ARKADY MARTINE

Why communication breakdowns fascinate the Hugo-winning writer

- Jonathan Wright

GIVEN THAT SHE writes so eloquently, there’s a certain irony in Arkady Martine’s abiding interest in what happens when people don’t understand each other. “I am deeply fascinated by a communication failure,” says the author (real name AnnaLinden Weller), “and the places where people, worldviews or conceptions of reality just don’t match up, in such a profound way that people stop thinking about each other as people.”

It’s a theme that runs through Martine’s duology, A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace. The books centre on Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador from a space station sent to the heart of the Teixcalaanli Empire, a place where being an outsider equates to being uncultured, a barbarian.

In part, her fascination is rooted in our current troubled times, where different groups construct their own realities. But it’s also an interest that reaches back to growing up as “a strange child” who felt “as if all the other children were aliens – or it was probably me since they all seemed to have figured it out”.

Then there’s the 1532 encounter between conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa when suspicion escalated into the Spanish killing thousands in the Massacre of Cajamarca. Martine came across an account in an article when she was a student*, and it made a lasting impression.