Every year I make a point to read some indie science fiction, and my favorite last year was GOODBYE TO THE SUN by Jonathan Nevair. So much so that you can see what I said about it on the cover of the newly released version.

I don’t say things about books if I don’t mean them. This is a good book. If you like SF featuring political intrigue mixed with action (and seriously, who doesn’t?) than you should check it out.

And let’s just get this out of the way right up front. Today, it’s available for free:
Amazon
GooglePlay

Seriously. There’s no catch here. No list to sign up for (though I wouldn’t say no to you signing up to read my future posts.) Just click the link and get the book for free.

Books 2 and 3 are also on sale for 2.99 each for this week only. If you wait longer than that, they’re all back to 4.99.

To celebrate this promotion, Jonathan is here to talk about one of his favorite Sci Fi books, which also happens to be one of mine: A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE.

Jonathan Nevair is a science fiction writer and, as Dr. Jonathan Wallis, an art historian and Professor of Art History at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia. His debut space opera series, Wind Tide (Goodbye to the Sun, Jati’s Wager, and No Song, But Silence), was inspired by Ancient Greek texts and myths and released in 2021. Two of his short stories appear in Simultaneous Times and Stellar Instinct, his standalone spy-fi space adventure, is slated to release in November 2022.

Here’s what Jonathan has to say about one of the best SF books of the past decade.

“This was the City, then, the Jewel of the World, the heart of the Empire: a collapse between narrative and perception…” – Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

There are twelve pages of notes beside me as I try to express in words the reasons why I love Arkady Martine’s 2019 Hugo Award-winning space opera, A Memory Called Empire. Martine’s novel is dense. It’s layered, both in the writing and the story. If a rich, tiered pastry were a space opera, it would be this book. Elegant prose conjures up political intrigue and mystery, courtly politics, and culturally diverse worldbuilding that is both intimate and alluring – set on a narrative stage set constructed as a vast galactic empire.

But that doesn’t get to the heart of what makes this book breathe life into my reader soul. I’ll stick to four themes, though there are many more: literary style and tone, the expression of power, setting, and worldbuilding (I won’t even touch the naming system, which is brilliant).

I adore space operas that begin with the grand and vast, and squeeze you down into character-specific circumstances. A Memory Called Empire does this much the same way that Becky Chambers’s novel, A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet, or Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s novella, And Machines Shall Surrender, does – with an arrival scenario that combines galactic scale with an invitation into the nuanced world of the main character’s specific circumstances – their excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, and anticipation. Mahit Dzmare, the main character in Martine’s novel, is introduced following a beautifully described scene of a holographic display of the Teixcalanni Empire. As the range of light-speed travel and distance via the holographic raise issues of time and memory, Martine introduces Mahit, who carries layers of a past with her, partly the result of an innovative Imago neuro-technology where previous individuals’ lived experiences are linked through recordings to the user. It creates a complex dynamic that twists time into a multi-personality character, a past professional predecessor haunting the mind as institutional memory. A fascinating way to add layers to a story involving a murder mystery.

And then there is power. The pen, through verse or stanza, is as mighty as the sword or the spaceship in the Teixcalaani Empire. Characters wield phrases and gestures like sharpened knives. Culture is capital. It’s a weapon through which privilege is expressed. More specifically, language is power in A Memory Called Empire. Poetry intimidates with the strength of an armada laying siege to a planet. Notions of barbarism, and cultural relativism, lurk implicitly in the way Martine writes character dialog and social interaction. When colonialist remarks are explicit, they are potent. You feel how attitudes and decisions carry imperialist weight in Teixcalaan. I relish space opera that incorporates eloquent prose in a way that doesn’t interfere or clog up the narrative flow and the believability of social exchange and conversational dialog. A Memory Called Empire raises the bar on culture in the Imperium to match the height of the book’s prose and it just…works.

The Imperium (the City) is a character unto itself, both in design and through artificial intelligence. Martine has a background in urban planning and I would guess that the wonderful complexity of the city’s presence in the novel is based on that expertise. The idea of an oecumenopolis, with an entire planet blanketed in urbanization, calls to mind science fiction worlds like Coruscant in Star Wars or Trantor in Foundation. As the central setting, it’s a fascinating take on space opera that manages to keep a galactic empire in play while working planetside, negotiating grand-scale politics and conflicts through personal and social interactions and intrigue on-world. It’s one way to write a space opera, and it feels epic, but the scale and scope are delivered intimately and it just… works.

Amidst the language and technology, the sensuous touch and visceral aspect of the world aren’t lost. If anything, it intensifies when pulled forward on the page. In one scene, Mahit delights in the physical (and as she admits, decadent) aspect of wrapping a light-driven tech info-fiche in a material tube with a wax seal. In others, the inclusion of flowers, birds, and other natural elements gain indescribable auras. These offer a brief respite from the intense political pressures, endless rhetorical battles, and surveillance of life in the Imperium.

I’m obsessed with the juxtaposition of holographic technology and visceral settings in science fiction – the kind you might see in the Star Wars universe. This relationship is flipped in A Memory Called Empire (to me, at least). The visceral is the exception to the technological/holographic rule, but when it plays a role in a scene or moves the plot, it becomes evocative and delicious… and potentially deadly.

What more can I say about A Memory Called Empire? A lot. But it would never match the rhetoric or poetry of the least talented artist inside the Teixcalaani Empire. Better to read it yourself (if you haven’t yet) and let Martine’s prose and imagination take you into a spectacular and unique example of space opera that remains one of my all-time favorites.

Thanks to Jonathan for coming by. Find out more about Jonathan and his books at www.jonathannevair.com

Goodreads
Amazon author page
Bookshop (SpaceCowboy Books)
Indiebound
Barnes & Noble
Apple Books
GooglePlay