A Book Report.

As most of you know, I am an avid science fiction fan.

I hated books!

Books were long and dull, of stuffy old families living on the moors of England, or about a man and a whale, or a book about a kid sailing down a river on a raft, or about an orphan in Victorian England, or about the Civil War and cowardice. Ugh!

So I wasn’t much of a book reader. Thank god for Cliff Notes!

In college my roommate was a reader, one book after another and he said here read this book… Naw. Go ahead a try it!

So after a lot of nagging I picked it up and couldn’t put it down!

The book? It was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I was hooked!

The current book that I’m listening to is by Arkadi Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace which won the 2022 Hugo Award. I finished her first book A Memory Called Empire.

The first thing that struck me was the names of the characters… Three Seagrass, Nine Maize, Ninteen Adze, Six Direction, Fifteen Engine, Thirty Larkspur, and others. You got to admit they are weird names for characters.

The second thing was the name of the empire Teixcalaanli, Texas? Or maybe the Aztecs wasn’t there a city or something with a name similar to that. A little googling I found Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. Hmm…

On another website I found, The History Behind the Character Names in ‘A Memory Called Empire.’ Bingo!

I began in the place where all research begins, Wikipedia. There I found an account of the Mixtec king Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, or 8 Deer for short, who was the only Mixtex king to ever unit them all under one banner. The Mixtecs were later conquered in the 16th century by the Spanish and there are about 800,000 Mixtec still living in Mexico today.

So that was a good start and it gave me what I needed to look a little further. As it turns out, the basis for Mixtec names came from the calendar that they used, with individuals being named after the day they were born. So Eight Deer would have been named after the day on which he was born. There are thirteen days and twenty symbols on this calendar. Eventually, I found this site which offers much more context on Mixtec names and mesoamerican culture in general.

So I was on the right track.

Another thing that intrigued me was that there seemed to be a little chemistry nothing out right in the open but little hints between the main character Mahit Dzmare and her Imperial liaison, Three Seagrass who is also a woman. That generated another “Hmm…”

In my research I found out that the author is a lesbian.

You see the main character Mahit Dzmare is not an Empire citizen but an ambassador and is called a barbarian but the Empire citizens, shades of the Roman Empire. The way the book dealt her being called a barbarian and her response to be called that seemed like a metaphor for something else.

When she flies off the handle at Three Seagrass for calling her a barbarian all the time, saying that she always brings that up all the time. Something clicked, you hear that in the LGBTQ+ community all the time. They are okay with you being trans but it seems like that keep preferencing your name with trans.

Don’t get me wrong so far there is nothing sexual or her being attracted to Three Seagrass, but just hints.

These are great books, Goodread said this about her first book…

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.

And it was Goodreads' Choice Award for best novel and won the Hugo Award, her second book A Desolation Called Peace won her a second Hugo Award, was nominated for a Nebula Award, and a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award.

These books are available from your local library online, both written and audio versions.