• they/them or anything else idc

I'm not a real robot, but I have a real face!

25, bi, genderless.



Oh yeah I finished A Memory Called Empire a few days ago and I feel like I should have enough to say about it to make a substantial post but it's just not happening. Gonna keep this post in my drafts and just barf whatever comes to mind into it for a bit.

Overall opinion: positive.

There's a lot of similarities with Ancillary Justice! Which I already knew before I read it because that's what everyone told me.
-it's about a space empire
-it takes an anthropological/linguistic approach, the empire uses language in a very particular way to render non-citizens less than human
-the main character has brain augments she needs to keep secret ooooo
-lesbians
-there's these really scary aliens that the empire is afraid of that have a huge impact on the plot but we only learn a tiny bit about them

The POV character and her girlbestfriend were so in love. I wanted them to kiss the whole book and then they did. But it was sad

Umm there was one weird scene where she was describing several background characters and one of them was just "and one person of a gender I didn't recognize." Only directly mentioned nonbinary person in the whole book. This is a clumsy thing I see too many books do... "and there was one nonbinary person on page 158 who said nothing, and I never had to write about them again." Like I would say I appreciate the effort at least but it's not even effort is it?

Evil milf I love her

I've been reading a lot of books about space empires lately. Asimov's Foundation, Le Guin's Hainish cycle (which I haven't posted about yet but I am slowly reading through), etc. Just scroll through my books tag and you'll see lol. I think it's interesting to compare how various authors approach the concept. I don't mean just any stories where there are empires in space, I mean really picking apart the concept, what it would look like, what it would mean, how such a massive atrocity would justify itself.
It seems to me that Arkady Martine is more directly influenced by Asimov's Foundation than Ann Leckie is, though she obviously still avoids Asimov's critical blunder of thinking that a space empire would be really cool, actually. The way Martine so vividly describes the ecumenopolis, it's beautiful, but it's also like, of course this isn't sustainable, of course they need to be constantly conquering more territory every moment they're not busy at civil war. It all follows so naturally from the idea of a city-planet that even Asimov had to address it in Foundation before he convinced himself that it's better than the "only alternative" of "anarchy" (a word Asimov somehow thinks means "feudalism").

I described Ancillary Justice this way but there's also an inversion of The Left Hand of Darkness going on here. Protagonist sent into the depths of a foreign culture for diplomatic reasons. But she's from a small space station, trying to convince the empire not to take them over, rather than from the empire, trying to convince a planet to join them.

I would be very interested to get some plural people's perspective on the book. The protag's experience is pretty explicitly what I would think to call some sort of plural. She's from a culture where basically everyone gets brain surgery to implant a machine that makes them plural on purpose. But then they're expected to "integrate" - that's literally the word used. (Protag does not integrate.) I'm not plural myself, so I don't really feel equipped to adequately analyze it from this angle. Do you think it was handled well?


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