Worse, Mehit arrives in Texicalaan only to find that her predecessor was murdered. The new ambassador, Mehit Dzmare, is sent to Texicalaan with 15 years worth of memories missing. When Texicalaan demands a new ambassador to Lsel, no one has any idea what could have gone wrong. During his 20 year career on Texicalaan, he returned to the station only once, so his imago recording is 15 years out of date. The last Lsel ambassador to Texicalaan was not well liked. That’s why Lsel’s most valuable imago lines are its diplomats, ambassadors to Texicalaan with literally generations of experience and memory to draw upon. If Texicalaan, an empire obsessed with recreating its own past, were to ever discover imago technology they would annex Lsel in an instant. Lsel pilots don’t need flight school because they already remember a thousand battles, including the ones they died in.

Lsel engineers need no training, because they remember building the station centuries before. When a person dies, their imago is removed and implanted in a young person. Usually implanted around the age of 18, an imago records a person’s every thought and memory so that critical knowledge is never lost.

More than a dozen generations ago, Lsel engineers invented a tiny device called an imago. With a tiny population, they cannot afford to lose experience, even in death. A remote mining outpost called Lsel Station sits on the edge of civilized space, allowed to remain independent from the galaxy-spanning Texicalaanli empire largely because it has nothing valuable to offer. “Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.” – Arkady Martine, A Memory Called EmpireĪ Memory Called Empire begins with a bizarre premise, but one that may be familiar to sci-fi fans.

A memory of empire