In the beginning, reading this was slow-going. Not through any fault of the writing. The issue was me entirely. It takes my brain time to adjust to nomenclature, but once I was able to wrap my head around it, the rest came easy.

It makes me nervous to write about A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE because of how close its themes are to my current philosophical plight. On a surface level, sure, this was an action-packed space opera where 400 pages happen in two weeks (!!!) but it's more than that. OH BOY was it more than that. The two themes that had me by the throat was 1) loving the hand that colonized you and 2) how much of your sense of self is your memory? Both are prevalent in the title alone.

At one point Yskandr says, "most of personality is endocrine" (345) and I still don't get it. All we are are the hormones that we secrete? But at the same time, it gives me some form of relief to think of the possibility of the absence of an essential self. Again, I still don't know where I stand on the Source of Self question (which is so unlike me). And when the question of "how do I know you're you?" comes up a lot especially surrounding the discussion of the imago machine, but Mahit's rebuts it by pointing out how is it any different to Teixcalaan's staunch preservation of culture and heritage - how everything is a reference, an allusion to history and culture that they cannot seem to let go.

Spoiler

I feel like I ought to say something about how Mahit and Three Seagrass culminated their relationship, both working and personal. I don't feel cheated - this is not a fanfic. I did not expect some kind of promise. The 'break-up' (if you can even call it that) was pragmatic. A straightforward reference to Three Seagrass' vainglorious ambition with no hard, bitter feelings whatsoever. All they were to each other, it seemed, was a tether vanquished by the finality of emotional response that resulted from insurrection, grief, and... novelty. Sure, it made me sad. But what's life without some of that?

The rest of this review is just going to be me and the sentences that make me go hmmmm.

There's continuity of memory, and that makes a self. A self is whoever remembers being that self.

One of them corrects: "Continuity of memory filtered through endocrine response.

One of them corrects: We all remember being that self, and we are not the same."

*

Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designer. It couldn't be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past - a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.

A City run by Ten Pearl's algorithm had Ten Pearl's interests embedded in it. A City run by an algorithm designed to response to Teixcalaanli desires was not innocent of those same Teixcalaanli desires, magnified, twisted by machine learning.

*

Empire was empire - the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.

*

A mind is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditional response, and past action, held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signalling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.

*

Nothing the Empire touched would remain hers.