A Memory Called Empire

Anna Linden Weller, who published A Memory Called Empire under the pen name Arkady Martine, serves as a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department’s Office of the Secretary. With her background as a city planner and a historian of the Byzantine Empire, she shares similarities with Three Seagrass, a cultural liaison or asekreta. Three Seagrass has almost encyclopedic knowledge of Teixcalaanli culture, literature, and history, and uses this knowledge to guide new ambassador Mahit and influence policy.

As Martine describes in her Acknowledgements, she finished A Memory Called Empire “in the summer of 2014, two weeks into an intensive language course in Modern Eastern Armenian” (465). The grammar of modern Armenian echoes throughout the novel, as language is important to the plot. Martine includes a glossary of terms and people, along with various grammatical forms. One example of this real-world parallel is the term “asekreta (pl. asekretim)” (451), which refers to “an actively serving member of the Information Minister” (451) on Teixcalaan. In modern Armenian, a similar word exists: ashakert (pl. ashakertnery), meaning pupil. Both words look similar, and both languages are agglutinative, meaning their morphemes—the smallest units that make up a word—combine to create changes in number and function. This amount of linguistic detail is made possible by Martine’s background.

Beyond language, the novel’s depiction of bureaucracy—the minutiae of paperwork and protocols—reflects Martine’s role as a policy advisor. Her academic background also influences the novel—specifically, her dissertation at Rutgers (2014) that focused on letters between functionaries in the Byzantine Empire as a show of imperial power. These letters reflect the role of mail in the novel, as gossip and news of war radiate to the outskirts of the fictional Teixcalaanli Empire.