Books like A Memory Called Empire
What should you read after Arkady Martine’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Arkady Martine
- 2019
- Political science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after A Memory Called Empire
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchDune
Frank Herbert
An empire that runs on ritual, poetry and assassination, and an outsider who has to learn its codes fast or die of them. Martine is in open conversation with this book.
- Court intrigue and poetry
- An outsider learning the etiquette
- A succession crisis
- Prophecy where Martine has bureaucracy
Worth a look — with a warningThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
Also a novel about a civilisation's self-image, though Liu's interest is physics and history rather than court manners. The politics land; the people rather less.
- Empire seen from its edge
- Language as a weapon
- Characters are vehicles for argument
Worth a look — with a warningSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
The one other novel that treats language as literally executable code. Stephenson's is louder and much sillier, but the linguistic weapon at its centre is the same idea.
- Language as a weapon
- Court intrigue and poetry
- Satirical cyberpunk, not court drama
Great matchFoundation
Isaac Asimov
Empire in decline, managed by people who talk their way out of crises rather than shoot their way out. The bones of Teixcalaan's anxiety, in 1950s form.
- Empire seen from its edge
- Court intrigue and poetry
- No interiority whatsoever
Best for the outsider learning the etiquetteThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
An envoy on a world whose social rules he keeps misreading, at real cost to everyone. The closest ancestor there is to Mahit's particular loneliness.
- An outsider learning the etiquette
- Empire seen from its edge
- Court intrigue and poetry
- Cold, quiet, sparsely plotted
Best for the empire's politicsAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
Leckie's Radch and Martine's Teixcalaan are cousins: gorgeous, cruel, obsessed with propriety, and narrated by someone whose selfhood is plural by design.
- Empire seen from its edge
- Memory implanted from another person
- Court intrigue and poetry
- Slower, more elliptical middle
Great matchHyperion
Dan Simmons
Here for the poetry thread specifically: a book where a poet's obsession is treated as world-historically dangerous, inside a Hegemony that reads a lot like Teixcalaan.
- Court intrigue and poetry
- Empire seen from its edge
- Ends without resolution
Best for the strangenessNinefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee
An empire whose physics depends on everyone keeping the same calendar, and a dead general installed in a living soldier's head. Two minds, one skull — Mahit would recognise the arrangement.
- Memory implanted from another person
- Empire seen from its edge
- Language as a weapon
- Explains nothing for 100 pages
Great matchLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
If the appeal was the murder mystery under the politics rather than the poetry over it, Corey run the same machine with grease on it: a detective, a conspiracy, a system tipping into war.
- Empire seen from its edge
- A succession crisis
- No literary texture
Worth a look — with a warningNeuromancer
William Gibson
Included for the recorded-consciousness thread — the Dixie Flatline construct is Mahit's imago in gutter form. In every other respect a very different book.
- Memory implanted from another person
- Language as a weapon
- No empire, no diplomacy
Great matchThe Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's physicist crosses from a poor anarchist moon to the rich world that despises it, and finds he loves things he ought to hate. That ambivalence is Mahit's whole condition.
- Being in love with a culture that would eat you
- Empire seen from its edge
- An outsider learning the etiquette
- Almost no plot velocity
Great matchRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
The colony-versus-metropole argument at full length, with the periphery's grievances given all the room they need and none of the imperial glamour.
- Empire seen from its edge
- A succession crisis
- 800 pages at geological pace
Best for the murder-in-a-capital plotCity of Stairs
Jackson Bennett
A colonised people now administering the empire that once owned them, and a spy investigating a killing nobody wants solved. Politics as sharp as Martine's and much faster.
- Empire seen from its edge
- Court intrigue and poetry
- An outsider learning the etiquette
- Fantasy gods, not starships
What should you read after A Memory Called Empire?
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Dune by Frank Herbert — an empire that runs on ritual, poetry and assassination, and an outsider who has to learn its codes fast or die of them. Martine is in open conversation with this book.
If what stayed with you was empire seen from its edge, read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu instead: also a novel about a civilisation's self-image, though Liu's interest is physics and history rather than court manners. The politics land; the people rather less. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is the other strong option — the one other novel that treats language as literally executable code. Stephenson's is louder and much sillier, but the linguistic weapon at its centre is the same idea.
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