My brother shoved this book by Arkady Martine at me and told me I had to read it because it’s so good.
He was right.
It’s a space opera with a whole lot of political intrigue, so if that’s your jam, I really don’t think you could do better than this book.
It takes place thousands of years in the future. Humans have migrated off Earth and onto other planets and space stations.
The planet at the center of the current empire is called Teixcalaan, and the empire is the Teixcalaan empire.
The story is told in third person limited with our main character Mahit Dzmare, newly appointed ambassador of Lsel Station to the Teixcalaan empire.
Stationers are just as human as Teixcalaan, but the Teixcalaan don’t act like it. Mahit gets called a barbarian to her face many times throughout the course of this book.
Stationers also tend to be taller than Teixcalaanzim, which struck me as weird. If you grew up on a space station, wouldn’t you have less access to nutrients and water, not to mention sunlight, than someone living on a planet? Wouldn’t that make you shorter in general?
I suspect it was another way for Martine to draw comparisons to the Teixcalaan empire and the empires we have/had here on Earth, but that one didn’t strike me as believable.
The rest of it struck me as believable because people are people and empire’s gonna empire whether they’re on Earth, Teixcalaan, or space.
Lsel Station is a space station on the edge of the Teixcalaan empire. At the moment they have good relations with the empire and they trade goods back and forth, but that relationship is also fragile. The threat of Teixcalaan deciding to absorb Lsel Station into the empire is constantly hanging over their heads.
A big part of Mahit’s job is to prevent that from happening.
Unfortunately she’s been sabotaged and her predecessor was probably murdered.
A big part of the intrigue involved in this plot is that Lsel stationers have a secret they really don’t want anyone to know about. Especially not the empire. They have the ability to implant someone’s memory into another person’s brain.
The device used is called an imago and candidates for imago are chosen very carefully based on their personality similarities to the last person to have the imago. The idea is that makes it easier for the two personalities to meld and eventually become one, but it’s a process that takes months and a whole lot of training and therapy.
Unfortunately, Mahit had to cut short her training and therapy because, thanks to her predecessor’s sudden death (probably by murder) the empire has requested a replacement be sent ASAP.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Mahit’s imago is 15 years out of date because that’s the last time her predecessor, Yskander, returned to Lsel Station to have his memories uploaded.
So she really has no idea what’s going on.
Just to put the icing on the cake, almost as soon as she reaches Teixcalaan, her imago machine stops working.
Was it sabotage? Or simply what happens when you try to go into the field too soon after having your imago installed?
Mahit has to figure all that out while also trying to figure out what Yskander promised the Emperor, and still obtaining her objective of keeping Lsel Station independent of the empire.
Fortunately, she has a very smart, very capable assistant, Three Seagrass, who also happens to be super cute and super into Mahit.