A Memory Called Empire

DNF - PG 25

Why?

I'll be honest with you, when I have a knee-jerk reaction to a book, it has to be pretty much perfect to keep me around after that. This book isn't perfect, and it would have only been well served to get rid of that needlessly complicatedly written ‘prelude' (which is actually a prologue, but we have to sound cooler than that) and the needless, overly complicated and irrelevant excerpts at the beginning of each chapter.

(The needless, overly complicated and irrelevant excerpt that starts off chapter two (then a second excerpt follows, as important as the first one is):

urgently direct your attention / novelty and importance characterize what comes next / IMMEDIATELY on Channel Eight!

Tonight, Seven Chysoprase and Four Sycamore bring you a report from Odile-1 in the Odile System, where Twenty-sixth Legion under sub-yaotlek Three Sumac are preparing to break orbit now that the insurrection in Odile-1's capital city has been quelled - in a moment we will have Four Sycamore, on site in the capital's central square, with an interview with the newly reinstated planetary governor Nine Shuttle - trade through the Odile Gate is expected to return to normal levels within the next two weeks...

- Channel Eight nightly newscast, as broadcast on the City's internal cloud hook network, 245th day, 3rd year in the 11th indiction of the Emperor of all Teixcalaan Six Direction)

Now, I didn't actually make it to chapter two, because I've had enough of the world that the author has created. My kind of sci-fi does not include statements like :[...]'“radiant blaze” was the epithet for the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare in The Expansion History as Attributed to Pseudo-Thirteen River[...]. (Unless your name is Ninefox Gambit and even then, people at least had people names, not numbers and ‘plants, tools or inanimate objects'. Ninefox Gambit was an uphill slog for me the first time I tried to read it, and I only persevered because 1) it actually moves from the start and 2) even early on, like from the first page, I was at the least interested in the characters. Flipping through this book, I discovered that the most interesting thing in it - the imago memory thing - is very underutilized.)

Also, reading some of the one star reviews indicates that my opinion of the world-building will not improve.