![]() Whilst embodying the living spirit of Yskandr Aghavn. Them a kind of joint entity, a person that is still entirely Mahit Dzmare ![]() To Yskandr’s memories, experience and knowledge, but also creates of the two of Her an imago, a digital copy of her predecessor that allows her not only access In the ambassador’s apartments, her hosts do not know that she carries within Their collective memory and body of knowledge. Until now remained ignorant of Lsel Station’s reliance on symbiosis to preserve Largely incuriousĪbout Stationer culture, language and social mores, the Teixcalaanlizlim have When Mahit learns that Yskandr Aghavn, the former ambassador, is dead, she quickly comes to suspect that he has been murdered.įluent in Teixcalaanli and steeped in City culture and politics from a youngĪge, Mahit is viewed by her Teixcalaanlizlim hosts as a barbarian. As a new and inexperienced negotiator, she must both seek to maintain the good diplomatic relations that have been established, whilst at the same time endeavouring to discover exactly what happened to her predecessor and what he had been planning. When Lsel Station’s ambassador to Teixcalaan stops communicating with home, Mahit is hastily dispatched to the City in his place. It is nonetheless proudly independent, and determined to preserve its integrity against the vast and ancient neighbouring empire of Teixcalaan. Lsel Station is a relatively young polity, its history spanning just fourteen generations. Mahit is a native of Lsel Station, the hollow bathysphere that is the population centre of the Lsel system, a small group of uninhabitable planets whose metallic ores form the main export and livelihood of the thirty thousand souls for whom Lsel Station is home. The protagonist of Arkady Martine’s debut A Memory Called Empire is Mahit Dzmare. Being honest about this, rather than attempting to squeeze space opera inside an ill-fitting science fictional rationale, not only makes better sense in terms of writing criticism, it actually renders the genre more enjoyable, engaging and rewarding, as Strahan himself put it. The paraphernalia of most space opera – planet-spanning empires, faster-than-light travel, jump-gates, fleets of intergalactic battle-cruisers, sworn allegiances and deadly betrayals – is surely the stuff of fantasy by any other name, and as the most popular recent TV franchises demonstrate, this kind of epic fantasy draws much of its inspiration either directly from realworld history, or from the fiction derived from it. ![]() As a baseline summary, hers was actually pretty fair, one that caused me to consider the nature and purpose of historical fiction more generally and how closely allied that genre is with space opera, a comparison that sounds unlikely but that becomes more resonant the more I think about it.Īs Jonathan Strahan said on a recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast (do listen, it’s great), ‘any stirring space opera adventure is by its nature epic fantasy,’ and for me at least, looking at space opera through the lens of historical fiction has come to seem far more apposite and useful than trying to interrogate it as science fiction. ![]() I could have gone on about how unfair a judgement that was on the magnificence of what had been achieved, but then, I realised, I couldn’t exactly tell her she was wrong, either. “All those people in cloaks and big dresses, politicking and then having their heads cut off. “I don’t think so,” she said, once I’d finished rhapsodising.
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