2019 Dragon Award Finalist, Best SF Novel: A Memory Called Empire

The Dragon Award

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Greetings, friends and neighbors out there in Internet land, most especially those of you with an interest in the 2019 Dragon Awards! And for my family who have somehow wound up here, y'all would be AMAZED at how hard I am working right now!

Somewhat condensed versions of this review, mostly eliminating references to Dragon Award Finalist status, can be found on Amazon (where you can vote) and Goodreads. When those reviews go live, I'll post the links in the comments.

This is a first novel, and as such, to be a finalist for the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel is quite an achievement. I believe the author, who writes under the pen name of Arkady Martine, is still a relatively young person, and thus we might be getting a first look at someone who will be winning awards for quite a long time.

Not for this one, though. Oh, please, do not let this book win the Best Science Fiction of the Year award.

The story develops into a perfectly good murder mystery, with intrigue, some small amounts of excitement, very nicely done. Unfortunately, it drags on, and on, until I was hoping for a power failure.

Had I NOT been reading this book as a self-induced assignment to review Dragon Award finalists, I suspect there is a good chance that I wouldn't have gotten past the Prelude. That runs, according the Kindle software on my laptop, about six pages. There is SOME narrative here, but it is surrounded by so much purpler prose that I found it truly aversive. Still, it was just the Prelude. I soldiered on...

...and came close to a sort of reader-death-coma with the beginning of Chapter One, because the prose was SO purple; but wait, that was just a quote from some historical document. I'll let it pass. The next pre-story chapter heading was refreshing, in that it was the bureaucratic requirements for the kinds of paperwork needed for entry into the main kingdom. (And we are about to meet the POV character, Mahit the Ambassador.)

Pathetic, it is, when I take some ease in reading (fictional) requirements for passport control.

The actual chapter wasn't nearly as nice. Third sentence:

Thus the first time she saw the City with her own flesh eyes, not in infofiche or holograph or imago-memory, it was haloed in white fire and shone like an endless glittering sea: an entire planet rendered into an ecumenopolis, palatially urban. (Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan) (p. 18). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. )

No. I tell you again, NO. NOTHING in a book you want a lot of people to read is “palatially urban” or an “ ecumenopolis,” and if you wish to write about halos of white fire and endless glittering seas...then I have nothing for you. By the way: any large body of water in sunlight is an endless glittering sea. There are no new images being brought here, and it's tedious.

The utter banality of big words run together in endless sentences eases up considerably by the end of the first chapter, but the second starts just as poorly:

The suite had been aired out before Mahit arrived—or at least she hoped it had, and assumed it had by virtue of the open windows and the antiseptic scent of cleaning fluid that the air coming in through those windows and blowing their draperies back hadn’t managed to dispel—but it was nevertheless very much a place someone had lived in, and for a long time. (Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan) (p. 39). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.)

Yes, that's all one sentence. And according to my Kindle, I'm on page 39. If this isn't something I'm REQUIRING myself to read, the book gets closed and returned. And I'm pretty flabbergasted that NONE of this even crops up in the Amazon reviews, but never mind.

Here's the TRULY tragic bit: somewhere in the vicinity of page 50, I noticed that the style had eased up, a bit, and that some of the dialogue was FUNNY. Yes, there was too much reliance on hidden knowledge of some rare ambassadorial expertise that we don't have, but it wasn't the killer that the purple prose had been. (It also didn't stop; throughout the book, the conversations that Mahit has with EVERYONE are subject to eternal internal: “What does this smile mean, how do I move my eyes,“ things of that sort. Just accept it, and drive on.

And drive on YOU MUST if you are to catch some of the brilliantly wicked (or is that wickedly brilliant? ) dialogue that passes between Mahit and her new associates. Some folks complained that their names are stupid, but I find that ridiculous. There's no reason to think that naming conventions we are familiar with will survive into the far future, or alternative universe, or new universe. Actually, I think names like Six Direction (the emperor) and Three Seagrass (her assigned assistant (ish)) are kind of cute, and didn't interfere with the story at all.

If you bailed early, you would ALSO miss the ability that the author has to faithfully render the chaos we have going on in our heads when we are in a crisis situation. Mahit is meeting with Three Seagrass, and Fifteen Engine, when a bomb explodes near them. She is frantically trying to process the events, her only contact with the society is incapacitated, she has to deal with seemingly cyborg-like police units, and she finds herself thinking about points of grammar, and whether the right forms of language are in use, and of the papers that may be written. In my experience, that is EXACTLY the sort of things our minds do, to give us relief from the nightmare we happen to have fallen into. I think that's an excellent bit of observation, and it's written as close to perfectly as anything we have the right to expect.

Oh, alas, for there is one more bit that doesn't belong: the LENGTH.

If this book was indie published, these would be EXACTLY the sort of first-novel mistakes I would expect. When I encounter these, I usually suggest that the author get into a writers' group, and develop some plain-speaking friends with good language skills. This book, though, is published by a major house. I find it VERY difficult to believe that an editor didn't see the issue with starting the book off with such melodramatic language, and that they didn't take a red pen to the last 300 pages, and SLASH. Take it for what it's worth, and it may not be worth much, but I DON'T think they did the author any favors, at all, with their treatment of her work.

She has a GREAT set-up. While I don't really believe in her space station, and there are some unaddressed science issues (how does a person who lived forever in free-fall, or micro-gravity at best, suddenly adapt to walking around on a planet?) I think the portrayal of the culture shock she experiences is very nicely done. I also thought the single science issue introduced is a great concept. The imago system allows the experiences of past generations to be resident in a new host, and she has an older version herself, with an obsolete personality of the prior ambassador. I ALSO like the fact that it's central to the entire story, and not some jambo-slamb-whizz-bang prop introduced just for flash. Good work, indeed.

As it is, it has a million dollars worth of potential. For most people, however, I fear that the slow slow dreary painful beginning is going to turn people off, big time, and thus, they won't see the nicely done parts.

YMMV, but in my opinion, if this one wins the award, then it's conclusive proof that the fix is in.

Peace be on your household.