A Memory Called Empire is a sci-fi political murder mystery written by Arkady Martine and published by Tor in 2019. The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, was published in 2021.
Tropes present in this work:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The City's AI manifests a variety of dangerous malfunctions, and seems to respond to the imperatives of the faction currently controlling it.
- Affectionate Nickname: Three Seagrass's old school buddy Twelve Azalea calls her Reed, while she calls him Petal.
- Back-Alley Doctor: Mahit gets her imago removed and Yskandr's imago installed at one of these.
- Blatant Lies: When Twelve Azalea warns Mahit that her predecessor's body was "full of metal", she tries to dismiss it as probably being a pacemaker or similar medical implant, despite knowing it's an illegal Imago machine.
- Clones Are People, Too: Cloning is not an uncommon means of reproduction, though Teixcalaanli law requires entrants and citizens to have a genome at least 10% unique for identification reasons. The emperor’s primary heir is a “ninety-percent clone”.
- Cool, but Inefficient: Mahit's official correspondence is on "infofiche sticks" that project messages on holograms when snapped open and are sealed with melted wax. She remarks that such an inefficient use of resources wouldn't pass on Lsel.
- Cool Chair: Emperor Six Direction's throne, depicted on the cover, is fashioned like a sundisc.
- Culture Chop Suey: Teixcalaan combines Mayan naming conventions (and ritual bloodletting) with Imperial China's scholarly bureaucracy and Rome's imperial succession methods.
- Death of Personality: A potential outcome of Emperor Six Direction's desire to install his own imago in a 10-year-old clone of himself - for the child.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance:
- The Teixcalatzlan call outsiders barbarians, in the sense of being foreigners and uncivilized, but they practice blood sacrifice, something most modern cultures consider barbaric in the modern sense of the word.
- In A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel, Three Seagrass makes a comment on the concept of democracy, finding it ridiculous.
- Didn't Think This Through: A sleep-deprived and stressed Mahit realizes too late that she completely forgot to think of how to pay for having the outdated imago switched out for the one pulled from Yskandr's corpse. She comes up with something on the fly, but chides herself for not planning ahead.
- Dismembering the Body: The Teixcalaanli find the Lsel custom of cremating their dead and eating the ashes to be somewhat... disturbing. They prefer to pump the body full of preservatives.
- The Emperor: Six Direction is a mostly-benevolent example (as is Nineteen Adze), but others in the long history of Teixcalaan are not.
- The Empire: Teixcalaan are about what you'd expect. Imperialist, xenophobic and absolutely massive. Characters that aren't native to Teixcalaan often treats it more like a monstrous beast that swallows up other civilizations than a nation.
- Fantastic Naming Convention: Teixcalaanli names combine a number with a plant, an inanimate object, or an abstract concept (although plants are most common). Cultural liaison Three Seagrass thinks a Lsel expat's chosen name of "Thirty-Six All Terrain Tundra Vehicle" is in poor taste, while another suggestion of "2e Asteroid" sounds hilarious.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Ships have guns, but people generally do not carry firearms, to the point that Mahit thinks of them as "projectile weapons" because they're so uncommon. This is for the simple fact that when you spend a lot of time in space, there is no problem so dire that an uncontrolled high-speed projectile bouncing around is a good solution. Also, literally; Lsel bans guns and flamethrowers.
- Feudal Future: Thousands of years into the future; the largest human power is an empire similar to both the Aztecs and the Byzantine Empire; with a succession crisis, a constantly-scheming aristocracy, and an ambassador who is trying to avoid her country being assimilated.
- Gambit Pileup: Everyone is plotting, on both Lsel and Teixcalaan. On Lsel, Darj Tarats and Dekakel Onchu both plot, differently, to stave off Teixcalaanli dominance, with Tarats planning to use the unseen alien threat as bait. Meanwhile, Aknel Amnardbat deliberately sabotages Yskander's imago-machine. On Teixcalaan, One Lightning plans a coup, while Thirty Larkspur uses the chaos to mount his own rush for the throne. Two Lemon and a group of anti-imperial provocateurs plot terror attacks. And everyone in the Teixcalaanli government seeks to coopt and cope with Yskandr's deal to make Emperor Six Direction immortal via imago-machine.
- Hegemonic Empire: Teixcalaan is an empire in many meanings of the term, militarily economically and culturally. Several client states are mentioned and even Lsel station uses Teixcalaan days despite it being completely out of sync with the star system they occupy.
- Height Angst: Downplayed. Mahit never expresses any particular distress about her height, but she does note that she's taller than most Teixcalaanlitzlim, which only further marks her as an outsider.
- Heroic BSoD: Yskandr absolutely loses it upon seeing his own dead body, which breaks his connection to Mahit except for a few flashes and peripheral neuropathy. It also doesn't help that an antagonistic Lsel politician deliberately sabotaged the imago machine.
- Hive Mind: The Imperial police of Teixcalaan, called the Sunlit, are linked into the city and each other, at least while on duty, possibly all the time.
- Human Aliens: The denizens of both Lsel and Teixcalaan and its territories are called humans, with the only difference being some minor divergent evolution (Stationers, for instance, are notably taller than Teixcalaanlitzlim). This is presumably due to both being a Lost Colony, though it's ambiguous where humans came from in this universe; Teixcalaan knows its history all the way back to the middle-ages, with no indication that they had space-travel earlier.
- Humans Are White: Averted; in fact Mahit takes note of one blond-haired person from the northern regions of Teixcalaan as unusual.
- Human Sacrifice: Teixcalaanlitzlim seal oaths in blood but actual sacrifices are rare, always voluntary, and usually done as a political statement. The first we see is a supporter of One Lightning sacrificing himself, the second is Emperor Six Direction after declaring his successor.
- Human Subspecies: Downplayed. Teixcalaanlitzlim and Lsel stationers are both called humans, but there are subtle diferences between them. Namely, stationers are on average a fair bit taller, due to growing up in lower gravity.
- Innocently Insensitive: Three Seagrass, despite being a bit of a xenophile, still struggles with this attitude due to being born and raised in an empire that treats everything not Teixcalaanli as being of lesser worth. In particular, whenever she tries to compliment how well Mahit fits into the City, it comes across as her insulting Lsel culture.
- Grand Theft Me: While this is not the intended purpose of the imago, the combination of a strong personality in the implant, a complete genetic match, and an unfinished native personality (ie, the Emperor's clone heir) would lead to this. The Emperor was seriously considering it because he's worried about what will happen when he's gone, but comes to see that he can't.
- Language Equals Thought: In the first chapter, Mahit ponders how the Teixcalaanli language uses the same word for city, world, empire and universe. This seems to reflect the Teixcalaanli attitude of considering anything outside the Empire to be barbaric or even unreal. Once something is conquered or annexed by the empire, it finally becomes part of the world.
- Manipulative Bastard: Darj Tarats played Yskandr, Lsel and Teixcalaan like a fiddle, using Yskandr and Lsel as bait in order to pull Teixcalaan into a war they cannot win.
- Mega City: The capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire, often referred to as simply The City and which has the same name as the planet, empire, and universe in Teixcalaanli. It has multiple climate zones.
- Mind Hive: Imago implants start out like this, with the imago acting like a separate personality that can be consulted, but after a while it develops into a blend of the two personalities. Mahit's unusual situation results in her having three minds in her head at once; Mahit Dzmare, Yskandr from 15 years ago and Yskandr from three months ago.
- Modified Clone: "Ninety-percent clones" are a legitimate form of reproduction on Teixcalaan, including one of the Emperor's heirs.
- Noble Bigot: Teixcalaanlitzlim are this at best. Even those like Three Seagrass, who are genuinely interested in other cultures, were still raised to view them as something inferior to Teixcalaan. Mahit struggles with whether or not Three Seagrass likes her for who she is or for being "exotic."
- No Transhumanism Allowed: In the Empire, neurological enhancement is banned due to the critical importance of the Imperial Examinations in their institutions. It would be seen as cheating.
- Polyamory: Nineteen Adze and Six Direction had no problem sharing Yskandr. The only friction came from the fact that all three are important figures whose agendas didn't (or couldn't) align.
- Population Control: Lsel practices strict population control due to limited resources, everyone has a birth control implant and new births are only authorized when food is available. A memo estimating the station's future population capacity is shown just after a travel guide to the City's rich variety in food.
- Sacrificial Lion: Petal is shot and killed during the attempted military coup.
- Sigil Spam: Thirty Larkspur's partisans prominently display a purple larkspur flower. Less obviously, Nineteen Adze and her close allies wear bone white.
- Space Sector: Space both within and beyond the Teixcalaanli Empire is divided into named sectors. Each sector is large enough to contain many star systems, potentially accessible through a jumpgate Portal Network. In particular, the protagonist is from a Space Station colony in the Bardzravand Sector, which is struggling to maintain its independence from Teixcalaan.
- Speculative Fiction LGBT: Neither Teixcalaan nor Lsel put much or any emphasis on identifying sexual preferences. Yskandr's apparent bisexuality and the lesbian relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass are not treated as remarkable.
- She Is the King: Teixcalaan uses the title Emperor regardless of gender, as seen in emperors Twelve Solar-Flare and Nineteen Adze.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Yskandr and his lovers were always on borrowed time, because he was sleeping with the Emperor and Nineteen Adze, and they are, well, who they are, and he was the ambassador of a station the Empire may well annex... yeah. And then he was murdered.
- Stern Sun Worshippers: The Teixcalaanlitzlim worship the sun and incorporate solar iconography, but their society have elements of a surveillance state and their attitude towards foreigners is always assimilation by conquest.
- Succession Crisis: Emperor Six Direction is very old and lacking natural children to inherit the throne, he has a "ninety percent clone", Eight Antidote, but he's only ten years old, so he's named his creche-sister Eight Loop and the merchant scion Thirty Larkspur to be co-emperors. But there's been stirrings favoring the general One Lightning. It culminates with One Lightning attempting a military coup, while Thirty Larkspur uses the chaos to try an internal coup - only for Six Direction to suddenly name his adviser Nineteen Adze Emperor before sacrificing himself in the temple, an act which generates such massive good PR that there's no way anyone could work up enough support to oppose her.
- Uterine Replicator: The norm, though not universal, on Teixcalaan and the only form of reproduction on Lsel. Mahit finds the idea of giving birth alien—to her, it's a waste to put someone who could be working through that kind of physical trauma when it's not necessary. Five Agate is noticably proud that she carried her son to term, implying that natural births are a privilege on Teixcalaan.
- Virtual Ghost: Lsel uses brain implants to create "imagos" from the memories of their people, and when one dies, their imago is loaded into their successor's implant to guide them and add their own memories to the imago. Some imago-lines go back fourteen generations. Unfortunately Mahit's imago of Yskandr suffers a mental breakdown when she sees his body. It turns out one of Yskandr's rivals in the Lsel council sabotaged Mahit's imago device, but she successfully replaces it with the device from Yskandr's corpse.
- Whodunnit to Me?: External backup variant. Yskandr's imago was made fifteen years previous and suffers a mental breakdown after discovering he's dead, going silent and only occasionally providing flashes of memory to Mahit.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Amnardbat sabotages Yskandr's imago because she believes he has sold out the station to Teixcalaan, and it would be better that his imago-line is ended rather than corrupt the next ambassador. Too bad her sabotage only leaves the next ambassador totally lost in the labyrinthine hellscape that is Teixcalaan's politics.
- The Xenophile: Three Seagrass admits that she "likes aliens." Downplayed in this case, since the "aliens" are really just humans with a different culture and some slight divergent evolution.
