December 22
Arkady Martine
About Arkady
Arkady Martine is speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Under both her names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, is published by Tor on 04 March, 2021.
For our Advent calendar, enjoy our exclusive Q&A with Arkady.
A Memory Called Empire is your first novel, but you have published many short stories. When did you know that your idea for AMCE was a novel, and not a short story?
The instant I decided to write a novel. Stories have shapes, and part of that shape is how long and multi-stranded they are – for me, this is a sort of instinct, a narrative proprioception. When I began A Memory Called Empire, I wanted to write a novel; I had set out to write a novel. So I found a story to tell that would take a novel’s worth of words.
A Memory Called Empire is the first in the series. Have you planned it all out?
A Memory Called Empire is the first in a duology. And the second book comes out in March 2021, so yes, it is entirely planned. There will likely be more Teixcalaan books in the future – I certainly want to write them – and I have several ideas sketched out for what stories I want to tell in that universe.
What is your favourite thing to write in a story?
Places and descriptions, by far – I absolutely love ekphrasis, the evocation or description of a place or object, especially in the sense of using that evocation or description to reveal character (what does the character notice, and why in this way?) or theme (what reoccurs in the language, over and over?) or even plot (drawing the reader’s eye and attention specifically).
And what is the one thing you know your editor will pull you up on?
I chronically underwrite. In the sense that the submission draft of A Memory Called Empire was a full forty thousand words shorter than the published version – but also in the sense that most editorial notes to me boil down to surface the subtextual.
You are also a historian, which some may argue is the opposite of SF. What draws you to Science Fiction?
First of all, SF and history are absolutely not opposites – they’re completely intertwined. I think it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden (publisher at Tor Books) who first said to me that history is the trade secret of science fiction. I use historical events, ideologies, and scenarios to construct SF that feels grounded in a particular sort of real – the real which is recognisably human. I’m interested in the problems and possibilities of humans taken to extremes we have not yet encountered – that’s what SF is to me. (Also I’ve been reading it since I was about seven years old, so it’s the literature I think in.)
If you could spend Christmas with one well-known SF/F character, who would it be? And what would you buy them as a gift?
The vast majority of my favorite SF/F characters would make exceptionally poor holiday companions. If I had to choose, though – I’d probably end up spending the holiday as a guest of Ilisidi, the aiji-dowager – functionally a sort of queen mother – in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series. Ilisidi is terrifying, and has been known to poison various people for political or social purposes, and plays the best long games – and she’s a brilliant hostess and conversationalist. A holiday at her estate in Malguri would be the opposite of boring. (I’d have to bring her a very clever gift, if I wanted to remain unpoisoned. Probably I’d ask a Pueblo artisan from the area in which I live – Santa Fe, New Mexico – to recommend a woven rug or pottery piece that is representative of the work of the people whose land I live on. No expense spared; Ilisidi would notice.)
Find out more about Arkady:
Looking for your next page turner?
Pre-order Arkady’s second novel, A Desolation called Peace (out on 4 March 2021) from Tor or support our local bookshop Transreal Fiction - Scotland’s leading SciFi and Fantasy bookstore - in Edinburgh.