Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Arkady Martine, a speculative fiction writer and in her secret identity as Dr. Anna Linden Weller, she is an historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda and the edges of the world, and coincidentally all of this is wrapped into her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, published in March by Tor. A great publishing house for SF for the past gazillion years.


A Memory Called Empire takes us on a journey in time and space to a place that is so far alien to our world (what should be worlds) and yet is also so familiar.

Politics, betrayal, trust and culture bind together this work in such a way, that we marvel at the labyrinthine texture of an empire that mirrors those that Arkady studies and even names the characters, many unpronounceable by me, in the same manner (or mirror) as ancient cultures on Earth.

The book opens doors to the reader that we didn’t even know existed but also draws on the legacies given us by so many other writers of the last two centuries