I can't speak for how well she has thought through the science, but it holds together well enough for the lay reader. Some words aside, Martine gives us a cleverly constructed world. Not only that, but she has not had the normal time interval to get used to sharing her head with another person…although, that's a crude approximation of what it means to have an imago implant. The imago device that Mahit carries attached to her brainstem is therefore 15 years out of date.

They do know however that he had declined to come home at the normal intervals to download his memories.

On the Lsel Station, the only home Mahit has ever known, no-one knows what has happened to Yskandr. New, because her predecessor Yskandr Aghavn, has gone silent and the Empire has demanded a replacement. I spent the first few chapters thinking…no…not really…but it drew me in, and then I couldn’t help but hurry back to it whenever I'd had to put it down.Īmbassador Mahit Dzmare is new to the job. Once you accept that – with apologies to the author – you can skim over the unnecessariness, the story and the world in which it is set become captivating. I wanted to know whether Mahit's failed imago would ever re-start or whether she'd have to face her tenure on this strange planet, the first planet she'd ever been on, completely alone. I wanted to know what was happening in the City…who was trying to kill who, and why, and whether they would succeed. I wanted to know where Mahit, and Three Seagrass were. These serve to give back-story: either history or 'meanwhile in another part of the star system'…but they're not necessary and for this reader, so counter-productive that I simply stopped reading them at all. The other bit of clever is to begin every chapter with an excerpt from a news report, or a classic of imagined literature, or a diplomatic message. The pity of it is that elsewhere she keeps the foreign-ness within bounds asekreta, ikantlos, ixplanatl – unfamiliar spellings, unreal words, but close enough for us not only to be able to read them without stumbling, but even to be able to guess at translations for them. Even the simple Teixcalaanli which appears every two or three pages took me till well near the end of the 400-odd pages to get my mental tongue around. Language and poetry are at the heart of the story, so the language has to feature heavily, it has to be strange, but it is a step too far when every time the title ezuazuacat' or the descriptor Teixcalaanliztlim brought me up short, halting the action, stalling the emotion. I can see why she does both, but it's a disappointment because they're the blocks against which the brilliance of the book stumbles. The problem with Martine's fiction debut is that she makes the two commonest errors in SF writing: she tries to be too clever and she wants her fictional languages to be complex and rich and errs on the side of making them unpronounceable by most readers.

A memory called empire characters