I just finished reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and noticed some really cool parallels with things in the Divine Cycle - poetic cyphers, non-standard naming conventions (they use number+noun combinations for names, like Three Seagrass), and important figures with poetic epigraphs that follow them like a name. I know it’s a fairly recent novel - are you familiar with it, or is this a case of common influences? The author is also a Byzantine historian so I’m sure a lot of it comes from that.
I would say the poetic cypher is really the big shout out to AMCE in PARTIZAN. Things like "non-standard naming conventions" and poetic names is about as old as Friends at the Table itself, going back at least to COUNTER/Weight and Twilight Mirage, respectively.
I would say the Imperial Radch trilogy is an even bigger touchstone for PARTIZAN (especially since at least two of us have read it, where as I think as of the time of recording PZN, only I'd read AMCE).
In general, we're pretty clear about our touchstones (and even shouted out both Radch and AMCE during the season). We have never been coy about where we draw our inspiration, and I think the show is probably most fun for folks who have those touhcstones at hand to see how we're responding to them directly. But I'll also say that we try very hard not to be reducible to already extant work.
