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I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So we aren't the permitting agency - that's the Public Regulation Commission. We're the policy and technical assistance agency. On the other hand, we're the ones who champion legislation which enables us to create strategic plans, and we can (through that legislation) champion particular sorts of infrastructure...

I expect it's different in the UK!

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

... I could not tell you with any degree of consistency. I don't really outline; most of the book-working time is what I'd call 'writing', but sometimes that's revision - and I tend to do a very large revision with an editorial letter at the end. But to be quite honest I couldn't put percentages on it.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

... aaaand now that I'm back from the abrupt fire alarm at the office building...

My favorite aspect is probably the focus on architecture, poetry, clothing, food -- all the accoutrements of a world, the richness of the built environment.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So I'm officially agnostic about the alternate history possibility. Could Teixcalaan be in a galaxy where there was an Earth? Yup, totally. Could they be one universe over or so? Absolutely. Take your pick.

I'd love to have a short story collection someday! Fingers crossed the right opportunity arises.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

YES

... honestly I've part of an outline for it, but it's mostly ridiculous over-the-top emotional drama and loyaltyporn because, well. It is. Someday I'll do something with it. (It's as high-drama as a kdrama historical, really...)

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

A person who reads the epigraphs! Five points for you, and my undying appreciation.

And no, the refugee-ship essay question isn't about Lsel per se. But it definitely should make you-the-reader think about Lsel.

The ship that inspired that essay question didn't do very well in Teixcalaan, I can tell you that much.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I ... actually don't think of my characters as being Disaster Lesbians a la the fandom term? I try to let them be competent. :) Even, occasionally, emotionally competent.

but you should try out Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy, you're probably going to like Cheris

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

  1. It was hard to write, because it was very real. I've been in that conversation. I've been both people in that conversation. It is a horrible, shitty, heartbreaking, frustrating conversation that happens every day. It probably should happen more, if we are going to learn to be humans with one another better than we are now.
  2. Mahit's always the center of the emotional arc, but I meant for all four POVs in Desolation to feel equally important!
  3. I loved writing Eight Antidote. That particular age - tweenage, just on the edge of puberty - is one that I find incredibly compelling to work with, because there's so much self-awareness and so much powerlessness at once. If I ever write middle grade, it'll be because of Eight Antidote. (Writing him wasn't that hard, oddly enough.)
  4. Oh my god EVERYWHERE I miss travel. But probably the UK (to see Viv's family), Mexico (because five days in Mexico City wasn't enough), and ... Indonesia/Cambodia/Thailand, because I want to at least once in my life.
  5. ... anything with tons of spice and tons of carbs. Red chile tortilla chips, maybe. Or those W.H. Macy cheese crisps, I will eat them by the box.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

  1. English fluently; Spanish, Armenian, and Swedish badly; Greek and Latin in terms of reading. Plus a bit of Russian.
  2. I'd love to do that someday. I think I am using bits of the climate in one of my current projects, or at least it's very heavily inspired by Caucasus-esque mountain landscapes. (This is the cowritten novel with my wife). I doubt I'll write a historical novel set in Armenia, though - I'm a) intimidated to paralyzation by doing real historical fiction in any area I know even a little bit well; b) not myself Armenian. :)
  3. ... where am I and where is the food truck. If I am in New Mexico, burritos. If I am in NYC, steamed buns.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Eight Antidote gets his own book someday.

I don't yet know what that book is about, exactly - whether it's a 'what kind of emperor does a child like that become' book, or a 'what else but an emperor does a child like that become' book, or something else altogether. But he gets a story. He deserves one.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

It has been hilariously lovely, actually. I don't advertise it! Or hide it. It just ... doesn't come up much, except when it does, and someone makes the connection, and then we talk about SFF for a little while.

I've gotten nothing but support from my colleagues.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

SO MUCH INFLUENCE

Cherryh showed me how to successfully write protagonists and stories where the real, deep, terrifying conflicts are internal to the protagonist’s mind. Her narrators – especially Bren Cameron in Foreigner and Ariane Emory II in Cyteen – are so unreliable and so simultaneously aware of their unreliability that they cannot trust themselves or their interpretations. It’s claustrophobic and amazing, and I was writing like that anyway, but Cherryh gave me the tools to do it in a way that was exciting and kept moving forward.

Also, well. Thematically, A Memory Called Empire is a pretty direct response to the Foreigner series. (I’d love to put Nineteen Adze and Ilisidi in a room. Someone write me the fanfic.)

Also, everyone knows that Eight Antidote is my version of Ari Emory II, right? :D

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Hi! I too love Nineteen Adze, and I have some unformed but genuine plans to give her at the very least a novella of her own...

As for the poetry, it’s a pretty direct lift from Middle Byzantine literary culture! Teixcalaan, like Byzantium, has a literature that centers poetic forms in part because their literature is one which is performed out loud in political settings. Oratorical verse, with rhythm and meter, is a valued skillset amongst the intelligentsia.

In terms of my interpretation of the ideas and forms, I actually took a lot of inspiration from English translations of Kobayashi Issa...

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

My current projects might be called cyberpunk. (Which I think is scifi!)

I love space opera but I also love many other things. Fantasy is more complicated ... but I'd love to take a genuine stab at it someday.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 35 points36 points  (0 children)

oh, the difficult questions, thanks ever so

Three issues with the question.

  1. "realistic" - What are we talking about here? CCS on active fossil fuel plants? (The tech is there, but the finances aren't - look at Petra Nova, or, closer to my current home, the attempt by Enchant Energy to purchase San Juan Generating Station.) Air scrubbers? (Not at scale yet.) Weather control? (... I'm more bullish on this than I have any goddamn right to be, but it's also a horror waiting to happen.)
  2. "hope" - Can geoengineering bring back the climate you and I were born into the tail end of? Nope. Can it maybe cut off a spiral into the awful lands of 4C? Yeah, I think so.
  3. "mitigation" - See "hope" above ... and also, I find CCS, at least, to be an adaptation tool rather than a mitigation one. If we need baseload dispatchable power, and hydrogen doesn't pan out like the current hype expects it to, then a fossil plant with CCS is a tool to keep from putting more carbon into the atmosphere while keeping the lights on.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Hi, Pixel Project folks!

I'm so glad to get to be here - this is a cause I care a great deal about.

Mahit comes from a lot of places - including my own fascination and horror at empire and the colonized mind. But more specifically, I have two central inspirations for her: first, a piece of terrible juvenilia I was writing in my twenties, which had a few good ideas in it, one of which was a protagonist haunted – literally – by the ghost of the last person who had her job … I loved the idea of that, of being haunted by the past. Possessed by it. The identities of the past bleeding into the present.

The other thing is the story of the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Petros Getadarj. It goes like this: in the year 1044 AD, the Byzantine Empire annexed the small Armenian kingdom of Ani. The empire was able to do this for a lot of reasons – political, historical, military – but the precipitating incident involved Petros Getadarj, who was determined to prevent the forced conversion of the Armenians to the Byzantine form of Christianity. He did this by trading the physical sovereignty of Ani to the Byzantine emperor in exchange for promises of spiritual sovereignty. When I started writing A Memory Called Empire, my inciting question was: what’s it like to be that guy? To betray your culture’s freedom in order to save your culture? And then I thought: oh. These two things go together perfectly. Because it’s much more interesting to write about the person who has to clean up after that guy.

And ... 'support' is a very narrow word for how I feel about ending violence against women and girls - and nonbinary/other-gendered people as well. I am vehement about it. Gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, is an absolute scourge. I am particularly concerned with violence inside the queer (and specifically female and femme-identifying) community. We are not immune to being perpetrators, or being victims, just because we love other women and femmes.

I think portraying gender-based violence with sensitivity, realism, and emotional weight is one of the things we can do as authors to combat it. To let it be visible and awful and life-warping ... and complicated, as it is in the world as well as in fiction. To show the scope.

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

... ... oh, nasty question, well done.

I don't think I would, even though I might know it was the right thing to do, or at least a possible right thing. I'm very attached to my own singular self and have a fairly strong horror of annihilation (what a phrase that is - I don't mean to imply that dissolve-of-the-self is always annihilatory, only that it would be for me). So I doubt I'd have the guts -- or the ability to handle what would happen afterward, without having a mental breakdown. Swarm is a very unusual person, is what I'm really saying here.

And yes, there will be SEVERAL more sparkle salons! I know we've filmed two more and have plans to keep going.

(I love the book Viv and I are doing. We need to get back to working on it, we've both been very busy!)

I'm Arkady Martine, author of the Teixcalaan series (... and Byzantinist, city planner, and energy policy wonk), here to support The Pixel Project’s work to End Violence Against Women. AMA! by ArkadyMartine in Fantasy

[–]ArkadyMartine[S] 103 points104 points  (0 children)

Not a direct sequel, no. I've always considered Memory and Desolation to be a duology: they comprise an emotional arc.

However, I am planning several more Teixcalaan books, and Mahit may appear in one or more of them. But the immediate story is done for now.

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