Reviews

i have a lot of thoughts about this book.

first off, i love the setup — love the use of memory as an imperial weapon, and the imago tech as a clever way of showing that. mahit losing her connection to her imago in chapter 1 is a dynamite setup. the little pieces of worldbuilding we get from teixcalaan are great; down to the smiling and various forms of etiquette, i think these details grant it a certain verisimilitude.

however.

maybe it's just my current headspace, but i found it very difficult to fully immerse myself in this. the worldbuilding is dense but not particularly deep, which i think is a part of it; reading the terms, memos, etc, felt like cutting through noise. the other reason is that i couldn't fully connect with mahit. i think principally this is because that she lacks a personal motivation, which imo in most SFF books should be established by end of chapter 1. i'm not talking about solving yskandr's death as a plot driver — i mean a central, personal motivation for the character on what she wants to do. what does this character want for herself, what from her past drives her to it? the answer we're given, i suppose, is to fully assimilate with the empire? maybe that's just not very compelling to me, but this lack of personal drive creates a pretty flat arc for her character throughout, and while we spend a lot of time with mahit, i don't really feel like i know her. we finally get some oomph from her in the last third, but her (view spoiler) feels a little lackluster because we really aren't told much about lsel as a culture, or what connects mahit to it. i think that was the other part of my issue — overall this was veeeery slow, with things only really picking up in the last hundred pages. and far more fascinating to me than the (extremely quickly conceived*) civil war was the existential threat of the invading aliens, which doesn't come until much later. fair enough, if it's a series, but i wanted more of that!

martine's presentation of empire is interesting to me. my own critique alludes to this piece that she wrote about another imperial fantasy book, in which she critiques its author for creating an empire that is too blatantly evil. in my view, AMCE’s empire isn’t evil enough — it is entirely too bloodless, too sympathetic, to be entirely believable. in some narrative regards, this makes sense — there needs to be a feasible reason mahit would “fall in love” with the colonizing culture, or else that central conceit for her character falls apart. but as we’re shown, teixcalaan’s “evil” is presented only as the more-or-less-peaceful annexation and cultural absorption of other colonies, which in itself is a soft and bloodless interpretation of empire. and our impression is that these colonies want to be engulfed by teixcalaan, because teixcalaan is just that wonderful. we experience the bulk of teixcalaan through “good” characters like three seagrass, even the emperor himself. anti-imperial villains are given little to no screentime, and are villainous primarily because they oppose the emperor, not due to their own imperial aims. while of course there are good agents in every empire, we aren’t given any real reason to root against teixcalaan, despite being told by the author that empire devours what it touches, empire is bad, etc. we’re not shown the full scope of why teixcalaan is worthy of criticism, because mahit, beyond a half-hearted sense of patriotism for lsel, does not give it.

my understanding of empire is undeniably western, as i'm american and am descended from irish people. i want to disclaim that i do think it’s believable and an astute point that empire has its “seductive” assets that make it appealing even to those colonized — art and culture, certainly (though in real life empire, these assets are stolen and repurposed from other cultures, not organically self-made as they are in teixcalaan). i think where this falls apart in AMCE for me is that mahit is undeniably aware of the darker side of teixcalaan (little as we’re shown it?) but continues to endorse it. she is not unwittingly seduced by teixcalaan — she wittingly allows herself to be. this makes her, at best, confusing, and at worst, a villain. in the end, we're kinda led to root for the emperor to stamp out his political opponents. the emperor is a nice guy who mahit is attracted to, and he restores order and peace, unlike the anti-imperial insurrectionists killing civilians. what is there to criticize about him, truly? i think, on its own, characters like yskandr and mahit who are willing to sell out their own culture to an empire is an interesting concept, but there's something about the execution in AMCE that feels almost a little too sympathetic to that aim.

anyway, i am glad i finally got to read this! it's sparked a lot of thoughts.

*my other critique was that the entire timespan of this book takes place in like 5 days, and i'm not really sure why? it made the attempted insurrection seem a little less realistic.