Books I Didn't Finish: A Memory Called Empire

Going into Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, there were a few reasons I thought I wasn’t going to finish it.

The first reason is that I’m just generally not a fan of space opera or space opera-esque sci-fi. I prefer my SF softer and smaller scale; anything that’s set more than a century from the present day or outside of our solar system tends to lose my interest fairly quickly. Books like this, which are set millenia into the future and depicting human cultures that are so divergent from ours that they may as well be fantasy are usually a non-starter.

But this didn’t actually bother me as much as I thought it would. Martine doesn’t go completely hog wild with the science fictional aspects like some SF authors do, which keeps things feeling relatable and grounded.

The second reason I might have stopped reading A Memory Called Empire is that it’s one of those genre novels that’s at least 70% world-building, with lots of supposedly fascinating digressions to discuss the poetry, history and language of the book’s setting, and my thoughts on that issue have been exhaustively detailed.

But to my surprise, this was once again not really an issue. The plot embedded into all of that setting detail is actually fairly gripping, moves at a nice fast pace, and the book itself doesn’t seem too long, unlike many chunky SFF novels.

No, the reason I stopped reading A Memory Called Empire a mere 22% of the way through is…a lot simpler.

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that I’ve been randomly italicizing words, putting emphasis on them for no apparent reason. Is that kind of frustrating? Does it make the post hard to read? Well good, because that means you’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to try to read A Memory Called Empire, which does this a whole fucking lot, frequently combined with using ellipses…for emphasis. And also. Stoccato. Sentences. Like when. You’re writing. A really annoyed. Tweet. And you’re like? Breaking up your sentences? Like this? Like you’re so mad? You can’t even?

The full impact of all of this is that it feels like you’re reading someone’s off-the-cuff blog post rant instead of a novel. When I say the over-excited italics happen a whole fucking lot, I mean it’s almost multiple times per page, on every page of the book. I’m not exaggerating. This, more than the wiki-like delving into the linguistics of Teixcalaanli poetry or the fact that the book is tackling a genre I’m just not that interested in to begin with, killed my desire to keep going stone dead.

…Okay, there were some other reasons besides the italics. I liked the fact that the book’s exposition dumps were mostly about the culture of the Texcalaanli empire instead of its technology—the book only goes into detail about one piece of future-tech, and it’s vital to the plot—but infortunately that culture isn’t terrible interesting. If you’ve consumed any sort of media about big space empires before, you’ve probably already seen an exact version of it; basically, it’s the third option that isn’t either a Warhammer 40,000 style fascist hellscape or Space Rome.

So lots of clean shiny architecture, rigid professional hierarchies, people have numbers in their names, the empire supposedly only annexes planets that want to join up but oh uh maybe they’re being a bit more trigger-happy with the colonialism than they’re letting on, the capital (which is called the City of course) looks orderly and peaceful but is actually a nest of political backstabbing and assassination…I don’t need to go into it in more detail, right? This is all extremely familiar.

I also wasn’t terribly enamoured with any of the characters. The protagonist’s only real personality trait is a huge obsession with imperial culture, and in her ambassador role she displays levels of confidence and competence that seem strangely at odds with her internal narration (admittedly this might have been intentional, given the main technological premise of the book). The other characters are interesting when they’re acting like mysterious agents of the imperial bureaucracy, but once the protagonist gets to know them better and they let their guard down they start to feel like they were plucked out of a coffeeshop AU fanfic. Also, I had an extremely hard time pinning down what age anyone is supposed to be—the three primary characters in the first quarter of the book turn out to be way younger than they seemed. Maybe that doesn’t bother other people, but it’s one of my personal bugbears.

It’s a shame, because before I became overwhelmed by italics and lost interest in the characters, I was quite keen on A Memory Called Empire. I was genuinely impressed with how quickly it gets going and how small-scale and focused it is for a space opera novel. I wish other genre fiction of all stripes would emulate those qualities. Just please, for the love of god, leave the italics behind.