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A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Tor, 2020, 460 p, including 11 p Glossary of Persons, Places and Objects and 2 p Acknowledgements.

Mahit Dzmare has spent her young life on Lsel Station, an artificial habitat on the borders of known space. Though the Station is independent – and keen to remain so – Mahit has always been fascinated by the literature of the neighbouring Teixcalaan Empire. Her affinity with Teixcalaan culture and her match with Lsel’s Ambassador to the Empire, Yskandr Aghavn, sees her chosen to replace him. This is made easier by a piece of highly confidential Lsel technology, the imago machine, an implant which gives access to the memories of the donor. But Yskandr last came home fifteen years before and so, when the call comes for Mahit to travel to Teixcalaan, The Jewel of the World, to replace Yskandr, her implant’s memories are long out of date. Her mission is to try as far as possible to prevent Lsel’s absorption by the Empire.

On arrival she finds herself precipitated into a crisis. Yskandr is dead, the Emperor is ageing, the succession uncertain and revolution astir. Despite the Teixcalaanli regarding implants as immoral (though they cover their faces with something called a cloudhook, which gives them two-way access to an internet-like network,) Yskandr had, in return for Lsel’s continuing independence, bargained with the Emperor to provide him with one as a means to give his consciousness immortality. But other influential Teixcalaanlitzim, especially those who seek his power, were and are working against this.

On inspecting Yskandr’s body (the Teixcalaanli have no problems with keeping bodies on ice for long periods but find Lsel’s funeral practices distasteful, non-Teixcalaanli are routinely referred to as barbarians,) Mahit’s imago machine ceases functioning and she has to cope with her new and increasingly dangerous environment with only her Teixcalaanli liaison, Three Seagrass, and her friend, Twelve Azalea, to help her.

The latters’ peculiar appellations are a feature of Teixcalaanli life. There is no explanation for this in the text (and why should there be?) but any Teixcalaanlitzim’s first name is a number – see Nineteen Adze, Thirty Larkspur, Eight Loop, and the Emperor, Six Direction, etc.

As the book progresses Mahit encounters various levels of Teixcalaanli society, all the while wondering if, why, and how Yskandr was murdered and whether her imago machine was deliberately sabotaged by someone back home.

The plot’s resolution is aided by Mahit’s knowledge that Lsel and the Empire are threatened by a species known as Ebrekti inhabiting space beyond the Station,

Teixcalaan society has echoes of the Aztecs – though without the ritual sacrifice – and words such as ezuazuacat and ixplanatlim seem to point to their language, Nahuatl. In this regard the Emperor’s final words “‘I am a spear in the hands of the sun’” seem particularly pointed.

Even though its action is restricted by and large to one planet A Memory Called Empire is Space Opera – of a sort – and is a good enough example of the form. Whether it was worth the Hugo Award it won in 2020 is another matter. At least one sequel (another Hugo winner – in 2022) awaits the reader who wants more.

Pedant’s corner:- “None of them were …” (none of them was… .) “‘How often does that happen,’” (is a question and ought to have a question mark, not a comma, before the end quotation mark. There were many more such examples.) “The jaws of the Empire opening up again, akimbo. Bloody-toothed” (akimbo? How on Earth can opened jaws be positioned on hips? Only arms can be akimbo,) “open maw” (how can a stomach be open?) “she had been Amnardbat’s choice of successors for Yskandr” (choice of successor,) “teeth on the maws of …. parasites” (stomachs don’t have teeth,) “wide jaws akimbo” (again; jaws cannot be placed on hips,) “there are a series” (one series, so: ‘there is a series’.) “One of the sunlit on the edge of the platoon detached themselves” (One …. detached itself.)

Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

Hodderscape, 2024, 296 p. £16.99. Reviewed for ParSec 10.

Welcome to the Grand Abeona Hotel, a once (and still) luxury spacefaring hotel, now a little down on its luck but still presenting a sumptuous face to the universe. Curtis tells us it has ‘class.’ Well, maybe, but as described it has – for 2774 – a decidedly (but deliberate) retro aesthetic, a restrained colour palette, an analogue appearance. Internal communication is by printed paper slips sent in sealed tubes through hydraulic glass pipes. It even has an old-style cinema (which hosts The Shit Movie Club.)

Its manager in 2814, Carl, blagged his way onto the hotel forty years earlier by pretending to be a porter/bell boy. Its 2774 manager Nina took him on and he has worked his way up. Absorbing waifs and strays – or inadvertent stay-ons – seems to be the hotel’s only recruitment policy as this is how Daphne – who bears an echo of the second Mrs De Winter in that she was in service to a domineering employer (but was sent back to retrieve a forgotten muff not aware she was on the last shuttle out) – comes on board. A measure of her diffidence is that Daphne speaks in a s-s-stutter. Back in the day the Abeona used to roam the galaxy almost at random but since Nina’s retirement its schedule has become more regular.

Background information and commentary are vouchsafed to us through intermittent ‘dispatches’ from someone known as The Lamplighter. Through these we discover the political system in this corner of the universe is exploitative. Various planets are systematically stripped of their resources, the workers on these worlds exposed to a harsh existence and left with little to themselves at the end. All this is overseen by a seemingly immortal Emperor, the Great Patrician, against whom the Lamplighter rails in his missives, disseminating descriptions of the Empire as decadent, stagnant, over-stretched, propped up by propaganda and the toil of the workers, and – worse – providing salacious intimate details about the Emperor, suggesting his longevity is merely through the creation of a succession of clones whose heads lie pickled on a shelf somewhere in the Imperial Palace. By decree, all thoughts of life forms outside ‘the Pyramid of Consciousness’ (at the top of which are humans and whose supreme pinnacle is of course the Emperor) are “Absurd, Anti-intellectual and Not allowed.”

Is Curtis perhaps being a little unimaginative here? Emperors and Empires have been a bit passé in SF for some considerable while, after all. And yet they do seem to be making something of a comeback (though under other designations) in the world where her book will be read. I also wondered about the economics of such a travelling resort, we are given no information about such mundanities beyond the fact that maintenance is most likely being skimped.

Successive chapters focus on events occurring to individuals on the ship, mostly hotel workers but with the odd passenger/guest added in – with a potted biography provided for every one of them.

Someone is sending poems, specifically sonnets, and Shakespearean ones at that, to various recipients but this strand seems to be a bit of a red herring and soon peters out.

The Shit Movie Club meets once a week and its present offer is an “over-acted, badly written, glitzy, teeth-rotting affair of the highest order” called Friends from Beyond and is of course a violation of the Pyramid of Consciousness. The staff love it.

A minor strand deals with the Problem Solvers’ Conference held on the hotel, whose attendees have been given a message to decode. Linguist Professor Azad and maths whizz Ooly Mall (a mathemagician) are drawn as one of the pairs to try to solve the puzzle. Their findings trouble them.

The main plot revolves around the identity of the Lamplighter. His, or her, dispatches used to be sent from chance locations but now are seemingly on a steady rota. As a result, agents of the Emperor have come to suspect he, or she, travels on the ship. They are ruthless in their investigations.

There is no dazzling new concept here, no innovation – the story is set in a hotel after all, the events could occur in any similar establishment (or cruise ship) – no deep insight into the human condition, but Curtis writes well enough, though her characters can be broadly brushed. It’s not meant to be anything more than entertainment (which that world in which it will be read certainly sorely needs) but in that it succeeds.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “when he arrived into the lobby” (when he arrived in the lobby.) “‘Aviary law states’” (last time I checked an aviary was for birds. Whatever else it is the Grand Abeona is not a bird. ‘Aviation law’ will not do. ‘Space law’? ‘Interplanetary law’?) “rose to a fresh crescendo” (No, no, no. The crescendo is the rise, not its peak,) “outside of” (just ‘outside,’ no ‘of’,) “the hoi polloi” (I know people misuse the phrase in this way but ‘hoi’ actually means ‘the’ so this reads as ‘the the polloi’.) “‘Who’s language is it?’” (Whose language is it?) “hung a pair of necklaces, either sides of a waxing crescent and waning gibbous, becoming on occasion a whole full moon as they overlapped” (the ‘either’ is odd, ‘moon’ ought to follow gibbous, and the image conjured up actually makes no sense; how can a pair of necklaces resemble both a crescent and a gibbous moon? The geometry is wrong,) Ralf (previously Ralph,) “didn’t ordain to respond” (didn’t deign to respond.) “He was knelt up on the seat” (He was kneeling up on the seat,) “the throw blanket folded neatly on” (just ‘a throw folded neatly on’.) “There were around the half a dozen people still in the running” (There were around half a dozen people…,) “the mesh underside of the catwalk” (not ‘of’, and it ought to simply be ‘the mesh of the catwalk’,) an unindented new paragraph, “a truckload of idiotic aristocrats set to work” (a truckload … sets to work,) “Ephraim relished in the rules” (Ephraim relished the rules,) “bearing down on the Uwade” (bearing down on Uwade,) “his sock draw” (sock drawer,) “same with the trouser draw” (trouser drawer,) “a place to lay low” (to lie low. Annoyingly, ‘lie low’ was used later,) “reached a painful crescendo” (no: ‘reached a painful climax’,) “that clunk-hiss of decompressing air” (it’s not air that escapes when you open a drinks can, it’s CO2,) “vocal chords” (vocal cords,) “the sense he was sat beside her” (sitting, or, seated.)

 

 

Episodes by Christopher Priest

Gollancz, 2020, 360 p

This is a collection of the late author‘s shorter work culled from throughout his career. Each story is prefaced by a ‘Before’ section saying how it came to be written and an ‘After’ section describing how the writing went and where the story was published. Priest’s writing is always controlled and well executed. In general it tends towards a feeling of unease, as if something is lurking below the surface or what has seemed to be reality morphs into something else but here I was surprised by how much of the contents leaned towards horror.

The Head and the Hand. A man who had become famous through allowing himself to be mutilated is persuaded out of retirement for a final cut.

A Dying Fall relates the thoughts that flash through a man’s mind as he is falling in front of a subway train. They are of travelling on a motorway in Belgium and of the training course in parachute jumping/sky diving he took there.

I, Haruspex is, I assume, in the mould of H P Lovecraft. (Priest’s ‘Before’word says it was solicited by a games company wanting something based on that author’s Cthulhu Mythos but he had no familiarity with that at all – similarly I have not. The company, while paying, never used the story and Priest later found a home for it elsewhere.) Effective in its own way it is told in an old-fashioned language of stilted particularity that, for a first person narration, is curiously distanced (not to mention distancing) and overladen with exclamation marks. After consuming his special meals, narrator James Owsley, descendant of a long line of haruspices, can halt or reverse time for a while. Off the Great Hall of his home, Beckon Abbey, lies a hagioscope over a pit which loathsome things are seeking to escape. In a nearby bog a German bomber plane is held in slow suspension as it crashes after being shot down, even though this is 1936. Someone, not a member of its crew, waves to him from the impending wreck and a voice speaks in his head.

Like the author’s novel The Space Machine, written as an hommage to H G Wells, Palely Loitering, a tale of time travel and thwarted love, bears the influence of Edwardian fiction. Despite including space travel (the McGuffin here – called the Flux Channel – was built to help launch a starship on its way,) the story has a resolutely antique feel to it. Its atmosphere of picnics and bandstands, its social and family dynamics were distinctly retro even in the 1979 in which it was first published. After the starship left, three bridges were built across the Flux Channel. The one leading straight across is the ‘Today’ bridge, two others, built at slight angles to the Channel, lead respectively to ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Tomorrow’. Our narrator as a boy one day leapt off the end of the ‘Tomorrow’ bridge and found himself thirty-four years in the future, where a young woman is pointed out to him by a man who says she is waiting for her sweetheart. The reader can from then fill in the gaps but Priest’s execution of the story is impressive.

An Infinite Summer again bears Edwardian hallmarks – but then part of it is set in 1903 where Thomas Lloyd is on the point of proposing to his intended, Sarah, when he is frozen by a camera-like device wielded by someone from the future. The frozen tableaux which result from these capturings can not be seen by contemporary passers-by but only by the unfrozen and the travellers from the future. The effect on Thomas wears off only in 1935 when he is free to move around again but has to wait more years for Sarah to unfreeze. In 1940 he, and Sarah’s image, are caught in the aftermath of the shooting down of a German bomber. The image of one of the bomber’s German crew held in suspension above a river after being captured by a freezer is unforgettable. I note the similarities here between this incident and the one in I Haruspex.

The Ament* is the tale of a man who was once part of a project to film two children, one male and one female, every week, to document changes during their growth and beyond, but who in his adulthood has dreams of committing murder. But are they dreams? The story is told in two alternating voices, his and a third person viewpoint.

The Invisible Men are those (not all men) who are detailed by their USian masters to spy on a British Prime Minister who feels he has to resign due to a financial scandal. (His statement that, “It’s British tradition for a public figure to resign his position if caught in the wrong,” seems altogether quaint now, 50 years after first publication.) His observations of his surroundings on a clandestine meeting on the Norfolk coast with his USian partner – a co-leader of a UK seemingly on the brink of becoming the 51st State – imbue the tale with a sense of foreboding.

The Stooge is employed by a stage illusionist to fake amazement at his tricks on being ‘randomly’ picked from his audience. The story’s title becomes doubly apposite.

In futouristic.co.uk a man responds to an email offering to sell him a time machine. It doesn’t work. For him.

Shooting an Episode presents the ultimate in reality TV, though it’s more like reality streaming. For its subjects no holds are barred. The trouble comes when our narrator has to go in amongst the participants to clean up their mess.

In The Sorting Out Melvina comes home late one night to find her door lying open having been forced. With increasing fear she moves through all her rooms, wondering if the man she has recently dumped has something to do with it, but a phone call reveals he is an hour away. Yet various of her books have been misplaced, their dust covers placed upside down, their normal, random arrangement systematised. One has been glued to a curtain.

In its ‘After’word Priest describes the gathering of books (which is what most readers do) as a kind of quiet madness. Well, all obsessions are. At least it’s a harmless madness.

*Amentia is the condition of feeble-mindedness or other general mental deficiency.

Pedant’s corner: Méliès’ (Méliès’s – especially since the final ‘s’ of Méliès is unsounded, thus demanding the apostrophe ‘s’ for its possessive,) maws (used for ‘mouth’; a maw is of course a stomach,) interlocuter (interlocutor,) aureole (areola,) Mrs Adams’ (Adams’s,) “more yachts were parked further away” (parked? Can you park a yacht?) “the king” (x 2, the King,) “the sort of problems the bank were concerned with” (the bank was concerned with,) soccer (football.)

More Reviews

Hot off the presses and to be read for ParSec, come Birdwatching at the End of the World by G W Dexter – a post-apocalypse novel with a twist – and Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi, seemingly another post-apocalypse novel this time in a world of multiple pandemics where an implantable mRNA vaccine factory will protect you from new viruses.

The twist in Birdwatching at the End of the World is that the survivors are the pupils of a girls’ school located on an island. The pitch writes itself.

Hannu Rajaniemi I know. He used to be part of the same writers’ group as I was before his day job as a microbiological researcher took him to the USA. His expertise in the field will doubtless lend authenticity to his story. I have reviewed several of his books already; here, here, here, and here.

 

Elephants in Bloom by Cécile Cristofari

NewCon Press, 2023, 239 p. Reviewed for ParSec 10.

This is the author’s first collection of short stories. Ten of them appeared in a variety of publications over the past five years, eight are original to this book. Each is provided with an authorial afterword. Some of these mention Cristofari’s French background and the latitude she gains as a writer from having two languages to draw on. She casts her net wide, with settings ranging from prehistory through to the present day and beyond. A common thread running through them is ecological collapse and possible recovery from it, in perhaps a sign of recent events some feature characters living in the aftermath of a pandemic.

A few are set in France, two even in Québec. Most succeed well but The Fishery, where “fishing boats” scour the universe for usable materials while avoiding inhabited worlds, has a central metaphor which is unfortunately stretched beyond breaking point. All have a firm focus on the humans at their heart and the dilemmas which they face.

The scenarios vary widely: a woman lives in a house with a window which gives onto other worlds so providing a means of escape, a couple try to evade an ongoing apocalypse on an otherwise deserted island, an intrusive cat in a care home seems to be a feline angel of death, a girl in post-Great War France talks to her never born brother to honour her non-French origins, a dangerous encounter on a mountain road ends in various ways, a witch has an uneasy pact with a hangman, another woman, with the help of the Moon, flies to Pluto in a plastic bottle to find her son who set out to search for his dead grandmother, a research scientist in a kind of steampunk fascist dictatorship secretly works against the regime, two children put a cat into a quantum bag in a glorious excuse for the author to deploy numerous cat puns (the least of which is is it alive or dead, and in which world?) An alien reports back to her planet from World’s End in Tierra Del Fuego, a museum caretaker converses with the (long dead) exhibits after hours, three travellers bearing gifts for a newborn trudge through a post-apocalyptic Québec winter, a stone-age woman finds a home outside her birth group despite the disfigurement inflicted on her to prevent it, a woman meant for sacrifice is surprised to find herself in the goddess’s world, a witch and a space-faring knight come to an accommodation after the battle they fought destroyed the world. The end can come in three ways, by wind, by flood, and by someone singing “My Bloody Valentine”, a group of archaeologists investigating the interior of the god who fell to Earth on the local mountain find an unusual treasure.

With the single exception mentioned above Cristofari handles all of them very well.

The following did not appear in the published review:-

Pedant’s corner:- “outside of” (just outside, no ‘of’,) “knowing fully well” (the phrase is ‘knowing full well’,) “that forced me to quiet” (to stillness,) “a thick handful of filaments were already drying on the windowsill” (a thick handful … was already,) “sank behind underwater buffs” (bluffs?) “Madame Darmon sit up” (sits up,) “Gaspard withdraw his paw” (withdraws,) “between oaks trees” (oak trees.) “Door and windows were open everywhere” (Doors and windows,) “the brand news dreadnoughts” (brand new,) “I will not baulk at any sacrifice” (balk.) “None of us have.” (None of us has,) a missing end quote mark, “as soon as the oil had ran out” (had run out.) “They dragged me until the edge of the woods” (dragged me to the edge of the woods,) “terrified that the he would ride away” (no need for the ‘the’,) “in disgust of our marred faces” (in disgust at our marred faces,) “the moon waxed and waned nine more time” (nine more times,) “on all four” (all fours,) fit (fitted.) “Its flower-fruit were turning” (was turning,) “precious guinea fowls” (the plural of guinea fowl is ‘guinea fowl’,) “always easier than thriving for a real solution” (striving for?)

 

 

ParSec 11

The latest edition of ParSec magazine (no 11) is available for purchase. At £5.99. It’s a bargain.

This edition contains no less than five of my reviews.

The Last Pantheon by Tade Thompson and Nick Wood.

The Phoenix Keeper by S A MacLean.

Dark Shepherd by Fred Gambino.

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell.

And, last but not least, Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Those reviews will appear here after a decent interval.

 

Songs of Chaos by S N Lewitt

Ace, 1993, 234 p.

On a future Earth where everyone is genetically designed to be perfect Dante McCall is a misfit. Viral treatments to cure his asthma didn’t take but instead warped his perceptions so that he was unfit for Normal interaction. He escapes a fire in the home where he lived and boards a spaceship about to launch. That ship is picked up by a rogue trader, the Mangueira. On board Mangueira, Dante, being Italian and knowing Spanish, can just about make out the language used aboard, Brazilian Portuguese due to the origin of its large crew. Its occupants are known to the rest of humanity as Malandros. Their ship-board life is dominated by samba dancing and singing. ‘Dancing changes body and brain chemistry and makes us more receptive, more reactive.’ Dante is at first as much of a misfit here as he was on Earth.

Lewitt makes no concessions to the reader at this point. Life on board is presented as it is and the reader has to decipher it along with Dante. As he does, so do we.

A feature of Mangueira is the prevalence of birds, especially hyacinth macaws, which can speak and turn out to be the repository of the Malandros’ history. “All together they form the memory and central processing unit of Mangueira.”

Further plot intrudes when Veronica, a spy from another Trader ship, boards. Her father was Malandro but she can’t remember much of what he told her. As time goes by she gradually assimilates to life on Mangueira and goes native.

There is a lot going on here. The idea of a space faring group making a virtue of singing and dancing, continuing the Brazilian tradition of Carnival, that songs are the records and contributions of a ship’s people, is beguiling. However, we also have genetic manipulation. Malandros were manufactured, like the birds. Altered with a virus so that their genetic structure included bioactive interface chips – invented and made illegal before the first emigrés left Earth. It is bred into them, to go down through the generations. A man called Jorge Almovardo had created the living machine and was later burned for it in a Charismatic Revival.

Dante too has been (illegally) manipulated, subject to perception of time-shift, with which he can change his own past, “all the reality he had ever lived.”

Songs of Chaos is a good, solid piece of Science Fiction all the better for its unusual setting and background.

Pedant’s corner:- Dante lay the cutlery across the plate” (laid the cutlery,) Guimaraes’ (Guimaraes’s.) “None of the structures were identifiable” (None … was.) “picked up the samples and lay them” (and laid them,) “to change he design” (change the design,) imposter (impostor.) “Her Night-dark skin” (why the capital ‘N’ on Night?) Plus marks for ‘autos-da-fe’ though.

Laughs? In Space?

Hard on the heels of me finishing Nordic Visions for review for ParSec along comes an anthology of (supposedly*) humorous SF works for my delight – or otherwise.

This is Laughs in Space edited by Donna Scott.

To be reviewed for ParSec 12.

*I say supposedly because in my experience humour and SF can be uncomfortable bedfellows.

We’ll see.

Nordic Visions

I happened to be in my local library the other day. The good lady and myself were looking at the new books section when she said, “What is speculative fiction?”

“SF and Fantasy,” I replied, “Why?” and she pointed out to me a book called Nordic Visions and subtitled The Best in Nordic Speculative Fiction edited by Margrét Helgadóttir.

As well as the editor herself I recognised the names of the three Finns who have contributed, Hannu Rajaniemi, Johanna Sinisalo and Emmi Itäranta (here and here.)

I of course borrowed it on the instant.

Despite its publication date of 2023 and any review of it not going to be timely I offered my review to Ian Whates at ParSec magazine.

He accepted and as a consequence the review will not be appearing on here for some time.

 

Clarke Award Winner 2024

This year’s Clarke Award winner is In Ascension by Martin Macinnes.

Macinnes’s novel deals with the ocean depths as well as outer space. Appropriate really as Arthur C Clarke was also interested in both. As well as many outer space works he also wrote The Deep Range.

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