Audio: A memory called Empire by Arkady Martine

• Teixcalaan, Book 1
• By: Arkady Martine
• Narrated by: Amy Landon
• Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Release date: 03-26-19
• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

My Thoughts

This was a planet bound scifi, and it really was more about this alien city, which was not that alien since they are human too. This was politics and mystery.

Mahit has lived her entire life on a station. She has never seen anything else, and she has dreamed of the City. Teixalaan, the empire. She speaks the language, she reads the poetry and she is chosen to be the ambassador. Since the previous one died all the sudden. Which of course is the whole mystery, why did he die? Is something rotten in this vast empire?

Mahit's people also saves the memories, if they are good memories and implant them into others. She gets the bad end of the stick, 5 years of the previous ambassadors life, since he has not be back to the station in 15 years. And she does not have enough time since it is a sort of symbiotic relationship. She will no longer be just Mahit. She is Mahit, and Iskander at the frey.

She is enchanted by the city as she arrives but she can also see the faults as she is new and not stuck in old ways as the Teixcalaan.

“You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.”

It was a fascinating culture. They sure liked their poetry. If you did not know poetry you were like dead to them. It was all about poetry.

And I liked Mahit, she is doing her best and she knows that she needs to know more to survive. Politics and murder mystery. And she gets a  great sidekick along the way too!

I enjoyed this story, but it did end. So I am curious what the next book will be about, if it will still be about her or someone else.

Narrator

I liked her voice. She brought desperation into Mahit's voice and the superiority to the Teixcalaans, since all are barbarians to them. She did well with male and female voices too as Mahit does have a male voice in her head

Blurb

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident - or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.  

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion - all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret - one that might spell the end of her station and her way of life - or rescue it from annihilation.  

A fascinating space-opera debut, Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is an interstellar mystery adventure.