A Memory Called Empire

 
 

A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

Tor

2019

 

 

A Memory Called Empire is a space opera about the ambassador of an independent space station getting deeply involved in local politics of the interstellar empire that threatens to annex her home. It has excellent worldbuilding, political and psychological realism, competent characters who're actually good at their jobs, and it kind of answers the question, what if a Trill ambassador from Star Trek got posted to the Centauri Empire from Babylon 5 during a major crisis?
 
The ambassador, Mahit, hails from Lsel Station, just beyond the Teixcalaanli empire. Both stationers and Teixcalaanlitzim (citizens of Teixcalaan) are human, but Mahit, who serves as our viewpoint character in close third-person, seems more similar to modern audience members than the stranger, more alien-seeming imperials. She also looks like me! "A tall narrow person in a barbarian's foreign-cut trousers and coat, her reddish-brown hair cropped low-grav short, her forehead high and bare."
 
Mahit grew up learning Teixcalaanli as a second language and loving the empire's poetic epics. She's drafted to become Lsel's new ambassador very suddenly, when the previous one dies unexpectedly. Before she leaves, she's given something that all adult stationers receive at the start of their career - an 'imago machine' that attaches to their brain, and contains the recorded memories and personality of their predecessor. Like the Trill! Or like having the voice of your mentor in your head. In Mahit's case, the most recent recording of previous ambassador Yskander is 15 years old, so she has no idea how he died or what the current situation on Teixcalaan is. (The same word refers to their home planet, their capital city that covers the planet, and the empire itself.)
 
Once she arrives, Mahit views Yskander's body, which causes the saved personality to experience something between a psychotic break and a Blue Screen of Death - leaving Mahit feeling even more lost and isolated. This is just the start of the busiest and worst week of her life. The entire 450 page novel takes place over just 6 or 7 days, during which Mahit nearly dies several times, and the city goes from relative calm to rioting in the streets. While Mahit tries to figure out what Yskander was doing before, and someone assassinated him for it, she also realizes that she's been placed near the center of the crisis that threatens the stability of Teixcalaan.
 
Mahit's liaison, and maybe friend, is Three Seagrass, a very clever member of the Information Ministry. She seems to like Mahit, and to help her, more than she probably should; in turn, Mahit trusts her more than she thinks she should too. All the Teixcalaanlitzim have names like that - a number and a noun. Three Seagrass's friend Twelve Azelea helps the two women too much also.
 
One of the big pleasures of this book is just taking in the complexity of life on Teixcalaan. Martine didn't create a whole language like Tolkein, but she shows us some of it, and through Mahit, describes it and gives linguistic insights. We see some examples to the ubiquitous poetry that all their writing and oration takes place in. We get glimpses of their fashion, their food, their manners. They have 6 directions instead of 4. Flowers are omnipresent. Teixcalaanlitzim keep their faces still and emote only with their eyes. Mahit's mouth-smile is one of many ways she's marked as a barbarian. We don't see any overt racism (directed at other imperials, at least,) but the highest ranking people are mostly shorter and have darker skin. There's no overt sexism either, and key to the plot, no homophobia. Their nationalism, chauvinism, and militarism are enough!
 
The Teixcalaanli language seems like it's very loosely based on or inspired by Aztec. It has 40 thousand glyphs, mostly whole words but also sounds, with multiple synonyms and homophones that we're told add complexity to their poems. Some of the words I thought might be modified from their sounds in English. Three Seagrass is an 'asekreta' - a secretary perhaps? The emperor's closest advisors are the 'ezuazuacat' - advocate, maybe? And a doctor or scientist is called an 'ixplanatl' - an explainer? Whether this was deliberate on Martine's part or I just imagined the similarity, it contributed to a feeling of ease and internal logic to dealing with the made-up language that you don't always get in fantasy or scifi.
 
Another pleasure of this book is seeing a fairly complex political situation rendered fairly realistically, and watching Mahit do her job well. We see her learning who the political actors are, what they want, what resources they control, and thus which events - which might on the surface appear random or coincidental - are likely the result of one politician or another's maneuvering, and how she, as a nearly powerless foreigner, can aid one side against another to achieve the outcome she wants for Lsel Station.
 
There's a real maturity on display in Mahit's thoughtfulness, and I appreciate the work Martine must have put in to writing both the situation and her socially competent protagonist. So often, we're told by narration that a character is smart only to see them behave foolishly. Mahit and Three Seagrass act intelligently, and it's nice to see. And I liked, for example, that the citizenry were not all of one mind, with anti-war protests shown as common, even if they're only dubiously legal. Near the end, there's a disturbing reminder of the January 6th insurrection attempt, in a book came out a year and a half earlier.
 
If I have any complaints about Memory, it's that the resolution of the crises happens so quickly it almost feels rushed. And the Martine has Mahit mention a few times that Teixcalaanli citizens are all trying to live up to the ideal version of the empire and to structure their own lives like they're characters in an ancient epic. Somehow, the first time she asserted this, it felt like she was referencing something we were supposed to already know, and it never seemed like this claim was really supported by the evidence of anyone's behavior. It stands out, because the rest of the psychology, linguistics, etc, appears more plausible.
 
I don't know if Martine grew up watching Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9 like I did, although we're close to the same age, but it's certainly plausible that she did, and that some of the similarities I think I see between her book and those shows is a deliberate homage. There's a sequel, although this story is complete in itself. Based on how this book ends, I'd guess that a major part of the sequel plot will be the Teixcalaanli fleet fighting aliens that resemble the Borg or the Shadows - a (potentially) even greater military power, and one that seemingly cannot be negotiated or reasoned with. I also think I see echoes of, or maybe a response to, Ann Leckie's Radchaai empire from Ancillary Justice.
 

A Memory Called Empire was nominated for a Nebula Award and won a Hugo, and I think those accolades are well deserved.

The Best American Comics 2015

 
 

The Best American Comics 2015

edited by Jonathan Lethem

Mariner Books

2015

 

 

The 2015 volume of Best American Comics was edited by Jonathan Lethem, who I think is the first editor who's a comic fan but hasn't been involved in professional comics production. Though he says he drew unpublished comics when he was younger, and his introduction to the book, and to each thematic section is drawn as a comic.
 
This also might be the first year with no Chris Ware! There's no Love & Rockets either. The 'big names' I recognize this time around include Ed Piskor with Hip Hop Family Tree, Joe Sacco's harrowing wordless WWI comic, Jesse Jacobs's Safari Honeymoon (which I've read!,) another of Jim Woodring's Frank comics, and Roz Chast from The New Yorker with Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about caring for her mother's dementia. The rest are either new to me, or I've forgotten I've seen them before. Julia Gfrorer's name rings a bell, but Palm Ash, her comic about Christianity spreading among the slaves in a Roman colosseum, wasn't something I'd seen before.
 
My favorites this time included R Sikoryak's Sadistic Comics, a retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine as a series of parody Wonder Woman comics covers; Farel Dalrymple's Wrenchies, a postapocalyptic survival story rendered in washes of watercolor; and Eleanor Davis's No Tears, No Sorrow, about a workshop for people who can't cry where they can practice the motions until the tears come. The mix of silly and poignant, and the transformation of something personal into a communal activity with a leader, reminded me of Ben Katchor, although Davis's art looks nothing like his, with everything drawn in smooth blocks of primary color.
 
I was also impressed by the frank depictions of women's totally unfulfilled sexual longing in Gina Wynbrandt's Someone Please Have Sex with Me and Anya Davidson's No Class. Independent comics are full of memoirs and semi-autobiographical fictions by men who are by turns pathetic, gross, and horny on main, so it was refreshing to see examples of young women pining hopelessly for oblivious would-be paramours for a change.
 
I think Lethem might've chosen more avant-garde comics (and works by fine artists that combine graphics and text) than in previous years, or maybe the works he chose needed to be reprinted in a larger format than BAC allows, or maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace this time, but for whatever reason, I found it quite difficult to parse some of the more experimental comics, even on the most basic level of understanding what I was seeing or what was supposed to be going on.

Dark Archives

 
  

Dark Archives

A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

by Megan Rosenbloom

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2020

 

 

Dark Archives is a surprisingly chatty account of the author's work to date with the Anthropodermic Book Project, an effort, first to verify through scientific testing, and then to catalog, every book with a human skin binding. It's a pretty morbid topic! But Rosenbloom is an upbeat narrator. And while she's aware of the macabre fascination some people have with these objects, her main interest is learning who made these books, whose bodies were used, who collected them, and most importantly, why?

One thing we quickly learn, as we follow Rosenbloom on her travels, is that there are probably a lot more books rumored to be bound in leather made of human skin than there are actual books bound this way. She doesn't receive permission to test every book she visits, but of the ones she tests, something like ½ to ⅔ are fakes, just animal leather with an aura supplied by salacious rumor. At the time of her writing, only about 50 were verified worldwide, an unknown percentage of an unknown total. But the fakes are all quite old. Often a library, or a series of collectors, has spent over a hundred years thinking something that turned out to be false, usually because someone a century ago wrote a note on the book itself with the claim. You can't tell by looking; the leathermaking process eradicates any visual indicators.

The peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) test that Rosenbloom and her colleagues use was developed at Harvard in the early 2010s, and allows the identification of leather based on a grain-of-rice sized sample, even when DNA testing is impossible. The test doesn't distinguish sex or race, can't even tell humans from other apes, but can definitely determine if something is made of cow, pig, goat, or whatever, or a human. (The one possible source of error would be a false positive generated by a person handling the sample before it was tested.)

When most people guess what sorts of books might be bound in human skin, they think of the occult - books about magic, demons, witchcraft. Historically, people have also sometimes slandered their enemies by claiming that they made books out of human skin. White colonists in America claimed this about Natives, and royalists claimed the French Revolutionaries did no on a factory scale. The most common anthropodermic book though, is a book on human anatomy, owned by a gentleman doctor around the time of the start of modern clinical medicine and surgery, who had access to the skin through his work, and used it on a book he already treasured, probably to make it more valuable as a collectible by using the rarest possible material. The typical current owner is the rare books' section of a medical library.

It's not that there are no occult or 'sexy' books bound in human skin, but there are very few. None of the rumors about Natives or French Revolutionaries that Rosenbloom tested turned out to be true. There are also persistent rumors about the Nazis. And like, there are ways the Nazis commodified the bodies of their victims on an industrial scale, such as collecting gold teeth, and, I learned, making felt from human hair. One SS officer's wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp may have made a lampshade from human skin, though if so, it seems to have been destroyed before the war ended. There are photos and even museum exhibits that use stand-in lamps while repeating this claim, and viewers probably sometimes think they've seen the real thing. One museum owned a particularly grotesque lamp they never displayed, and feared it might be made with human skin. Rosenbloom and the PMF test determined it was cellulose, the plant fiber used to make film for movie cameras, much to the museum's relief.

I'll admit that part of me wishes all the rumors were false, that historically, the desire to do something like that never once coincided with the skill needed to do so. But what Rosenbloom's research so far reveals is that the 'evil geniuses' who turn human bodies into books are just doctors, and the 'evil empires' that facilitated these acts are the US and England. If there's evil here, it's mostly banal, the result of the routine and dehumanizing prejudices of the sort of wealthy White men who mostly became the early doctors colliding with the unfinished norms and anemic ethics of the early days of scientific medicine in the 19th century.

Also, nearly all new books in those days were sold as text blocks that the customer was responsible for having bound into a finished hardback, and rare book collectors routinely rebound old books to suit their own asthetic preferences. Even having the skill and material, and lacking any restraint to stop them, I think even fewer (of the already few) doctors would've done this if the book technology at the time didn't facilitate it too, which is probably why there almost no anthropodermic books from much earlier or later.

So a lot of Dark Archives ends up being about the history of medicine. Dissecting cadavers is an invaluable way to learn anatomy, still used today, and it's one reason scientific medicine is so much more effective than earlier techniques - it's based on direct observation of real human bodies. A lot of the time, getting the bodies involved grave-robbing. In England, dissection after death was an additional punishment added to the sentence of some criminals. Later, poor people's bodies were used instead (which they initially found intolerable.) It's not until well into the 20th century that the prior consent of the deceased became enshrined as an ethical principle. 

Part of learning this way involves a certain amount of emotional detachment and desensitizing. We wouldn't have many surgeons if they all felt like they were committing assault or inflicting torture. But understandable as all that is, the way the rest of us think about the dead and the correct way to honor them means that it's not ethical to take skin from a dead person and use it as a raw material. The laws around this aren't always clear, but the feelings of the public haven't actually changed much over the past 200 years, with the biggest change being a positive one, that fewer of us see any of our fellow humans as being equivalent to animals.

The Skull

 
 

The Skull

A Tyrolean Fable

by Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press

2023 

 

 

The Skull is the most recent kids' book by Jon Klassen. It's his take on a folk tale. As a joke, I might describe it as the Halloween version of I Want My Hat Back, but actually, I think the superficial spookiness of the skull imagery hides a more serious underlying darkness. Klassen's use of parallelism and subtext gives this brief tale a depth I wasn't expecting.

The story opens with a girl, Otilla, running through the forest, running away from home. She goes into the deepest, oldest part of the forest, and finds an ancient manor house. She knocks and asks to be let in. She's tired and needs a place to stay. She doesn't want the people who might be following her to find her. She doesn't want to go home, ever. Otilla is answered by a talking human skull, who lets her in once she agrees to carry him.

Otilla carries the skull as he gives her a tour of the house. It's clear he enjoys the company. By the end of the day, they might be friends. Otilla gets ready for bed, and tucks the skull in next to her. He warns her that every night, a headless skeleton enters the house, demands the skull, chases the skull, tries to capture it. So far the skull has always stayed away, but he's afraid. He doesn't want to be caught, ever. Otilla promises to protect him.

In the middle of the night, the headless skeleton appears and shouts for the skull in a booming voice. Otilla is barely able to keep her friend away. They're chased all over the house.

Then Otilla finds a way to get the upper hand. She incapacitates the skeleton, and tucks the skull back into bed. Then she systematically and vehemently destroys the skeleton. She returns to bed and assures the skull that the skeleton won't be back. He invites her to stay with him in the house, and she agrees.

We never explicitly learn what Otilla was running away from, only that she's afraid of being made to go back, and that she's happy to start a new life with her new friend. I think Otilla sees the skull as a kindred spirit. There's an obvious similarity between her situation and his desire to not be reconnected to the skeleton.

The ferocity of Otilla's violence against the skeleton is almost shocking, even for a fairy tale. It shows the strength of her emotion. It seems to symbolize what she'd like to do to whatever she's running away from. (Did Otilla also fear someone much larger coming in the middle of the night to pull her from bed?)

I don't know if kids will pick up on the implications here, or if that subtext will only be visible to adult readers. But I suspect they'll notice, at least, that the story is somewhat deeper than its surface, that Otilla's actions show she feels more than her placid face lets on. The friendship here seems strange, but it's based on an underlying similarity and mutual respect that goes beyond appearances.
 
Klassen's art is deceptively simple. If you've seen his other books, his style is instantly recognizable. He works in block shapes and speckled colors, and finds a way to include more emotional nuance than seems like should be possible. For most of the book, Otilla seems worried but displaying a calm she doesn't feel. When she destroys the skeleton, she has a kind of satisfied determination.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

 
 

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

by INJ Culbard

adapted from the novella by HP Lovecraft

Self Made Hero

1943, adapted 2014

 

 

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a graphic novel adaptation of an HP Lovecraft book by the same name. It's much more of a fantasy adventure than a horror story, and since Lovecraft mostly wrote short stories, I think it's one of his few book-length projects. I read INJ Culbard's adaptation of The King in Yellow last year. I think this one is also pretty successful.

The book opens with early 20th century Bostonian Randolph Carter dreaming of a beautiful golden city, and wondering if it's possible to reach it. He has lunch with an artist friend (they both expect to see a third friend who doesn't arrive,) who tells him of his own similar dream and how to pray to the gods of sleep for admission to the Dreamlands.

Carter prays while falling asleep, an unknown presence sees him, and he awakes, seemingly, at the entrance to the Dreamlands. They warn him that his city might not be in these dreams, but farther out in some other, unearthly dreams, and that crossing from one to the other is dangerous. There's also some caution about the relationship between the gods of Earth and the stronger, older gods of outer space. This idea gets repeated a few times over the course of the book, sometimes with Earth's gods protecting us from the outer gods, sometimes with the outer gods protecting Earth's gods from even stranger, more dangerous things from even farther out.

What follows is an adventure story where Carter crosses the Dreamlands in stages. At each step along the way, he finds human (and sometimes cat!) allies, and is opposed by otherworldly creatures that look, at most, only vaguely human. Each step involves traveling to a new city with strange monumental architecture, and where the otherworldly opposition often takes the form of foreign traders who arrive on weird ships and are only welcome because of the high quality of the goods they carry. It's not hard to see Lovecraft's orientalism and xenophobia at play here.

Also at every step of the way, people tell Carter he's making a mistake, he should turn back, he'll likely fail and will be destroyed by what he finds if he succeeds. Among the allies he finds are his two artist friends from Earth. The one who didn't show up has died and turned into a ghoul; the other found his own golden city and now rules it as a king. He says that the city is made of his childhood sense of awe and wonder, and that he'd give up his kinghood to feel those original emotions again.

Eventually, Carter finds the strange landmarks that point the way, and the ominous, godlike guardians who can point him toward his final destination. The last guardian points to what appears to be a trap, a destination that would damn him. Carter realizes that instead of going forward, he needs to go back, and wakes up in Boston with a newfound appreciation for the city, and a nostalgia for his childhood. It fits with the theme of everyone warning Carter to turn back, but also feels like a remarkably conservative ending - though again, perhaps not a surprise coming from Lovecraft. His usual unhappy endings always result from someone ignoring that kind of advice.

Culbard's art works well here. It's not super detailed, but has a sense of movement and action. I like his use of colors, both to indicate time of day, but also to convey a sense of movement as Carter hops from location to location on his trek.