I enjoyed this story of an ambassador to a galactic empire. The basic form is a detective story which is always a good way to do sci-fi world building, our protagonist gets an excuse to poke around at various levels of society and ask plenty of questions about how things work, and the who-dunnit stuff keeps the pages turning.

The Empire of the book’s title (Teixcalaan it’s called) has some vague Aztec trappings — a fondness for gold, a tradition of blood sacrifice, and a surfeit of vowels and x’s. But scratch the surface and it seemed to me that, as so often before, we’re dealing with Rome. There’s a triumvirate, there’s an upstart military commander who wants a military triumph with his spaceship parked just off the capital planet (the field of Mars). It’s possible that Aztecs also has these things, but to me, in my ignorance, it felt like exotic paintwork over that old european chassis.

None of which is to say that this book doesn’t have interesting things to say about  empire and colonialism. One of the features of Teixcalaan is its rich poetic and literary tradition with which our ‘barbarian’ heroine is deeply enamoured. Who doesnt love American cultural products even as we see them supplant more distinctive local versions? The book  doesn’t give easy answers around what it means to keep your identity when faced with integration into such an edifice which i really appreciated.

The final piece of the puzzle is the technological macguffin. The ‘barbarians’ have a device which can record a personality and install it into a new host where the knowledge and experience can be subsumed into a new whole (making concrete the concept of cultural memory). Kind of like the Trill in Star Trek. This plays nicely with all the ideas of individuality and identity both at a personal and at a societal level.

So there’s a lot to recommend, and I will be reading part two, but i have to say i would have liked more alien-ness and a little more show-dont-tell — in this sense the book felt close to me to the similarly feited and IMO similarly luke warm Ancillary Justice books. I don’t think sci-fi should all be full on Gene Wolfe style puzzles but I wouldn’t  have minded  doing a little more work in terms of piecing together the setting and the structures. That kind of friction often serves to bring things to life in a way that’s really unique to world building fiction.