1. She’s finding out all sorts of things from Yskandr’s memories, things he’s ashamed of, things that can be useful in helping Mahit survive as long as she’s very careful to not say any of it out loud. And the new Yskandr isn’t the only addition to the cast of characters. Where Book 1 was mostly from Mahit’s point of view, this novel is told from several viewpoints, all of them intertwined.
The beautiful Information agent Three Seagrass is still reeling from the death of her best friend, to the point where she can’t even write poetry anymore (for a Teixcalaani that’s about as bad as not being able to get out of bed). She jumps at the chance to insert herself into the middle of Teixcalaan’s new war, and not coincidentally back into Mahit’s life with zero warning. It’s an impulsive, almost criminally dangerous thing to do as a grand romantic gesture, and I loved every moment of it.
We also have the Teixcalaani fleet commander Nine Hibiscus, who’s earned so much undying loyalty from her soldiers that she may have been sent to die in war so she won’t possibly be a rival to the Emperor.
Meanwhile Eight Antidote, the clone of the previous Emperor, is trying to find his place in the rich and complex civilization of Teixcalaan. He also thinks it might also be nice if he could learn everything he needs to in, oh, the next seven years or so before his future of being Emperor of Everything finally arrives. It’s a lot for an eleven-year-old to deal with, especially since the impossibly complex nature of Teixcalaan – where every conversation is a game or a duel – means he’s being pulled by in different directions by different departments, and different factions within each department, that all have very different goals in their new war.
It’s a truly astounding number of different story threads that the author keeps going here, each with their own agenda, their own perspective on the coming war, and their own reason for not being able to actually come out and say what they’re thinking, or planning, or feeling. There are plots and political machinations and romantic entanglements and having to remember that smiling with your teeth showing is a pleasant grin to a Stationer and a threat to a Teixcalaani. And all of it is happening while the unknown Enemy is wiping out entire fleets with weapons that no one has ever even imagined, much less seen.
I am not equipped to run a first-contact scenario, Nine Hibuscus thought, especially when the things being contacted spit ship-dissolving fluids at my people and don’t make understandable noises.
Martine writes some truly horrifying ways for soldiers to die (made even worse by a technology that I first thought might be a little problematic and then decided it might be the WORST IDEA IN THE WORLD for a war-setting.) The few segments that are narrated from the Enemy’s point of view show that they don’t think in any way like humans do. This blends nicely with everyone else’s viewpoint, since there’s a lot, and I mean a LOT, of de-humanization (de-personization) going on here.
It’s not just generals and government factions talking about acceptable losses, or plotting to destroy an entire planet of sentient beings, it’s how everyone treats anyone else who doesn’t fit their politics or their view of a perfect society (seems rather timely, doesn’t it, het hem current US political climate). The Lsel ruling body treats anything pro-Teixcalaani like an infectious disease, to the point where they’ll destroy “dangerous” imago-lines and dictate what children learn in school so they can be implanted with the “right” imagos. And the Teixcalaani treat everyone who isn’t part of the Empire as a barbarian; “world” means The Empire, someone speaking “language” is speaking Teixcalaani, and the fact that Nine Seagrass loves everything about Mahit that’s not-Teixcalaani is the absolute worst thing that Mahit can imagine.
She didn’t know what to do, and Yskandr didn’t know what to do, and Three Seagrass was going to keep hurting her like she had yesterday, keep thinking of her as my clever barbarian and not as Mahit Dzmare, no matter how many times they kissed, and there was no such thing as safety and no such thing as going home.
This sequel has everything I enjoyed in the previous book, in a universe that keeps expanding. There’s still the clever nicknames (“Reed” for Three Seagrass, “Mallow” for Nine Hibiscus), the dazzling Teixcalaani technology with holographic controls that can be moved with a flick of the wrist and make the planning of a space battle look like a dance. The excerpts at the start of each chapter can be pop fiction, travelogues, interoffice memos, and a whole range of other sources that add weight and depth to the world Martine has created, and which echo (or predict) what’s happening in the story. (One of my favorites of those was a snippet of a breathless restaurant review, paired with a text message asking someone to make sure a captain didn’t smuggle anything else in with his shipment of fishcakes, oh and he’s also fired.)
Add to this the ongoing First Contact with the Enemy, and the struggle to find a way to talk with something who’s language makes humans physically ill to listen to. There are more details about what the inside of Lsel Station or a Teixcalaani flagship looks like, including a comic book store, a series of terraced pools inside a hydroponics garden, and small cat-like creatures that have gotten inside the ship’s air ducts. That’s right, a space ship with an infestation of space kittens. I freaking love this book.
Three Seagrass could imagine the picture she made: Information envoy in coral-orange, the brightest uniform in this sea of Fleet grey-and-gold, with a kitten on her shoulder. An absurd picture. Possibly a threateningly absurd one.
The author creates scenes of fierce loyalty, sacrifice, teeth-gritting fury, problematic romance, and moments of despair that are so sharp they feel almost bright. Multiple times the characters are in a situation where the possibility of death is right there, sometimes as close as a pistol pointed right under their chin, and they have to talk, very fast, and try to find the right combination of words that will solve things instead of just shouting could you wait to do the horrible thing you’re planning on doing for ONE MORE SECOND?!
Book 1 was about memory, Book 2 is about language (most importantly accepting that someone is enough of a person to want to learn how to speak with them). But I think there’s also questions that are being asked here, and they aren’t so much about war, they’re about peace. What does “peace” look like? What is it worth? Does having your greatest enemy distracted by a conflict that could spill over at any time really count as being “safe”? Maybe we need to consider the idea that when someone’s pushing a military option to “make the nation safe”, what they really mean is “it’s in our best interest to make sure the military is always needed by dragging us into this war, and the next one, and the next, forever.”