A Memory Called Empire

Great plot and world development but gave up the will to read a couple of times and thought of returning... It's like the author consciously decided that only my most dedicated readers should make it to the end... Was hoping for a gift for completing it but was disappointed...

It had a plot and a good idea but then it just kept painfully stretching with those awful names. I tried very hard to go at it for weeks but couldn't. Try Jack Vance, I stayed it after this and is unputdownable

Undemanding, dull, juvenile adventure with a thin veneer of simplistic socio-politics and the mildest of clean LGBTQ romance, written by someone with a barely teenage sensibility who probably thinks Enid Blyton is too edgy.I’d be tempted to say it’s YA in disguise, if I didn’t think that even that cynical, marketing-led mock-genre’s worst remainder-bin fodder might have reasonable grounds to feel insulted by the comparison.It’s fairly derivative out of the gate, with liberal swipes from obvious sources, but the writing was lively enough at the start to hold my interest and the take on the secondary personality download trope seemed more interesting than Yoon Ha Lee’s.You don’t have to wait long for the first arrival from Deus Ex Machina Airlines, and the techno-fail gimmick just put me in mind of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, which is pretty grim company. Then the Famous Three have a squee party and head off to explore the spooky old mortuary, and it all just falls apart.The Three Find-Outers continue to shuffle through a sequence of blank-walled rooms droning exposition at each other, while nothing else keeps happening, over and over.The publisher’s product description makes an aspirational comparison with Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, which is just speaking ill of the dead.I started it because of the publisher’s initial release hype and blurbs from names you don’t usually find alongside the inevitable suspects, and I read it to the last page with increasingly grim determination.I have nothing to show except a grubby ring around the bathtub of my self-esteem and 99p less in my bank account.I definitely won’t be back for the sequel.

I started reading this expecting something, more. (Perhaps along the lines of 'Geta' aka 'Courtship Rite' by Donald Kingsbury). This novel is not that accomplished or interesting.Instead it is a long hard slog of a novel that, while it has some very interesting ideas, is more of a 'fish out of water' type story mixed in with a whodunnit and a sprinkling of palace intrigue. It's certainly not the worst I have read but it is nowhere near the best either.In the appendix the author writes he came up with this idea while studying another language. Boy does it show! Huge chunks of the novel are devoted to the Teixcalaan language in an attempt to give us some idea of their world view but, by the end of it, I wound up with the impression of an Aztec/Mayan knockoff, with the serial numbers painted out and a gob of high tech slapped on the top.There were moments where the narrative picks up but I realised I could not tell you the name of single character or what they looked like a few minutes after I finished the book.It made that little impact on me.

Let's start with the title.Because it was the title that first caught my attention and made this stand out. It was intriguing, mysterious? What exactly did it mean? And it led to the blurb, which was also intriguing but didn't explain the title, and to reading the story.Which still didn't exactly explain the title. The Empire mentioned is obviously the great Star-spanning political edifice that is Teixcalaan, within which the story exists and around which it revolves. But what of the Memory part? Does that refer to the secret technology from outside the Empire that allows thoughts, experiences, memories and personalities to be recorded and passed on? Vital for the small space-station culture of Lsel, where valuable experience and knowledge needs to be retained. But open to abuse and to having unknown but possibly dangerous results if introduced to Teixcalaan, where neuro-science generally is restricted.Or does the title refer to something even deeper? Perhaps to the way in which Teixcalann is itself controlled and influenced by its past, by the huge weight of culture and literature and history that defines and directs it - so that the memory of what it was controls what it is. The Empire exists as much in its own memory as in the present.Or perhaps it's both. And that sort of ambiguity, the multiple possible meanings of words in Teixcalaan is a theme that runs throughout the book. Everything that is said, everything that is written, is at once both cultural and political. All meanings are shaded, and what is said is never what is meant.In this fast, culture rich and treacherous Empire there are numerous currents flowing. There is the political intrigue driven by a dying Emperor, there is the mystery of what happened to the previous Ambassador from Lsel, there are the rifts between the rulers of Lsel Station itself.Central to the story is the new Ambassador from Lsel, who must adapt to a vast new culture, find out what happened to her predecessor, discover who sabotaged her own neuro-tech, and try to keep Lsel from being swallowed by the Empire.The author does an excellent job of weaving all these elements into a brilliant, fast-paced and absorbing novel. The title is perfect. I look forward to reading the next book in the series, no matter what it's called.

An Ambassador from a space station is sent to replace her deceased predecessor and find out what went on.She has the benefit of an implant with a recording of her predecessors memories and personalities, last backed up 15 years ago.The game is afoot !!!And then straight away it isn’t. The implant fails and our heroine is left to wander around an Empire with her two new friends trying to figure out what is going on.And essentially this is where it all falls down for me. There’s some decent stuff on the architecture and design of the Empire we visit and an attempt at aligning the language that is spoken to poetry. So that the meanings of the words spoken by the Empire folk she is dealing with are hidden within obtuse and flowery prose. And everyone is rated by how clever their poems are. Ah yes, you’re thinking, the kind of pretentious waffle that pseuds will vote for to make them look clever come awards time.But from the point of implant failure to about 75% in the book it is just three people constantly over analysing others words and actions whilst sat around coffee tables (great world building) and our heroine being repetitively introspective.Things pick up but not to any great extent and the whole thing is really just one big non event.One big plot point I will mention is that a key factor is the previous ambassadors implant, but because plot, it is made super easy barely an inconvenience for our heroine to get hold of it, even though everyone wants it.There’s very little action and , with the author being prone to over stating everything , very little tension. You really are bored to tears by the characters in here..who read like well meaning student types rather than professionals.

I just wanted to pitch in with a bit of an antidote to the particularly hostile reviews that have floated to the top here. It's not the most outstanding scifi i have read this year but it's neither the most disappointing either. It's definitely an attempt, and a pretty good one at that, to write thoughtful and considered scifi that represents the intricacies of diplomacy and their dependence on subtleties of language and custom. To be an emissary at the court of a powerful and possibly dangerous neighbour is a delicate position, and to be thrust into such a position unexpectedly is a good basis for a drama. As stated by the author her story has its origins in her love for Byzantine history where similar dynamics could have well been in play.So why the damning reviews? I wonder if it's because it doesn't conform to the increasingly dominant trope of shoot'em'up, space marine, jackboots in space formula that seems to be churned out on an industrial pace, probably by a rudimentary AI? It occurs to me that right now, scifi is generally regressing back to what it was in the 1930s, cowboys and indians in space. One has to sift far and wide these days to find anything that can be compared with the golden age of hi-concept scifi. Here is a worthwhile example and i will be checking out the sequel when it arrives.