Arkady Martine’s book has been mentioned by a few authors I follow and when the time came to put down the KU buffet plate and read something less pulpy, I decided to see if this book lived up to its hype.
This book is a new take on an old-school Sci-fi and Fantasy standard: an outsider comes to court. Here, a young ambassador from a small space station is sent in haste to the 800-pound gorilla of an empire to replace the old ambassador of many decades, who is suddenly not available. Her job is to keep her station independent and find out what happened. She has one advantage, a neural implant that contains a copy of the personality and memories of the old ambassador, albeit one 15 years out of date.
She’s got the rest of the deck stacked against her. In the Empire, she’s considered a barbarian. Her selection was rushed, and wasn’t given time to completely integrate with the personality in her implant, and when she arrives, she discovers the old ambassador has died under suspicious circumstances, and suddenly her implant malfunctions. Problems ensue.
The story is a murder mystery coupled with a court intrigue story, and it somehow avoids the usual pitfalls of political dramas and keepsand keepsand keeps the tension going in every chapter. The Sci-fi elements are light, about the level of your average Star Trek episode. There are wormholes, AI-controlled cities, neural implants, and (to keep the Star Trek metaphor going) a poetry-obsessed Empire that behaves like a malevolent Federation.
The story comes out of the culture and the people in it: everyone is intelligent, and each character has a unique motivation to explain their actions both the heroes and the forces against them. One reviewer called it “bureaucracy porn,” a story where everyone is smart and competent, and nobody gets a free pass because the other side is stupid. (There is one scene that breaks this rule, but it didn’t detract from the story). If you enjoyed the political machinations in Game of Thrones, House of Cards, or CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series, you’ll probably like this book.
