Nipped through the book in spare hours this weekend. I thought of Red Witch of Mercury (1945?; no prizes for guessing why I know it): pacey space opera politicking springs from a long stem. Of course, I don't read tonnes of this stuff, so I speak from ignorance, but sometimes interlopers gain broad insights that evade the acculturated.
Attitudinally, though, we stand in a different spot to the '40s, and attitude matters, as does the tertiary degree's worth of thought put into sociocultural detail.
As a whole, I enjoyed A Memory.
The novel features a lot of verse, or rather, mostly talks about and does not feature a lot of verse, often describing rather than exemplifying. Unlike a spaceship, which can only be told, this is an entity within our medium. So show it to us! What we get lacks vim, feeling like what when I was young my teachers would've called construese. This lack seems a shame, especially given the linguistic care evidenced elsewhere, both in the main text and in the appended notes.
Without vim, I found it a little harder to inhabit Mahit's strained admiration for Teixcalaanli poems: we wind up not on the outside—with Mahit—but on the outside of the outside. At the day's end I distrust the identification-games novels play, but if a book asks us to play them perhaps we might play them better. Then again, the outside of the outside has its uses, and the requirement to read through distance might do us good.
I'd also call the prose in general inefficient. Too many sentences for my taste lean on the copula: ring up the Campaign for Real Verbs. My teeth also hurt when I read emphatic italics used so frequently. I think italicisation, like swearing, grows stronger the less often the writer deploys it. And I think authors should trust their word-choice and order to carry emphasis.
Maybe these views make me a terrible old person. Martine can wring prose out to the point that it does its job, gets out of the way, and doesn't fall over. That takes work. Different readers value different things, and Martine's won deserved praise for all that thick description. As I said, I enjoyed the book!
